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As
settlors moved West in the United States after the enactment
of the 1862 Homestead Act, the eastern fencing methods they
took along—wooden rails, stones, levees - were not feasible
in the open, treeless lands of the plains. By 1874,
six patents for barbed wire had been registered in the United
States; before the decade was out, more than 50,000 miles
of barbed wire fencing were in place. By the turn of
the century, 44% of the barbed wire made in the United States
was exported. The nation was at the center of the barbed
wire economy and by that time barbed wire was used to prevent
human movement as well as animal control and boundary delineation.
As early as 1899, the first recorded settlements whose boundaries
were defined by barbed wire were in place—in the South
African veldt where the British enforced a total occupation
in order to maintain political authority over the Boers of
the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. In World War
I barbed wire became a battlefield institution when it was
used to ring the front from Switzerland to the coast of Belgium,
sealing in troops on either side and adding years to the trench
warfare.
The
Devil's Rope covers the period from the 1870s through
World War II and the completion of the Berlin Wall in 1961,
and will include an epilogue that details the massive amounts
of barbed wire used today—100,000 tons are consumed
annually in the United States. The video will follow
a small band of avid collectors of barbed wire, men in their
70s and 80s, from the Middle West and the plains states, who
gather together at conventions to buy, sell, trade and wax
nostalgic about barbed wire. These men sit on the Board
of the Barbed Wire Museum in LaCrosse, Kansas; regularly hunt
for additions to their collections in abandoned farmlands
and fields of rural America and have friendly squabbles over
the value of the rarest barbed wire specimens. Their
colorful accounts of the history of barbed wire and their
affection for it will be weaved together with Hollywood westerns
(such as BarbedWire and CowTown, starring Gene
Autry); early Edison films of the Boer War in South Africa
and newsreel footage from the trenches of World War I and
the concentration camps of World War II.
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