The Fence My Grandfather Didn’t Want to Build

From the open skies of Wyoming, here’s this month’s short story about ranch life, an insight I learned from my family, and a piece of trivia, along with some special book news.

Story 

My father used to tell me stories about his dad, Kirk, and one thing came up again and again: Kirk hated building fences.

But our ranch depended on them.

By the time my father was running the I Lazy D, fencing was constant work. We had more than a dozen pastures, and grazing had to be properly managed. Dad did most of the fencing himself, and Kirk stayed clear of it.

But when Kirk was younger, he couldn’t avoid fencing entirely. Early ranches—like the one his father, Ike, started—kept horses close to the main ranch headquarters so they could be easily wrangled for cattle drives. Ranch headquarters and barns were usually built beside subirrigated meadows where rich grasses grew thick and long. Years later, those same meadows would become hay fields for growing supplemental winter feed for our livestock.

To keep his horses from wandering off when they weren’t being ridden, Ike fenced the meadow, our first fenced area. This soon became common practice on ranches across the country.

Grandpa Kirk

That horse pasture was Kirk’s responsibility.

Over the years, he repaired it as needed, replacing broken cedar posts, digging deep holes for

railroad ties used as stretch points, and tightening loose strands of barbed wire. It may have been the only fencing he ever did before Dad was old enough to take over the job for good.

At one point, Kirk bought several rolls of four-point barbed wire—World War I surplus

originally manufactured for the European theater. He stretched it in four strands around the horse pasture. Much later, when I started working on the ranch, that wire was rusted and brittle, cracked by decades of harsh Wyoming weather.

My brother, Rod, and I eventually took over all the fence repairs.

That horse pasture symbolized an earlier time and a task my grandfather never enjoyed. But like so many things on the ranch, it carried a deeper meaning. More than a boundary, it marked a handoff from one generation to the next.

The last week before we left the ranch for good, I walked that fence line one final time.

Insight

From Dad: “There’s much more to fencing than most people realize. You gotta learn where to

build them—but you also have to know when to take them down.”

Did You Know?

Barbed wire can last almost forever, keeping things where they need to be.

Book News

We’ve passed 5,000 sales! And won another award: Independent Press Award for Western

Nonfiction.

My heartfelt thanks to everyone for your support.

Until next month,

Mark Miller

“My family had written stories about places in ranch history. We used the slanting penmanship of fence lines scribbling their way across dunes, the sweeping cursive of cut hay in the meadow below the barn, and the well-placed punctuation of windmills and water holes over the range.” From A Sometimes Paradise.