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Speaker 1: Hey, Casey, could we could we start this episode off

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Speaker 1: with an old school dialing a number kind of telephone thing.

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Speaker 1: There we go, I'm Ben, Hello, I mean hello, it's me.

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Speaker 1: I've been a man home along long. Oh yeah, it's no.

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Speaker 1: Oh okay, I was. I thought the holding music was

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Speaker 1: good enough that I was. I was going to sit

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Speaker 1: there with everyone for a while. Ben't it like that.

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Speaker 1: I was just doing a little uh telephone related music

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Speaker 1: number from Todd Rundgren by way of Adele. And you're

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Speaker 1: here to listen to that holding music as well. Thanks

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Speaker 1: so much for dropping by, folks. This is ridiculous history. No,

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Speaker 1: before we begin, I have to ask you something that

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Speaker 1: I'm sure both you and our super producer Casey Pegram

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Speaker 1: have heard numerous times in our meetings here. Have you

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Speaker 1: ever been on hold at a conference call and there's

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Speaker 1: this terrible song about being on hold on a telephone? Yeah,

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Speaker 1: that's that's uber conference, I think is what you're talking about. Ben. Wait,

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Speaker 1: and I don't wonder where am I friends? I'd know

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Speaker 1: why I am a friend? Why did they go? And

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Speaker 1: it's sort of sedate. It's cute the first time you

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Speaker 1: hear it, but then it's it just it just kind

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Speaker 1: of wears on you and grades on you. Yeah, it

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Speaker 1: never ends. At some point, it indeterminably loops and you're

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Speaker 1: still waiting. Yeah. And it's weird because listeners peep behind

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Speaker 1: the curtain. When we're not podcasting, we're on conference calls,

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Speaker 1: and typically on commerce calls where the people were waiting

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Speaker 1: for never show up, So we just hear that song

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Speaker 1: over and over and over again. It's like a more

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Speaker 1: Internet trolley version of waiting for Good Do. Yeah. And

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Speaker 1: you know that kind of figures into the story for

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Speaker 1: today because there's a lot of themes in the story

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Speaker 1: that are kind of pre Internet. He aren't They absolutely

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Speaker 1: in in a in a very prescient way, I would argue,

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Speaker 1: it turns out so that we don't bury the lead

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Speaker 1: too much. Back in the day, before the days of

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Speaker 1: snazzy cell phones, before the days of even those awkward,

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Speaker 1: uh nineteen eighties Wall Street hot shot phones. You know

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Speaker 1: what I'm talking about. For everybody I'm miming awkwardly to

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Speaker 1: know that this is the big antenna due to sort

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Speaker 1: of a swoop of the arm. And I'm also thinking

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Speaker 1: about the ones that came in a bag. Oh yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: before the days of all that stuff. When the telephone

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Speaker 1: was a new, fancy and vital invention, right, the people

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Speaker 1: ran into problems. One of the big problems was infrastructure,

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Speaker 1: especially in rural areas. In the early nineteen hundreds, there

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Speaker 1: were so many amazing innovations. We got refrigerators, radios, electric

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Speaker 1: washing machines and so on. But one of the more

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Speaker 1: simplistic innovations of the let's say late eighteen hundreds that

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Speaker 1: played a huge role in communication for a while was,

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Speaker 1: oddly enough, barbed wire. That's right. It was incredibly effective

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Speaker 1: and innovative in exactly the thing that it was meant

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Speaker 1: to do, which was to keep things in or not

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Speaker 1: let things out. Um And it was patented in eighteen

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Speaker 1: seventy four by Joseph Glinton, that's right, and not long

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Speaker 1: after at at all. The telephone was patented in eighteen

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Speaker 1: seventy seven, and barbed wire played a big role in

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Speaker 1: helping to spread the the use of the telephone to

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Speaker 1: some of those rural places that did not have access

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Speaker 1: to that infrastructure. Because ma Bell, as it was known,

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Speaker 1: had to get the most bang for her buck, right,

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Speaker 1: so she was going to install those lines only in

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Speaker 1: the places where they could have the most customers that

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Speaker 1: were the closest together right right, therefore cities, right, urban populations,

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Speaker 1: and we see, you know, we see a similar thing

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Speaker 1: happening with telecommunications construction in rural areas of the United

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Speaker 1: States at least today. But once the patents, once the

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Speaker 1: patents for the phone began to expire, and around three

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Speaker 1: or so other companies were making phones. Willy Nilly Sears,

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Speaker 1: Roebuck made a phone. I mean, they made almost everything

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Speaker 1: back then, right, they were the costco of their time.

