Slim Randles

Joe Glidden died 105 years ago, and millions of cowboys in New Mexico would celebrate if they knew why, and if there were really millions of cowboys in New Mexico, which there aren’t.

Now while you’re parsing that sentence, let me explain that Joe Glidden was a farmer in Illinois and his wife, his daughter and his two sons all died before Joe was 38. In a fit of despondence, he invented barbed wire. In 1874, in another fit of despondence, they let him patent the darned stuff.

Depression is a terrible thing. Why else would a lonely farmer take a perfectly good coffee grinder and teach it to wrap sharp points around a piece of harmless, smooth wire, turning it into the bane of every rancher’s and cowboy’s existence? So it was that, since 1874, the West got fenced, and cowboys got torn up, and bluejeans had to be made stiffer, and cowboys had to find wives so their shirts could get mended, and some doctor had to invent tetanus shots.

So what happened to Joe Glidden after he came up with barbed wire? Well, he remarried, was elected sheriff of his county, became one of the richest men in the , and eventually owned a 250,000-acre ranch, a hotel, a bank and a newspaper.

Ain’t no justice in this world.

The late Cleofes Ortiz, who was declared an official state treasure here in New Mexico, used to play old-time fiddle music for school children all over the state. This maestro of music always used to wait for the inevitable question to arise when one of the sharp-eyed kids would notice he was missing the end of one of his fingers. His eyes would twinkle and he’d tell the kids, “When I was a kid, we were too poor to buy violin strings, so I had to use barbed wire.”

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