The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Fences

THESE two drawings further illustrate rail and stone fences, resting their ends on transverse sleepers, and with intersecting stakes set at an angle, with their butts braced amongst the boulders. Such fences were more often found in rough and broken country.

THIS time it's a snake style log and boulder fence with slanting stakes at the junctions. Rough enough it does look, to be sure, but at the same time rugged, and thus, doubtless, successful. In the pioneer days it wasn't always the appearance so much as the effectiveness of things that really counted. Even the look of it must have discouraged the livestock.

AND now we come to the beginning of the barbed wire era. It began in the third quarter of the nineteenth century with the crude type of wire illustrated herewith so well by Dr. Jefferys. In those long gone days the cattle were probably not as docile and amenable as their descendants of today. Good grazing was not so plentiful, and conditions generally for the animals were not so luxurious, so that their dispositions, doubtless, were a bit more rugged. When the fields they were grazing became lean they made no bones about going through a fence if they possibly could. But this new barbed wire contraption tore them cruelly. It took time for them to learn a proper respect for it. But the farmers, particularly in the Canadian West, welcomed it gladly. Where timber was scarce it was a godsend. From 1873 onward it seemed here to stay.