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Speaker 1: But the point is it became much easier to purchase

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Speaker 1: a telephone set. It did not, however, come with in

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Speaker 1: the box a telephone line network, right, a network, yeah.

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Speaker 1: And so what several enterprising farmers did is they said, well,

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Speaker 1: if a wire is a wire, right, and if we

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Speaker 1: can transmit sound a d yeah, right, how long is

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Speaker 1: a piece of wire? Right? Uh? The question asked is

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Speaker 1: are the wires in fencing that we have already built?

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Speaker 1: Because barbed wire was tremendously popular and effective at preventing

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Speaker 1: you know, bulls from getting toward heifer's when it wasn't

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Speaker 1: breeding season, and keeping them away from China shops, and

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Speaker 1: keeping them away from the important China shop industry at

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Speaker 1: the time. What they said is, uh, let's let's give

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Speaker 1: it a go. Let's see what happens if we connect

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Speaker 1: the wire of a telephone to the wire on a

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Speaker 1: barbed wire fence, and it turns out it worked really,

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Speaker 1: really well. Typically, they take a smooth wire strung from

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Speaker 1: a telephone in a house or a barn to a

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Speaker 1: barbed wire fence. Then it would hook to the top

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Speaker 1: strand of barbed wire. Most fences had you know, at

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Speaker 1: least three, maybe four strands of barbed wire, so they

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Speaker 1: would only use the top one, and the telephone signal

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Speaker 1: would follow the wire to whatever other telephone was connected

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Speaker 1: down the line. And typically that would be um for

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Speaker 1: lack of better term, neighborhoods, because these were neighborhoods the

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Speaker 1: way we think of them. These houses were miles and

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Speaker 1: miles and miles apart from each other, these ranches and

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Speaker 1: these farms. But this network of barbed wire fencing could

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Speaker 1: potentially be connected, and you you know, you might have

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Speaker 1: to do something like install a jumper to go over

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Speaker 1: a road to connect to the next segment of fence

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Speaker 1: that might belong to the other property right and they

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Speaker 1: would do that. Once they figured how it worked and

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Speaker 1: word got around that stuff started happening, didn't they. Yeah. Absolutely,

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Speaker 1: And we have to emphasize how useful this was for people.

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Speaker 1: They were They were essentially building cooperatives and this kind

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Speaker 1: of approach was not something that was foreig into farming

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Speaker 1: communities at the time. They had built cooperative irrigation projects

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Speaker 1: and things of that nature. This was another example of

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Speaker 1: people coming together and boom you go. You you're able

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Speaker 1: to save a journey of miles and miles. Right, You

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Speaker 1: can just call up one of your neighbors and say,

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Speaker 1: you know, hey, keep an eye out for this lost lamb,

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Speaker 1: or hey, are we still on for Sunday dinner, you know?

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Speaker 1: Or God forbid you know, um grandmama um has her angina.

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Speaker 1: You know, you call instead of having to send a

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Speaker 1: horse or a runner, you just call the house down

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Speaker 1: the line, and maybe there's a dock that can come

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Speaker 1: a running, right. Yeah, And that's a really great point

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Speaker 1: because we understand that even today can communication is a

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Speaker 1: vital part of rural life, you know, especially if you're

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Speaker 1: if you're isolated, you need to have an effective means

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Speaker 1: of communicating from point A to point B. And I

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Speaker 1: love how you point out what happens in an emergency,

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Speaker 1: because this system, as ingenious as it is, it was imperfect,

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Speaker 1: right at all. But just like that good old fashioned,

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Speaker 1: down home ingenuity that got the system of running in

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Speaker 1: the first place, they had to come up with interesting

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Speaker 1: little fixes to kind of deal with the imperfect nature

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Speaker 1: of this whole system, right Ben, Yeah, Yeah, absolutely no.

