Essays
Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado
Fencecutting wars
January 1, 2005
"My great-granddaddy was a fencecutter along the Colorado River in the 1880s. I'm one, too, and for the same reason. He hated the rich capitalists from up north fencing off the free range, and I hate the high game fences. It is the same old story, the have-nots against the deep-pocket rich. I am the Texas version of an Earth-firster monkeywrencher." The self-avowed eco-terrorist glared at me. He was too skinny for his old clothes, and had a three-day gray stubble on his face. Bowlegged and Stetsoned, he appeared to be a stove-up old cowboy. We were standing along a highway in the hill country, and the tall game fences lined both sides of it as far as could be seen.
“You have to pay a minimum of a grand to hunt deer on the cheapest of the high-fence ranches, and the price goes up and up, beyond 4000 dollars. Each point and each extra inch of inside spread adds another 400 bucks to the price of the deer. The deer are raised in pens and only released into bigger pastures just before the hunt -- and don't have a bit of their natural wariness."
He pressed his nostril with a finger and blew a wad of snot on the ground. "Some of these gamefarm ranchers will show videos of each individual deer on the place to their prospective clients, just so that the "guest" can select the very animal they want to shoot. Deer factories, that is what they are, not ranches! The wild animals of Texas belong to us all, and it is dead wrong to turn deer into a commercial product. We are getting shut out from our own landscape.”
I accidentally ran into him along the highway where I had stopped to take a breather on my way to a conference near Johnson City a couple of years ago. I needed to walk around a bit and stretch my legs. He had walked up, carrying a bag of soda pop cans over his shoulder, carrying a stabbing stick. When he had jabbed a can with what seemed to be excessive vigor I had commented, "I hate the idiots that toss their crud out the windows, too," as a way of greeting him.
"I don't hate 'em -- they keep me in beer money. I'm just mad at this fence -- " and he slapped the 8 foot tall fence with his stick. "Look at this, this was not here last year -- and to build it they cut down one of the largest tickletongues along this road. It had strands of old Spur Rowel barbed wire from the 1890’s buried in its wood." That was when he launched into his “rant and rave.” I had had to move back a foot or two – his breath was foul with stale beer.
After his diatribe against the high game fences, he looked down at the ground, acting like he'd said too much. He took a half step away, but then straightened up, as if forcing himself to demonstrate dignity and pride. To put him at ease, I asked about his grandfather.
"My grandfather was a mercenary that fought for Pancho Villa and died in Spain fighting against Franco. His brother joined the Farmers’ and Laborers’ Protective Association, and some members of that were tried for treason in World War One, just because they were socialists. The history of the folks that fought for worker's rights in the United States is always glossed over by the oligarchy's educational system. But you were asking about my great-grandfather, right?" I nodded. This was not a typical alcoholic stove-up cowboy.
"My great-great-grandfather came to Texas as part of an Utopian community known as La Reunion, near Dallas. He'd been part of the group that later formed the International Workingman's Association cofounded by Karl Marx in 1864. A bunch of like-minded folks tried to create their socialist paradise here in Texas in 1855 but it fell apart in a decade. A bunch of them went back to Europe, but he stayed and went to the frontier and claimed some land, but died at age 40 from cholera. Like a lot of folks, my great-grandfather started branding mavericks and building up a herd as a teenager. And being at the edge of the frontier with all the country being free range, he saw it as a chance to make something of himself. He threw in his stock with others and went up the Chisholm Trail, and then the Western Trail and did pretty good for a few years. Then Comanches killed his first wife and their three kids, and stole his herd. After that, he just worked for wages for other men running cattle on the open range. He ended up working in the coal mines at Thurber years later." I had never heard of the La Reunion “commune.”
"In 1879 a rich Kentucky girl by the name of Mabel Doss married William Day and helped him buy 130 sections of land in Coleman County. One or the other of them had listened to "Bet-a-million" Gates and decided barbed wire was a good thing. By 1881, Day died, and a year later Mabel sold a half-interest in the ranch to other Kentuckians. By then, almost the entire ranch had been fenced off -- the largest ranch behind fence in Texas. Other investors, including lords and earls from England, bought up huge tracts of west Texas land and started doing the same. The free range boys were a mite unhappy, to say the least. In 1883 a drought dried up the country, and to get water for their cows, they sometimes had to cut fences to keep their stock alive. The conflict escalated, and the fencecutters started going after every fence. Over at Robert Lee the fencecutters burned a thousand fenceposts and threw rolls of wires on the fire -- you can still see that mass of melted together metal in the old jail museum there. " I knew this story.
"My great-grandpappy, with his socialist background, printed up broadsides that read "Down with monopolists" and "Down with foreign capitalists." His buddies printed up others that read "The soil of Texas belongs to the heroes of the Confederacy," and they plastered them all on every fence in town. When they rode out fencecutting, they often wore white hoods, so they became known as the "White Caps." Some of his compatriots were the justice of the peace and the constable of Brownwood -- and they got shot while cutting fence and were found wearing false moustaches. Things got pretty hairy -- Mabel Day hired a gunslinger to protect her ranch while she went to Austin. After almost a year of lobbying she got fencecutting and malicious pasture burning made felonies."
"And in an interesting sidenote, my great-granduncle married a Mexican gal up on the upper Pecos, and with the old free range Spanish sheepherders he also cut fences trying to protect their grazing grounds -- the old Spanish land grants. They were known as Gorras Blancas, which means white caps. You ought to read about the Gorras Blancas in "The Devil's Hatband" by Daniel Aragón y Ulibarrí to learn how ruthless the capitalists of the late 1800's really were. And, interestingly enough, one of those capitalists was Mabel Day’s new husband – Captain Joseph Lea, the founder of Roswell, New Mexico, who had been Bloody Bill Quantrill’s righthand man."
He suddenly lost steam and looked half-bewildered. Before I could say something to keep the conversation going, he shrugged and started to walk away, saying, "I know I am a clueless Luddite and can't stop the fences, but I can dang sure disrupt things!" With that, he marched off down the fenceline, whacking it with his jabbing stick with every step. A person can sure meet some strange characters when travelling the roads of west Texas!
Did the fellow really cut the high fences, or was it just the booze talking? Do other people hate the high fences? Has anybody else “taken the law into his own hands” and cut fences, too? After he got a hundred yards away, I sat in my little truck and took notes on the conversation, and when I got home researched how factual his stories were. His historical information was accurate – even the socialist nature of some of the White Caps’ placards. I googled, and online found the results of a poll about high fences in a hunting magazine. Over 60 percent of the respondents despised them. I could find no stories about modern day fence cutting, however.