The Texas Rangers and the Fence Cutters
Waco, McLennan County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Before 1875 in Texas, cattle roamed over thousands of acres of public land, and free grazing became a tradition. After 1875, however, an increasing farm populace tended to protect crops and other property with barbed wire fences which were resented by stockraisers. Cattle losses in drouths of the 1880s provoked such widespread cutting of fences that the Texas government recognized this as a crime and in 1884 enacted laws and measures to curb the practice. Texas Rangers were dispatched by the Governor at the call of County Judges and Sheriffs to apprehend the fence cutters. They operated from the Red River to the Rio Grande, and from the Panhandle to the Pine Woods of East Texas. Disguise and concealment were required, and one of the Rangers who won praise for his work pronounced it the most disagreeable duty in the world. The vigorous effort went on for some years. Finally, however, stockmen who had wanted to restore the open range were won over to fencing their own lands and using windmills to water their cattle herds. The Texas Rangers had in one more instance helped to stabilize life in the West.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
The arrival of cheap barbed wire in the late 1870s collided head-on with Texas's tradition of free grazing on open public land. As farmers fenced their crops and drought-stricken ranchers lost cattle in the 1880s, fence-cutting erupted into a range war that the state criminalized in 1884. Governors dispatched the Texas Rangers, who went undercover to hunt the cutters across the whole sweep of Texas until stockmen finally embraced fencing and windmills of their own.
Why it matters
The fence-cutting wars marked the end of the open range and the birth of the modern fenced ranch — a defining turn in how the American West was settled and owned.
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Related events
- · Texas fence-cutting wars
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Waco, County Seat of McLennan County
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Waco began where a Native village once stood, the former home of the Waco Indians, when the first town lots sold in 1849 and Shapley Ross opened a ferry across the Brazos the next year. Ferry, then bridge in 1870, then railroad in 1872 turned the settlement into a cotton-trading powerhouse and, by 1900, one of Texas's great inland cotton ports. Baylor University arrived in 1886, three governors called the city home, and 20th-century military camps made Waco known far beyond Texas.
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