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Speaker 1: In an article called before mob Bell Rural Telephone Systems

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Speaker 1: in the West by an author named CF. Eckhart, they

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Speaker 1: noted the following rain and large bulls with raging hormones

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Speaker 1: were the nemeses of fence line telephone systems. Apparently, it

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Speaker 1: would happen not too infrequently that a bull with a

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Speaker 1: high threshold of pain and intense desire to quote make

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Speaker 1: the acquaintance of heifer's in the next pasture could just

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Speaker 1: ram through the line, ran through the fence such that

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Speaker 1: it breaks the line, and then the ram through the heifers,

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Speaker 1: ram through the heifers. Yeah, it's just rams on rams there,

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Speaker 1: and they would have to have somebody come out and

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Speaker 1: fix that line. And that was a little bit of

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Speaker 1: an easier fix than rain. Yeah, it's true, you know,

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Speaker 1: rain was a big problem because it would cause the

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Speaker 1: signal to dissipate, and you know, if there were frost,

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Speaker 1: they would have to wait until the frost thought entirely

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Speaker 1: to even use the system. We did not mention though,

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Speaker 1: that there would be maybe around twenty phones connected together

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Speaker 1: on one of these systems, the network size of the network.

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Speaker 1: But not only that, anytime someone made a call, every

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Speaker 1: single phone would ring. That's the other problem. It's a

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Speaker 1: cool party line. They had them, like even in the eighties.

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Speaker 1: I kind of remember them. You'd have them in your

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Speaker 1: house or in a neighborhood. It was I guess it

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Speaker 1: was for fun. I can't think of what the functional

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Speaker 1: reason was to do it later, but this was just

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Speaker 1: an absolute byproduct of how this system was. Either you

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Speaker 1: didn't dial anybody you know had a number, so they

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Speaker 1: would come up with these um special rings for a family.

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Speaker 1: And the phones that we're talking about were largely these

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Speaker 1: crank generator phones. So if a family's ring code was

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Speaker 1: dot dot dash or like you know, a long long short,

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Speaker 1: you would do crank, crank, crank, you know right. This

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Speaker 1: shows how even when the system was working perfectly as intended,

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Speaker 1: it had some definitive drawbacks. In a very real sense,

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Speaker 1: everybody knew what you and your neighbor were talking about,

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Speaker 1: and it was considered, especially in these larger communities of

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Speaker 1: maybe twenty phones or something, it was considered common courtesy

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Speaker 1: not to pick up the phone and eavesdrop if you

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Speaker 1: knew somebody was calling the Jorgensen's and not your house.

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Speaker 1: But as it turns out, quote unquote, listening in became

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Speaker 1: a very very popular activity. Yeah, it's true, and I

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Speaker 1: did read somewhere. It was actually in a common section

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Speaker 1: on a Gizmoto article about this called barbed wire fences

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Speaker 1: were an early d I Y telephone network. Um, folks

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Speaker 1: were talking about more the party line systems of you know,

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Speaker 1: more recent years, but if anything, that would just be

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Speaker 1: a kind of higher quality version of what we're talking

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Speaker 1: about here. And apparently the more people that are on

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Speaker 1: the line, the signal starts to diminish, kind of like

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Speaker 1: making a copy of a copy of a copy, I guess,

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Speaker 1: And you could kind of tell when someone picked up

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Speaker 1: because the signal dropped a little bit, so kind of

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Speaker 1: people would be like, get off the line, who's on

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Speaker 1: the line. That kind of state. You hear that a

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Speaker 1: lot this cooperation made it a little easier for them

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Speaker 1: to detect where a break was in the line. Possibly, yeah, right,

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Speaker 1: and that's how they can find the bull. Uh. I

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Speaker 1: was going to say the bull breaks if we're gonna

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Speaker 1: make something up. But rain was a little bit more

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Speaker 1: perfidious because it gets soaked the fence post as well,

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Speaker 1: and to combat that, they needed to have insulation, so

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Speaker 1: you see, like porcelain tubes. Actually, the weird answer is

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Speaker 1: that when especially in Texas, when huge thunderstorm came through,

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Speaker 1: it would ground the entire system until things dried out.

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Speaker 1: But they solved it by working with saloons, the discarded

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Speaker 1: beer bottles, whiskey bottles and so on. Glass is a

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Speaker 1: great electrical insulator, and so they would collect bottles from

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Speaker 1: the saloons, break the necks off, whittle wooden pegs to

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Speaker 1: fit into the broken bottlenecks, drill holes in the pegs,

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Speaker 1: and these glass insulators got nailed defense posts, and then

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Speaker 1: you could string the wire along the insulator so that

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Speaker 1: you could reliably communicate, you know, but then you know,

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Speaker 1: it's still not perfect, but it sounds pretty cool, right, Yeah.

