The English Horses

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The first rifle shot came as the stallion leaped the poles. The colts milled in confusion at the break, distracted by the stallion’s charge, terrified by the rifle fire. Burn reined the gray around, looked across the valley. Two men were working together on the rails. A third sat on his horse, holding the others’ mounts. A fourth man held the rifle. He raised it again, and fired.

Author’s Note

Barbed wire was introduced in the mid-1870s. By trial and perseverance, the sharp wire traveled into the cattle regions of the West and Southwest, and its use forever changed the lives of the numerous men who babied, doctored, and branded the free-roaming herds.

Open range was effectively ended by the wire’s introduction, and the blizzards of 1886–87 were terrible examples of the need for ranchers to monitor their stock more closely. Thousands of cattle in Montana and Wyoming drifted before the winter storms, only to be caught up against long miles of wire fence and frozen in their tracks.

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