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In the 1870s, few in Texas had heard of barbed wire, and those who had didn’t really believe it could be strong enough to pen cattle.
All of that changed in 1876 when two barbed wire salesman for the Washburn-Moen Co. arrived in San Antonio from Illinois.
Trying to create a show, John Warne “Bet-a-Million” Gates and Pete McManus built a corral of barbed wire on Alamo Plaza.
They ushered in a herd of longhorn, and to the astonishment of everyone who watched, the barbed wire held the cattle.
It was a spectacle, and Gates invited ranchers into the Menger Hotel to order the product he reportedly called “light as air, stronger than whiskey, and cheap as dirt.”
Barbed wire orders skyrocketed, and so did the pace of change in Texas.
Anita Seaney, curator of Devil’s Rope Museum in McLean, a barbed wire museum located in a former bra factory along the old U.S. Route 66, said the barbed wire demonstration in San Antonio changed the American West.
Farmers and homesteaders were able to fence off their crops and gardens from being trampled by cattle.
Barbed wire also arrived around the same time of major railroad expansion, and ranchers were starting to send their cattle to market by rail. Big cattle drives from Texas to Montana ended. The concept of the open range faded away.
“It was part of our history and it was quite a battle at the time. It stopped the open range business,” Seaney said. “The cattlemen still wanted open range and wanted to go where they wanted to go.”
Wire cutting became common, and a crime. And if someone got caught, “They would have a shoot-em-up-fight and hang people,” Seaney said.
In Karnes County by 1886, local ranchers has banded together and paid a $2-per-mile fee to help maintain and defend their fences from being cut, according to the forthcoming book by Charles Olmstead, “Karnes County, the Good, the Bad, the Butlers.”
A proclamation pledged ranchers would support local law enforcement and read, “..there is a number of lawless men banded together for the purpose of destroying pasture fences and who have been recently operating in the night time in the county of Karnes and destroying much valuable fencing and are likely unless restrained to continue their depredations.”
Despite the struggle, the upshot over time was that barbed wire “kind of civilized the West,” Seaney said. Cowboys stopped following their herds and stayed in place. “It got everyone to sit still.”
The barbed wire demonstration was beyond successful, especially for Gates.
He returned to Illinois with more barbed wire orders than the factory could fulfill. When he asked for and was denied a partnership in the company he worked for, he started his own company.
McManus stayed in San Antonio, according to “The History and Mystery of the Menger Hotel” by Docia Schultz Williams, and later went to work for Gates, becoming the person who sold more barbed wire than anyone else in the world.
Gates’ business acumen and good luck became the stuff of legend.
He would earn the nickname “Bet-A-Million” after a 1900 horse race in England. He actually bet $70,000 and won $600,000, but rumors flew that had him betting $1 million and willing more than $2 million, according to the Texas State Historical Association.
Gates owned or controlled Consolidated Steel and Wire Co., Illinois Steel Co., American Steel and Wire Co. of Illinois and Republic Steel Co. Two of his companies later grew into United States Steel Co. He invested in what became the Kansas City Southern Railway.
And in 1900, a wildcat driller working in southeast Texas ran out of money 2,000 feet into his new well.
The wildcatter, Patillo Higgins, asked Gates to back the project, and Gates formed the Texas Co. to make the investment.
That well was Spindletop, which blew in and ushered in the state’s first oil boom. Gates’ Texas Co. later became known as Texaco.
jhiller@express-news.net
Twitter: @Jennifer_Hiller
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