Fencing the Prairie

Unique region demanded innovative thinking.

By Sam Moore
Updated on May 22, 2009
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courtesy Sam Moore
Woven wire fence was the ultimate answer, according to one manufacturer.

I always read the police reports in the daily newspaper, partly to see who got caught doing what, but mostly to read the often hilarious way some of the events are described. A report that turns up periodically in our paper is the one where someone calls the cops because a neighbor’s horses or cattle are loose and have strayed onto the complainant’s property. The police always respond and warn the owner of the animals to keep the critters penned up or face a citation.

The laws governing restraint of animals didn’t always put the burden upon the animal owner. In the decades prior to the Civil War, in prairie states such as Iowa, Indiana and Illinois, if you wanted to keep animals out of your crops, laws of the day said that you, the grower, were responsible for building a fence around your crops to protect them from the wandering herds of livestock.

Still known in the 1840s as “The Wild Prairies,” the region generated such struggles well before the advent of the epic Wild West battles between cattle barons and sodbusters later portrayed in countless dime novels, Western movies and TV series. But the same forces that caused those later “range wars” were already at work. Cattle owners wanted to keep the prairie range open and unfenced so their herds could graze on the abundant grass free of charge. Dirt farmers, recognizing the grain growing potential of rich prairie soil, wanted to practice intensive farming, but their crops were often ravaged by roaming herds of cattle, sheep and particularly the so-called “land sharks” – herds of half-wild hogs that ran loose until they were rounded up and driven eastward to market.

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