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Speaker 1: And there's more fun little tricks too. We're talking about emergencies.

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Speaker 1: They'd have a particular ring for emergencies. They even started

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Speaker 1: treating it almost like a pirate radio network in a

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Speaker 1: way where, um, they would have if if you're maybe

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Speaker 1: someone in your household played the banjo and you had

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Speaker 1: a little string band or something like that, you would

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Speaker 1: play into the phone and people, you know that listening

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Speaker 1: in on that would be welcome, you know, and that

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Speaker 1: would be almost like a community engagement kind of thing,

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Speaker 1: you know, bringing coming together with your neighbors over these

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Speaker 1: at times quite large distances between households. Yeah, and there

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Speaker 1: are some heartwarming accounts of you know, the one guy,

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Speaker 1: the first guy or first family in the neighborhood to

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Speaker 1: get a radio turning into like the radio hour every

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Speaker 1: nine pm. Here's the up to minute stories. Right. Also, wait,

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Speaker 1: I forgot we should talk turkey. We should talk prices.

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Speaker 1: Because this wasn't a thing that incorporated long distance phone

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Speaker 1: call charges. It didn't have any weird hidden fees. You

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Speaker 1: didn't really have to sign, uh, you know, a binding

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Speaker 1: through your contract. It's like when I every now and

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Speaker 1: then say, you know, I Ben, I think I'm gonna

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Speaker 1: start a cell phone company. You do say that, and

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Speaker 1: then you're like all on all my friends, the time

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Speaker 1: for that has passed, but not during this time. This

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Speaker 1: was literally like a from the ground up, no pun intended,

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Speaker 1: maybe a little a little bit a little bit uh

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Speaker 1: d i y telecommunications network. Yeah. By one estimate, service

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Speaker 1: ran four a mere three to eighteen dollars a year,

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Speaker 1: and that was way less than the regional phone companies charged.

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Speaker 1: And the labor for maintaining these networks was supplied by

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Speaker 1: volunteers because often if there's barbed wire already, they would

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Speaker 1: be repairing it in the course of regular farm Who

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Speaker 1: are you paying though? I don't understand that. Um. I

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Speaker 1: thought it was just kind of a cooperative like a

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Speaker 1: collective kind of thing, right, So this would vary from

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Speaker 1: cooperative to co operative organization organization. Let's look at one

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Speaker 1: example in the Montana East Line Telephone Association. It sounds

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Speaker 1: pretty classy, right, who does There are eight members, but

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Speaker 1: they had a leader who identified himself as H. B.

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Speaker 1: S in farming publications, and he said that he would

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Speaker 1: be able to get them connected for a fee of

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Speaker 1: twenty five dollars each. So so that three to ten

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Speaker 1: or whatever, that's a one time fee. That's cool. See

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Speaker 1: ben I was picturing this all wrong. I was picturing

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Speaker 1: that it was a straight up cooperation between those families

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Speaker 1: that lived in closest proximity. But I realized now that

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Speaker 1: this began to have a much wider reach, didn't that? Yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: And you're absolutely right now, maybe it wasn't first, Yeah, yeah, absolutely,

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Speaker 1: And at first was also probably a calculation of necessity

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Speaker 1: more than novelty. Right. So, in the case of Montana

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Speaker 1: East Line Telephone Association, h b S sells the following

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Speaker 1: package for about twenty five bucks each, a telephone set

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Speaker 1: with two dry batteries and a shore ring condenser, a magneto,

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Speaker 1: a lightning arrest or, a ground knob, knobs and tubes,

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Speaker 1: plus ten feet of interior wire and around fifty feet

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Speaker 1: of outside drop wire that connect to the nearest poll.

