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The Texas fence-cutting wars, 1893-1890
Wibracht, Brooke
Wibracht, Brooke
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2018
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Abstract
In the 1880s a brief but dramatic historical chapter unfolded in Texas. In locales scattered far and wide across the Lone Star State, bands of landless men wielding wire-cutting tools mounted a campaign to destroy the newly introduced barbed-wire fences which, they believed, were depriving them of access to water or grass that was rightfully theirs. Landowners who constructed the fences fought back, and the intermittent violence that erupted became known, somewhat hyperbolically, as the Texas Fence-Cutting Wars. The violence forced the governor to call a special session of the state legislature in 1884 to address the issue. The legislature criminalized the act of cutting a fence and authorized an appropriated fund. The governor utilized the Texas Rangers to enforce the newly enacted laws to investigate fence-cutting incidences across the state. Supposedly, the work of the Texas Rangers and the 1884 fence laws put an end to most of the fence cutting.^This dissertation challenges many long-held beliefs of the Texas Fence-Cutting Wars by using modern historical methodologies to challenge the cornerstones of the Wars. This overhaul places the Wars within the context of the Long Progressive Era, and this helps contextualize the Wars as not an episodic event in the inevitable settling of the American West but rather as one of the opening chapters in the story of agrarian unrest in the late nineteenth century. From this perspective, new participants emerge including women and minorities. Also, the landless cattlemen prove surprisingly adaptable, and fence cutting turns out to be but one phase in their efforts to adapt to the new capitalist order. This dissertation exposes the cutters diplomatic and political movements which took on different forms.^^Other historians asserted that the Greenback Party influenced the fence cutters cause but this dissertation argues that it was primarily the Farmers Alliance that encouraged the cutters to join their ranks. The Wars, in short, have much to teach us about how rural people came to terms with modern America.
Contents
Subject
Subject(s)
Barbed wire Political aspects Texas.
Barbed wire Social aspects Texas.
Wire fencing Texas History.
Ranch life Texas History.
Social conflict Texas History.
Frontier and pioneer life Texas.
Barbed wire Social aspects Texas.
Wire fencing Texas History.
Ranch life Texas History.
Social conflict Texas History.
Frontier and pioneer life Texas.
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Dissertation
Description
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1 online resource (vi, 257 pages) :
Department
History