| A Word Edgewise
by Mary Joe Clendenin |
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Thinking about Texas in frontier days, and the ranchers who enjoyed open range with the benefit of grazing cattle anywhere within riding distance, brings to mind old Western movies.. However, men being possessive creatures, it wasn't long after ranching began before boundaries became important to keep down disputes and range wars.
Big ranchers settling on land considered unfit for farming, laid claim to vast acres, even when the state of Texas sent surveyors to locate homesteads and mark county lines. The call of the land, the yearning for a piece of ground to call their own, attracted farmers to uninviting arid areas. Windmills began to spring up and small, fertile plots produced food for families. In the decades of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, the prairie farmers found it impossible to fence their lands with rails and boards because of the shortage of wood and transportation. Building wooden or rail fences, as settlers in the eastern and southern states did, was impractical, also, because prairie fires swept across the broad acres almost every year.
In Europe, especially in England, to where many cattlemen and other early settlers traced their ancestry, live hedges of different kinds marked boundaries and were strong enough to hold cattle. In fact, some hedgerows in England date back more than a thousand years, and many have their own names. Judith's Hedge is a section planted by a niece of William the Conqueror in the 11th century.
Hedgerows take much up-keep and are disappearing from the English country side. Although they serve as sanctuary for many birds and small animals, the need for land and expense of hedge up-keep has sealed the fate of, perhaps, a great source of history.
Here in the United States, a search for some form of fast growing, thorny plant, hardy enough to withstand the rigors of dry, cold and hot climate began. Was that the answer for marking boundries on vast ranch land? According to government agricultural reports, growing hedge rows was seriously considered. Americans thought that they could do anything farmers in the Old Country could do, quicker and more efficiently, so they considered growing boundaries. The big ranchers, trying to hold out for open ranges were fighting a loosing battle.
In areas such as Erath County and other hilly, rocky areas, rock fences sprang up. As the orchardman in one of Robert Frost's poems said, "Good fences make good neighbors" even if you don't know who you are fencing in or out. But rock fences wouldn't work on the plains.
Several plants seemed promising as usable for hedges: osage-orange (bois d'arc apples), thorn locust, mesquite, and pyracantha, all armed with thorns were considered. The United States Agricultural Department estimated that ten thousand bushels of seed were planted in the Northwest in the spring of 1860, producing 300,000,000 plants, sufficient to plant 60,000 miles of hedge--enough to fence in Texas. The producers of the hedge plants were almost counting their money as they planted their seed. But something else loomed over the horizen.
For several reasons, including lack of water on the plains of Texas, the prairie fires, and most important, the invention of barbed wire, hedges were not practical. Barbed wire, even though it called for posts upon which to string it, was the answer to the boundary disputes. Posts burned with the prairie fires, but they were easier to replace than men killed in gun battles. Fences were cut, but laws were made to protect the property owners. It was almost as if barbed wire were an instrument for civilizing the people of the frontier. Still, remnants of green hedges may be found in Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and even in Erath County where Joe Fitzgerald tried planting bois d'arc for hedge and windbreaks (barbed wire not much of a windbreak).
An old cowboy, not fond of barbed wire but knowing that good boundaries
made good neighbors said, "The Almighty never would have
made such a country as Texas without furnishing a hedge to go
with it." Maybe God didn't furnish the hedge, but he did
furnish the intelligence and ingenuity that have come through
time after time to solve problems for Americans.