It’s The Pitts: Knights of the Nippers

I’m a “barb-arian” – one of about 10 thousand people who collect barbed wire. 

I’ve been collecting barbed wire for over 40 years and have nearly 500 different pieces in my collection, but I’m an amateur compared to some barb-arians.

I traveled all over the country in my job and was always looking for wire I didn’t have. 

I wrote a story about one man in Texas whose entire ranch was wrapped in a very rare wire that was his retirement and Individual Retirement Account. 

Naturally, I coveted a piece of his wire and came away with an 18-inch piece of the rarest wire I have in my collection. 

After a column I wrote years ago about my barbed wire collection, my friend Dan from Gettysburg, S.D. sent me his entire collection.

I have lots of wire not intended for use with cattle. The earliest piece of wire in my collection dates back to the 1850s, and the smooth wire was used for horses. Such wire was called “obvious wire,” and another example in my collection has a chunk of wood everywhere a barb should be. 

This was not nearly as cruel as the “vicious wire” which came later. 

I really like my “planter’s wire,” which has knots or balls spaced evenly. You took the wire off of the fence, laid it in the garden and planted a seed at every ball or knot. When you were done planting the garden, you put the wire back on the fence.

People might think barbed wire is cruel to animals, but we’ve always reserved the most barbaric wire for humans. 

I have a piece of World War I German barbed wire that has three-quarter inch sharp barbs and a piece of Vietnam wire with metal spears at the tip of razor wire.

One of my favorites is not that rare, and it’s called Brinkerhoff Ribbon. I like it because of its history. 

When Texas became a state, it wanted a capitol building, but they were short of money. What they did have was a lot of land, so they promised to trade three million acres covering land in 10 counties in the Texas Panhandle – thus the ranch name XIT – to a mostly British syndicate if they’d build them a capitol building. 

One version of the story says the Texas capitol had to be taller than the one in Washington, D.C. 

The syndicate enclosed the entire three million acres with Brinkerhoff wire, which consisted of a flat ribbon of wire three-eighths of an inch wide with flat lance-like barbs every four and a half inches.

In the 1870s, barbed wire made cattle drives nearly impossible, closed off water holes and free grass, and many ranchers thought it was the ruination of the country so they formed fence-cutting groups like the Rolling Fence Cutters, Hatchet Company and Knights of the Nippers.

I think my collection will pay off better than Bitcoin, because 10 years from now ranchers won’t put up barbed wire fences. Instead they will rely on virtual fences, where cattle will wear shock collars and receive shocks from a transmitter tower if they leave the reservation. It’s simply a matter of economics. 

I read of one rancher whose fences all burned down in a fire, and he got a quote of nearly $10 million to re-fence his ranch. Have you priced railroad ties these days?

Those peddling virtual fences could take a lesson from John “Bet A Million” Gates who owned half interest in an Illinois hardware store. 

To sell more barbed wire, he put up an enclosure in a San Antonio, Texas plaza and enclosed it in barbed wire. Then he bet onlookers he could run in a bunch of “wild” Longhorns and the wire would hold them. He even had a cowboy on horseback enter the pen with two flaming torches to frighten the cattle, but the fence held and the universal use of barbed wire took hold. 

In 1874, 10,000 pounds of barbed wire sold. Six years later, ranchers bought over 80 million pounds.

Just like the penny, someday barbed wire will become obsolete, and I’m hoping my rusty barbed wire collection will be worth more than the cattle it held captive.