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Speaker 1: And then HBS says, you know, beyond that, like if

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Speaker 1: you're more than uh sixty feet away from where that

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Speaker 1: that nearest polar wire is, beyond that, you can use

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Speaker 1: any kind of wire you have. And people did have

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Speaker 1: wire laying around, you know, probably barbed wire. Yeah. In fact,

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Speaker 1: and this it started to catch on that this was

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Speaker 1: a valuable commodity in these unwired um traditionally areas and

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Speaker 1: in Arizona in Hidalgo County. Um, a new railroad that

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Speaker 1: had been installed. Um, some trains killed, uh, somebody's bull,

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Speaker 1: and the railroad company as payment, allowed this local network

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Speaker 1: to use some of their railroad signposts as jumpers for

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Speaker 1: the phone network. Oh cool. You know what, that's one

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Speaker 1: of the few times that we have seen a railroad

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Speaker 1: company portraying a positive light. That's a really good point

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Speaker 1: and think of at that. And you know, as it

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Speaker 1: got bigger and bigger with these associations like you're talking about,

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Speaker 1: things like switchboards even came into the picture, didn't they. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: They would be typically in a store in the local

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Speaker 1: town area or often in somebody's kitchen, and then they

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Speaker 1: would have switchboard operators who had limited hours, right, so

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Speaker 1: you you would, uh, you would ring into the switchboard

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Speaker 1: and then asked to be connected somewhere. There's another thing here.

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Speaker 1: We know you mentioned earlier how these took off and

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Speaker 1: how they grew quite popular at the time. By nineteen

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Speaker 1: o two, there were more than six thousand small independent

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Speaker 1: phone companies that were actually farmers mutuals like you know,

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Speaker 1: the farming collective or cooperative phone network and you know

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Speaker 1: this not only was it functional, and we have that

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Speaker 1: community aspect to it. Right. Um. In an article from

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Speaker 1: Atlas Obscura, there's a really great quote from a woman

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Speaker 1: named Emma Marble who was a young homestead or we

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Speaker 1: haven't really even talked about the idea of homesteading. How

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Speaker 1: this was a thing where people were given land grants

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Speaker 1: by the government in order to come out and settle

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Speaker 1: some of these um more widely parts of the country

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Speaker 1: in the Midwest and such, right, um, m A Marble

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Speaker 1: in this article who's a young homesteader in in the

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Speaker 1: in Arizona, um said that the lines kept loneliness at bay. Right.

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Speaker 1: She said. The theory was that we would answer only

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Speaker 1: when our own ring sounded, but whenever the bell rang,

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Speaker 1: every woman on the line rushed to a receiver. Um.

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Speaker 1: And speaking of the homesteading thing, there was another use

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Speaker 1: where there would be inspections from time to time. Property

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Speaker 1: inspectors were just people like representatives from the government that

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Speaker 1: would come and visit these homesteads to make sure they

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Speaker 1: were operating according to the law that granted them these

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Speaker 1: pieces of land. And whenever they would someone down the

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Speaker 1: line on that single dirt road leading between these these

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Speaker 1: properties would see the inspector coming, those party lines would

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Speaker 1: light up and everyone would know so they could get

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Speaker 1: to work. Right, Yeah, that's that's cool. That's that's an

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Speaker 1: awesome fact there. And and also just to just to add,

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Speaker 1: we said limited hours about the switchboards, but I feel

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Speaker 1: like we need to be clear this. This will be

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Speaker 1: a good example of how kind of ad hawc and

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Speaker 1: casual this was. The switchboard usually shut down around nine pm,

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Speaker 1: so it worked from like maybe five thirty in the

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Speaker 1: morning to nine pm. It was always shut down around

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Speaker 1: two or three pm on Sunday so families could go

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Speaker 1: to church, and it was also shut down on Saturday

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Speaker 1: night if there were a dance in town. So you know, nobody,

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Speaker 1: nobody had this as a salary job in these situations,

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Speaker 1: and it was something that happened for the benefit of

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Speaker 1: the community. Like when the party line blows up and

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Speaker 1: it's time to it's time to at least look busy, right. Also,

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Speaker 1: I have to say the use of the phrase party line,

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Speaker 1: it still always reminds me of those commercials from the

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Speaker 1: nineteen nineties where they're like call and chat with interesting

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Speaker 1: people like numbers. So I could never when I was

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Speaker 1: a kid, I could never tell if these were, you know,

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Speaker 1: nine numbers of a romantic or sexual nature, or if

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Speaker 1: there were really people who were just calling to be like, Hey,

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Speaker 1: what's the names Derek? I just got the town. I

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Speaker 1: want to talk to Derek. It seems awesome. All right, Well,

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Speaker 1: since we've gotten to the modern party lines, let's talk

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Speaker 1: about a little interesting tidbit that I saw about a

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Speaker 1: modern use of this. You had talked about how the

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Speaker 1: parallel between this time with having a hard time getting

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Speaker 1: infrastructure in place in more rural areas comparing with that

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Speaker 1: we're experiencing now with um other countries that are very

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Speaker 1: hard to get to where there's a lot of poverty,

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Speaker 1: and even somewhat you know, you're seeing issues with getting

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Speaker 1: high speed internet in more world parts of the United States.

