The advantages of wire fence are easy to see: “It takes up no room, exhausts no soil, shades no vegetation, is proof against high winds, makes no snowdrifts, and is both durable and cheap.”……taken from an old wire advertisement in the 1870s.

The records of the U.S. Patent Office show that up to 1881 there had been issued 1229 fence patents. The first was issued in 1801, the first with barbs attached was in 1867. In noting the distribution it should bear in mind that in the earlier period the settlements were not approaching the Plains. Up to 1857 only about 100 patents were issued. Between 1866 and 1869 there were 368, or more than 122 a year. Sectionally, the patents were distributed according to origin as follows:
New England states………………40
Middle states………………………372
Southern states………………….. 108
Western states………………….. 696
District of Columbia…………….. 8
Canada……………………………. 5

Despite the fact that the Western states were the newest, they took out more patents than all the rest of the country put together, including Canada.

Although these figures are for fences of all sorts, an examination of barbed wire litigation indicates that practically all barbed wire inventions or claims to inventions originated in the prairie states or in the prairie region of the Plains states.

As a special note, barbed wire was accepted, though reluctantly, against man during the Spanish American War in Cuba in 1898 and has been used in every war since. It’s use resulted in the development of the TANK as the only effective counter weapon.

(worth repeating, taken from the December 1995 NMBWCA’s “Wire Barb and Nail” newsletter.