Stockman’s ribbon wire, two strands with a third wire twisted in
and sheared, began the Devil’s fence in 1863, when Michael Kelly
first made it, to keep his wife’s garden from cattle and vermin,
a couplet of wires then patented by Joseph Glidden,
DeKalb, Illinois, 1874, the twisted wire began the division
of land, and the end of common-use and free movement
across the Great Plains of the last of the First Peoples. After the Civil War,
it came into use ending the primacy of cavalry that began with Darius,
and ended with the Russian–Japanese war, in 1902, the British
in South Africa used it to enclose their settlements against the Boers,
who were sent when captured to the first concentration camps
and by that time the Great Divide had been squared off, the ghosts had begun…
James McCorkle is the author of two collections of poetry, Evidences (Copper Canyon Press, 2003) and The Subtle Bodies (Etruscan Press, 2014), and co-editor of The Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry from the Colonial Era to the Present (Greenwood, 2015). He co-directs the Africana Studies Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.
Subscribe to NER
Buy digital and read it today