Why did ranchers view barbed wire as a threat?

Answer 1

Barbed wire was a way to stop other ranchers' livestock from getting mixed up with another rancher's livestock. It also was a way to stop squatters from making a homestead on land that wasn't theirs. There were a few free-range cattle drovers back then that didn't own land but grazed their cattle wherever necessary. Barbed wire prevented that as well, and created a kind of necessary ownership of the land.

Answer 2

Prior to rail roads being built ranchers would have to drive their cattle hundreds of miles to markets like Chicago, Il. The ranchers would allow their cattle to free graze as they traveled and as cattle barons bought up enormous tracts of land the free grazing way of life was slowly choked out.

Answer 3

They could no longer have their cattle on the open range. They had to confine their animals to their properties and find ways to keep them there and graze them there year after year without loosing the land to desertification.

Answer 4

It heralded an end to the open-range cattle industry, and created more friction between open-range ranchers and the sod busters, otherwise known as the farmers because the ranchers wanted the land that the farmers were turning over for crops for cattle grazing. Of course barbed wire wasn't the only thing that affected the cattle industry. Over-grazing, the near-extinction of the very cattle that were herded back east for their meat, the completion and expansion of the railroad and the ever-increasing population of farms, towns and cities in the West had an impact on the cattle industry.

Answer 5

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