Bewitched by Bobbed Wire

There’s a prickly side to the romance of the Old West. “People think the Colt .45 and the Winchester won the West,” says Whittier resident Onie Sims. “But the West was won with barbed wire, windmills and the John Deere plow. I have the wire.”

More than 1,000 pieces and 600 varieties of it.

In the late 1960s, Sims visited a friend in Texas who collected barbed wire. Soon after, Sims and his 8-year-old son found about 25 different types on the grounds of the Sims family’s Texas ranch, and Sims was hooked. “Then I read about a guy in Bakersfield who had a garage full, so I visited him and became even more hooked. He gave me a bunch of wire and sold me a book, ‘The Bobbed Wire Bible’ No. 3. I now have 40 or 50 books on it and many articles.”

According to the lore, one Joseph Glidden of DeKalb, Ill., put barbs on wire to keep cows out of his wife’s garden. Glidden’s wire was patented in 1874 (DeKalb actually spawned several “barbed-wire barons”), and the stuff “won the West” as the handiest fencing material available to homesteaders settling in Illinois, Iowa, the Dakotas and other heartland states during the 1870s. Resourceful wire producers seeking to avoid paying royalties on existing patents developed about 500 varieties by 1900, Sims says. Original barbed-wire property dividers can still be found all over the Old West, says Sims, a former division engineer and manager for the Halliburton Co. “Posts wear out long before the wire. It’s there almost forever.”

Today, he says, most “devil’s rope” is made in Japan and Belgium from American materials and sells in 80-rod rolls, with a rod measuring a quarter of a mile. The standard collector sample is an 18-inch piece long enough to display two or three barbs, and some collectors even specialize in the factory splices joining lengths of wire.

While much collecting is now done by trade, “20 or 30 years ago you could get it from ranchers who were nice about it if you told them you were a collector. They would often go out and help you,” says Sims, 70, whose collection also includes an array of the different barbed wires used by different nations in wartime.

Sims has gone the way of many a collector and acquired new obsessions, including monkey wrenches, pliers and threaded hub caps, but he still displays 80 to 90 wire varieties in his home, and keeps an additional 1,000 samples for trading. He recently sold a rare piece of distinctive “Phillips Cocklebur” wire for $800. “If you’re collecting something, you enjoy it while you have it, and then it goes to the next person to enjoy.”