Barbed wire, or the “devil’s rope,” as Native Americans called it, was controversial from the start. Initially, after it was first patented by Illinois farmer Joseph Glidden in the 1870s, it was mostly used to restrict the movement of cattle and other animals. The most dangerous type of long-spiked barbs, known as “vicious wire,” would cut through the cattle’s hide, resulting in screwworm fly infestations.
Barbed wire was one of most effective tools White settlers used to dispossess Natives of their lands. It closed off traditional hunting grounds and broke up the communal structure of their societies.
In the 1880s and 1890s, fence-cutting wars broke out in the borderlands and the Southwest. In Texas, open-range ranchers snipped fences to allow their cattle to pass. In New Mexico, Mexican American villagers reclaimed their communal land rights by cutting down the barbed-wire fences put up by Anglo-American squatters and land speculators.
On Jan. 31, 1904, the Washington Times reported on a congressional bill for “a barbed wire fence barrier [to] be constructed along the Canadian border with electrical warning connections, to make the smuggling of Chinese into this country more liable to detection, and it is proposed to make use of the same plan along the Mexican border.” That year, Congress voted to make the Chinese exclusion law permanent — it previously had to be renewed every 10 years — and expanded it so it barred new migration from China and mandated the deportation of all Chinese immigrants already in the United States.
In 1916, Maj. Cornelius Vanderbilt III proposed installing “electrified barbed-wire entanglements” next to a 1,950-mile military road running from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific, as the solution to “protecting the Mexican border.” His great-grandfather had founded a railroad empire during the Gilded Age, and Cornelius III had left his mansion on New York’s Fifth Avenue to join the New York National Guard in 1901. In 1916, he pitched the border barrier while serving as chief inspector among 150,000 Guardsmen sent by President Woodrow Wilson to the southern border during the Mexican Revolution.
Vanderbilt got his idea by observing the battlefields in Europe during World War I. “The use of [barbed-wire] entanglements is a development of warfare adopted by all armies, and greatly resorted to by the warring nations of Europe,” Vanderbilt explained. “It has been found to be one of the most efficient methods of delaying and barring the passage of disputed lines.”