These three unsuspecting inventions won the American Wild West – but did they destroy it too?
Historian Karen Jones reveals how barbed wire and other surprising inventions transformed the frontier, reshaping the lives of settlers, as well as the land and its peoples
Grit and gunfights. Cowboys riding under a relentless sun. Native Americans resisting conquest. Sheriffs and outlaws squaring off in dusty towns.
These images of adventure and high drama still shape how we imagine the American 19th-century West – the so-called Wild West – as a place shaped by individual courage and personal struggle. And without such determination, the frontier might never have pushed so far.
But what’s often forgotten is how profoundly the American frontier was reshaped by forces less dramatic than shootouts. As the industrial revolution swept across the 19th-century world, it was technological change that transformed the frontier more decisively than any single battle.
“There are three inventions that come to mind when I think about what the technological transformations were; the objects that won the Old West and helped the expansion westward,” explains historian Karen Jones on the HistoryExtra podcast.
Together, they opened the prairie to Euro-American settlement – and at the same time hastened the destruction of the old West forever.
Barbed wire: fencing in the Wild West
Before the 1860s, the American West was an open range.
Cattle and wild bison roamed freely across grasslands that stretched for hundreds of miles. With timber a scarce resource, and the impracticality of stone walls on the plains, fencing land in was an incredibly difficult task.
That changed in 1867, when Illinois farmer Joseph Glidden patented barbed wire. This invention suddenly, Jones says, “transforms the parcelling up of the west in a cheap and effective way.”
Barbed wire was simple: two twisted strands of wire with sharp barbs at intervals. But its impact was revolutionary. For the first time, settlers could cheaply fence land, excluding rivals and protecting crops from wandering cattle. Ranchers used it to control their herds; homesteaders used it to secure farms.
Conflict quickly followed. “It becomes the method by which the ranchers with the cattle interests and the homesteaders come to blows,” says Jones.
Cattlemen resisted the fencing of the open range they had once driven their herds across. Meanwhile, Native peoples saw traditional hunting grounds cut off. The so-called ‘range wars’ of the late 19th century – violent clashes between ranchers, farmers and vigilantes – were fought over strands of wire as well as over competing ideology.
Barbed wire enabled the development of open prairies into parcels of private property, reshaping the landscape more permanently than any cavalry campaign.
The Winchester rifle: firepower and mythology
Being able to parcel up land isn’t much use if you can’t defend it.
“The Winchester repeating rifle; the Winchester 73 is hugely important for the US Army as an efficient piece of technology that enabled them to manifest power in the West. It was also used by settlers, and by cowboys and is celebrated as part of the sheriff vs outlaw culture of the West too,” Jones explains.
The key to the rifle as an innovation was speed.
Older muskets and rifles fired a single shot and then had to be reloaded – a slow process while in battle or on the hunt. The Winchester Model 1873, by contrast, used a lever-action mechanism that allowed multiple shots to be fired in quick succession. It gave soldiers and settlers an enormous advantage over opponents with traditional weapons or slower firearms.
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As Jones explains, for the US Army, the Winchester was a decisive weapon in campaigns against Native tribes. For settlers, it provided security against raids or rustlers. For outlaws, it offered firepower. And in popular imagination, it became the “gun that won the West”, celebrated in dime novels, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows and later 20th-century Hollywood westerns.
“It becomes really important in the mythological West, which is often tangled up so closely with what’s happening at the time. It has a real power: even as the West is being made, it’s being imagined,” Jones notes.
So, the revolutionary Winchester became both a practical tool of conquest and a powerful prop in the enduring myth of the frontier.
The refrigerated railcar: the industrial frontier
The third invention that Jones cites certainly lacked allure, but its impact was transformative. In the 1870s, Chicago meatpacking entrepreneur Gustavus Swift perfected the refrigerated railcar.
“The refrigerated rail car doesn’t sound very romantic as a bit of technology”, explains Jones, but “it’s a symbol of the industrialised West, and the importance of industrialisation in this story.”
Until its development, cattle had to be driven hundreds of miles to railheads at towns like Abilene in modern Texas or Dodge City, Kansas. There they were shipped east alive – an inefficient and costly system. But when refrigeration became an option, slaughtered beef could be cooled, packed and sent directly to urban markets.
This tied the frontier into the national economy. The cowboy drive remained an iconic image, but the real profits now lay in Chicago’s stockyards and the boxed beef arriving daily in New York, Boston and Philadelphia.
The frontier became part of a vast industrial network – a meat factory for the rest of the US, as much as an untamed wilderness.
How technological change destroyed the old West
Together, these technologies utterly reshaped the prairie, and in doing so, wiped out its most iconic animal.
In the early 19th century, bison herds were so vast they sometimes stopped trains for days as they thundered past. By the 1880s, only a few hundred survived.
“Bison roamed the West in their millions historically,” Jones says, “but they’re driven off the open range by the cattle kingdom, enthusiastically abetted by sportsmen and by market hunters who kill these animals to make them largely into fertilizer … and also by the army who see in the destruction of the bison a way to take the power and authority of indigenous tribes away.”
Barbed wire cut off grazing lands. Rifles made it easy to slaughter animals on a massive scale. Railroads and refrigerated cars created new markets for hides, meat and fertilizer. Meanwhile, the US Army, seeking to break the power of Plains tribes, actively encouraged the destruction.
For Native peoples, a bison was a source of food, clothing, shelter and a spiritual cornerstone. Its eradication stripped them of sustenance and cultural identity, forcing dependence on government rations and confinement to reservations.
An ecological and cultural catastrophe
The loss of the bison wasn't just the end of a species, but the collapse of an ecological system and a cultural order.
“Ecologically this changes the West because bison eat and graze in a really different way to domestic cattle”, Jones explains. “Their removal signals an entirely different cultural system and economic system: a system of Euro-American industrialized agriculture.”
Replacing wild herds with cattle led to overgrazing, soil erosion and ecological imbalance. The Plains landscape was permanently altered, with scars that remain visible today.
This article is based on an interview with Karen Jones, speaking to Elinor Evans on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
Authors
James Osborne is a digital content producer at HistoryExtra where he writes, researches, and edits articles, while also conducting the occasional interview