Glidden was not the only person trying to solve the West's fencing problem in the 1870s. Henry Rose had displayed a wooden rail with metal points at the DeKalb County Fair that summer; Glidden, Jacob Haish, and Isaac Ellwood had all watched, all gone home, and all started tinkering. Haish filed competing patents within months. The lawsuits that followed - Glidden and Ellwood's company against Haish, against everyone - lasted until 1892 and reached the Supreme Court. Glidden won. His design, marketed as 'The Winner,' set the template every later barbed wire variation was measured against: two twisted strands holding the barb in place, the twisting itself doing the work of preventing the barb from sliding along the wire. Simple, cheap to manufacture, brutally effective. By 1880, his factory in DeKalb was producing eighty miles of wire a day.

Before barbed wire, the High Plains were essentially unfenceable. Wood was scarce, hedges took years to mature, and smooth wire could not hold cattle. Range was managed by custom: cows from different brands mixed freely; ownership was sorted at spring roundup; long drives moved herds hundreds of miles to railheads in Kansas and Nebraska. Barbed wire ended all of it in less than a generation. Ranchers fenced their holdings. Farmers fenced their crops against drifting cattle. The great cattle drives, which had defined cowboy life in the 1860s and '70s, stopped because there was no longer an unbroken corridor between Texas and the railhead. The cowboy as romantic figure was on horseback for maybe twenty years. By 1890 his job was largely riding fence lines with pliers in his saddlebag, repairing wire.

Not everyone welcomed it. Smaller ranchers, who had grazed their cattle on common range, lost access when larger operators fenced in scarce water sources. The Fence Cutting Wars erupted across Texas in the early 1880s - night-riding 'nippers' cutting miles of wire, ranchers shooting back, the legislature eventually making fence cutting a felony in 1884. Cowboys cut wire that blocked the old trails. Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne peoples - already pushed onto reservations - watched the buffalo plains they had hunted for generations subdivided beyond recognition; the barbed wire enclosed not just cattle but a way of life that had to end before cattle ranching as Americans practiced it could exist. Cattle caught in fences died slowly of infected wounds. The wire's nickname captured the ambivalence: useful but cruel, transformative but exclusionary. Devil's rope.

Once Glidden's patent expired, the floodgates opened. Every small-town blacksmith with access to a wire drawing machine produced his own variation: barbs shaped like arrowheads, like crosses, like flat plates, like miniature stars. Some had two strands, some four; some had barbs every three inches, some every six. The Devil's Rope Museum displays over five hundred of these varieties mounted on boards, each labeled with patent number, inventor, and year. Antique barbed wire is a genuine collecting field. Rare early patents sell for hundreds of dollars per eighteen-inch strand. The annual collectors' convention - yes, this exists - draws hundreds. The obsessive cataloging of slight variations in a utilitarian fencing material is itself a peculiarly American activity, somewhere between historical preservation and folk art.

The Devil's Rope Museum is at 100 Kingsley Street in McLean, Texas, in a brick building that was a brassiere factory before the museum took it over - the wire-and-undergarment-history coincidence is one of those things small towns produce without trying. The museum is free; donations support it. McLean itself is a Route 66 ghost town in slow motion - the interstate bypassed it in the 1980s, the gas stations closed, the population dropped below a thousand. The same building houses a Route 66 museum on the other side, which makes the trip worthwhile in either weather. Amarillo, seventy-five miles west on I-40, has Rick Husband International Airport (KAMA) and most services. Open hours are limited and seasonal; calling ahead is wise. The drive across the Panhandle to get there is exactly the kind of flat, fenced, horizon-to-horizon country that Glidden's patent made possible.