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Speaker 1: So I was reading this article on gizmoto that I

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Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, and in the comments I found some fantastic

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Speaker 1: I can't confirm this. I just want to read this

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Speaker 1: to you and see what you think. UM user Chelanso

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Speaker 1: says I attended a Cisco networking class where the instructor

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Speaker 1: talked about this sort of thing he'd been deploying network

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Speaker 1: equipment throughout Africa, and in some places there was no

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Speaker 1: way to keep copper wires from being stolen, so in

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Speaker 1: at least one installation they ran X point to five

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Speaker 1: over barbed wire. Next point to five is a standard

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Speaker 1: like a packet, UH, A wide area network, you know,

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Speaker 1: like a very rudimentary Internet. Basically, that's amazing and I

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Speaker 1: can't imagine a better testament to the brilliance of this

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Speaker 1: sort of application. The wires a wire, there's a wire

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Speaker 1: a wire. I hope this is deployed in more areas

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Speaker 1: of the world. Uh. In the case of the US

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Speaker 1: barbed wire telephone system, we know that it persisted much

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Speaker 1: much longer than you might typically imagine, like into the seventies,

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Speaker 1: especially some places in like Texas. I want to say, yes, yes,

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Speaker 1: you're spot on, So there's uh. Eckhart in this article

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Speaker 1: has a pretty pretty chuckle worthy description of his difficulty

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Speaker 1: calling his parents, who still used a barbed wire system

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Speaker 1: into the seventies. So this is definitely rural Texas. He

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Speaker 1: said his parents lived in a place called Liberty Hill,

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Speaker 1: north and west of Austin and outside the system, their

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Speaker 1: own cooperative system. Their phone number was get this thirty seven,

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Speaker 1: just that that has been there with the thirty seven

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Speaker 1: couple to get the phone. I guess so, yeah, you're

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Speaker 1: probably right actually, and uh. Inside their barbed wire system,

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Speaker 1: their phone number was three longs and a short And

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Speaker 1: when this guy was calling his parents, he would have

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Speaker 1: to ring an operator in Dallas and tell her that

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Speaker 1: he is calling Liberty Hill, Texas. She would say, where

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Speaker 1: is it. He would say, it's in Williamson County. It's

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Speaker 1: you know here in relation to Austin. She would say,

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Speaker 1: that's area CO five one two. You can dial the

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Speaker 1: number correct, And you would have to say, no, believe me,

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Speaker 1: I can't. I do this all the time. And she

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Speaker 1: would say what's number and he'd say thirty seven and

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Speaker 1: she would say, sir, that's not a telephone number. So

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Speaker 1: he would have to tell her to call somebody and

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Speaker 1: then they would dial in. And this the strange thing

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Speaker 1: is to me though, that these systems were able to

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Speaker 1: work with the modern nineties seventies era telephone system. It's

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Speaker 1: very cool and thus ends the story for now. At

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Speaker 1: least of the time, farmers used barbed wire to you know,

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Speaker 1: start a party line party all the time on the

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Speaker 1: rural party line are we gonna do some rural party

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Speaker 1: line voices. It's actually kind of tough for me to

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Speaker 1: say rural j rural juror. He did a good job,

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Speaker 1: but it sounded very unnatural. Ben, It's hard to say,

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Speaker 1: like in the conversation rural Yes, our friends Scott, Benjamin

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Speaker 1: is haunted by that phrase. By the way, and speaking

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Speaker 1: of communication, we can't think of a better way to

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Speaker 1: close out this episode than with a little listener mail.

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Speaker 1: What are you saying, No, Ben, how about you go first? Alright?

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Speaker 1: Sure thing, So our first letter arrives from Chris J.

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Speaker 1: And Chris J says, Hey, guys, I just got done

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Speaker 1: listening to your Wild West episode, and I thought it

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Speaker 1: was great. I work at an archive in Wyoming, and

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Speaker 1: we hold all sorts of collections related to the Wild West,

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Speaker 1: like some papers of Buffalo Bill Cody or Alfred Jacob Miller,

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Speaker 1: who painted some of the first images of the West.

