Drift Fence

Duane's take

Now, I'm tellin' this one straight from the official marker, so let's see what the Panhandle has to say for itself. It starts, as so many Texas stories do, with cattle and ambition. Famed cattleman Charles Goodnight established one of the first ranches in the Texas Panhandle — the J A Ranch — in 1876.

That same year, Thomas S. Bugbee established the first cattle ranch right here in Hutchinson County. Two ranches, one year.

The Panhandle was open for business. Then came the 1880s, and beef prices soared, and ranchers poured into this region like the storms that would later haunt them. The Texas Panhandle had everything a cow could want — open range, expansive grasslands, and winters mild enough to draw herds drifting south from Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas.

Every season, that great seasonal migration rolled in, and it disrupted the careful work of local ranchers who had gone to great lengths to respect one another's boundaries. So the members of the Panhandle Stock Association pooled their resources. Between 1882 and 1885, they erected barbed wire barriers — two hundred miles of it, stretching across the Panhandle, including Hutchinson County — to stop those drifting cattle from spilling down into the fertile Canadian River Valley.

They called it the drift fence. And it worked. Oh, it worked.

The winters of 1886 and 1887 came in hard and mean, with strong storms pushing cattle south in massive numbers. The herds moved ahead of the weather just like they always had — only now, two hundred miles of barbed wire was waiting for them. The cattle stalled at the fence line.

Thousands of them. They froze. They were trampled to death.

The losses were staggering — and that word staggering is the marker's own, because there's no softer word for what happened. What was built to protect the Canadian River Valley had become a wall between living animals and survival. The catastrophe was too large to ignore.

Federal and state legislation followed, limiting fencing on public lands. The drift fence was removed — or what remained of it was folded into private ranch fencing, absorbed back into the land it had tried to manage. Two hundred miles of wire.

Erected in just a few years. Gone not long after. And in its wake, a lesson the Panhandle did not soon forget about the difference between a fence that keeps things out and one that traps things in.

What the marker says

Famed cattleman Charles Goodnight established one of the first ranches in the Texas Panhandle, the J A Ranch, in 1876. Later that year, Thomas S. Bugbee established the first cattle ranch in Hutchinson County. As a result of soaring beef prices cattle ranching proliferated in this region of the U.S. in the 1880s. The Texas Panhandle, with its open range and expansive grasslands, became the preferred winter grazing site for cattle migrating south from Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas. This seasonal influx of cattle disrupted the practice of area ranchers who went to great lengths to respect adjacent ranch boundaries. Members of the Panhandle Stock Association pooled their resources and in 1882-85 erected barbed wire barriers along a 200-mile stretch of the Panhandle including Hutchinson County to prevent cattle from drifting south into the fertile Canadian River Valley. The "drift fence" worked too well in the winters of 1886 and 1887 when thousands of cattle moving south ahead of strong storms stalled at the fence line and froze or were trampled to death. The staggering losses prompted federal and state legislation which limited fencing on public lands and the "drift fence" was removed or incorporated into private ranch fencing. Sesquicentennial of Texas Statehood 1845-1995.