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let's take a second to talk about why barbed wire was so crazy popular in the [Barbed wire walks down red carpet]

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West and no it wasn't because it made a pretty cool-looking tattoo though uh

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that is true does look cool there well first folks love barbed wire because it

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was cheap regular wood fencing would have been way too expensive for the vast [Man walks into shop and checks out fencing wood]

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expanses that needed to be covered and as the existence of Top Ramen proves

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people will go for anything as long as it's easy on the wallet barbed wire

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fences also didn't need much maintenance earthen fences and hedges were a

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headache compared to barbed wire a good rule of [Man gives thumbs up at barbed wire fences]

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thumb for fences and significant others well nobody likes it when they're high

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maintenance most importantly there was about a zero percent chance of the

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cattle getting out of the fence go lean on a barbed wire fence yourself and [Man leans on barbed wire fence]

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it'll be easy to understand why it hurts a lot our lawyers have informed us that

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we need to add a disclaimer please do not actually lean on a barbed wire fence

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lawyers they're so pushy so what did all this barbed wire mean for the Wild West [Barbed wire fence appears in a field]

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well for one land became divided duh ranchers used barbed wire to close off

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their own properties this was awesome for bigshot ranchers with lots of land

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and it was less awesome for small ranchers who depended on lots of free

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open range no fencing in their property meant that

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ranchers were raising more cattle on smaller areas of land which helped the [Cows mooing near barbed wire fence]

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whole meat industry take off and all those cattle couldn't survive on the

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naturally growing grass farmers started supplementing their food with lots of

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grain and corn this meant that more corn and grain were grown in the Midwest and [Grain and corn field appears]

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all this sounds fine right well for the most part it was but there were a few

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people in the West who weren't huge fans like we said before for folks that owned

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plenty of land the idea of fencing it in and keeping other people's hands off it

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was awesome it was an old school hey kids get off my love kind of deal but [Man chases boy off his lawn]

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for people who didn't happen to own property the size of

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Montana all of this kind of stunk small-time ranchers depended on open

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rain style of ranching which let herds migrate according to weather and

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resource needs well by 1883 this evolved into what was called the fence cutting [Person cuts fence cutting]

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wars this was when Cowboys and ranchers who loved the open range went around

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cutting the new shiny barbed wire fences in protest Oh spoiler alert they did not

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win things also got worse for American Indians in the barbed wire era which

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honestly should come as no surprise for anyone who has ever read anything about

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American history at all ever barbed wire is part of a much bigger story of

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violence disease racism and genocide against America's indigenous peoples

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basically putting up fences around property in the West was the final death [People stood beside grave of communal ownership]

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knell for the era of communal ownership suddenly every acre had somebody's name

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on it eventually this resulted in the Dawes

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Act of 1887 which seized tribal lands and divided them into neat little

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squares that American Indians had to individually own of course the US

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government didn't mind trimming off extra pieces and selling them and sure

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American Indians eventually got a few casinos but they certainly never hit the [Man playing slot machine]

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jackpot

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