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Speaker 1: Myth and West, says Chris, go hand in hand. It

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Speaker 1: is so pervasive that the Wyoming state government officially, and

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Speaker 1: to some of us, grown worthily, adopted the codes of

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Speaker 1: the West, which is essentially the idea of how to

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Speaker 1: live like a cowboy. The mythologized for, and at least

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Speaker 1: these myths are everywhere out here, mainly because it's become

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Speaker 1: a source of tourism and is what people like to

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Speaker 1: see when they travel in this area. Even though we're

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Speaker 1: not all cowboys and we don't all ride horses. For

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Speaker 1: better or worse, this myth is here to stay, despite

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Speaker 1: exhaustive efforts by many historians and archivists to dispel it.

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Speaker 1: One topic, Chris says that I thought I might suggest,

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Speaker 1: along the same lines as the wild West, that is

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Speaker 1: actually wild West is something called the Johnson County War.

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Speaker 1: I've never heard of this in all of you, I

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Speaker 1: have not. Essentially, in the late eighteen hundreds, a group

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Speaker 1: of cattle barons who are also in the government, we're

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Speaker 1: trying to take back land they perceived to be there's,

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Speaker 1: even though it clearly belonged to settlers and small ranchers.

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Speaker 1: Through a series of events including lynchings, cattle wrestling, corruption,

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Speaker 1: and outlaws, a war broke out between the townspeople of

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00:25:49,640 --> 00:25:52,880
Speaker 1: Buffalo the surrounding area and the cattle barons. And they're

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00:25:52,920 --> 00:25:56,520
Speaker 1: hired guns, culminating in a siege and Butcher Cassie and

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00:25:56,520 --> 00:25:59,639
Speaker 1: the Sundance kids style shootout at a ranch house. I

431
00:25:59,720 --> 00:26:01,760
Speaker 1: thought you guys might be interested. Keep up the good

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00:26:01,840 --> 00:26:04,879
Speaker 1: work and keep me ridiculous. You know that makes me

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00:26:04,920 --> 00:26:07,760
Speaker 1: think of just bringing back this mythologizing of the wild

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00:26:07,760 --> 00:26:10,400
Speaker 1: West that's seen in the World Tennant Bombs, where Owen

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00:26:10,440 --> 00:26:12,520
Speaker 1: Wilson's character is doing a reading from his book. His

436
00:26:12,600 --> 00:26:14,560
Speaker 1: character you like hash I had to look at because

437
00:26:14,600 --> 00:26:16,639
Speaker 1: this I wanted to want to read it for the

438
00:26:16,720 --> 00:26:19,399
Speaker 1: crickets and the rust beetles scuttled among the nettles of

439
00:26:19,440 --> 00:26:23,840
Speaker 1: the sage thicket. Vaminos, amigos. He whispered and threw the

440
00:26:23,880 --> 00:26:27,240
Speaker 1: busted leather flint crawl over the loose weave of the saddlecock,

441
00:26:27,720 --> 00:26:32,040
Speaker 1: and they wrote on in the friscalating dusk light. Sounds

442
00:26:32,080 --> 00:26:36,159
Speaker 1: almost like a like a dig against Cormack. Yeah, I

443
00:26:36,200 --> 00:26:39,040
Speaker 1: love it so much, man. But thank you very much

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00:26:39,320 --> 00:26:42,880
Speaker 1: Chris J. For the lovely email. Um and I've got

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00:26:42,880 --> 00:26:45,720
Speaker 1: one more yeah, yeah, yeah, well you know what, which

446
00:26:45,760 --> 00:26:47,560
Speaker 1: I'm gonna stick with his wild West theme. We've got

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00:26:47,560 --> 00:26:50,640
Speaker 1: one here from Dennis Oh, and he says, hey, troops,

448
00:26:50,680 --> 00:26:53,119
Speaker 1: just a quick couple of thoughts. I love the show overall.

449
00:26:53,119 --> 00:26:55,520
Speaker 1: By the way, while the Wild West wasn't wild by

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00:26:55,520 --> 00:26:58,240
Speaker 1: any stretch of Hollywood. That doesn't mean that there weren't

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00:26:58,280 --> 00:27:00,760
Speaker 1: firearms back then. Then he gives us a link to

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00:27:00,800 --> 00:27:03,440
Speaker 1: an Economist article. He says, the Economist article arguing against

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00:27:03,440 --> 00:27:06,280
Speaker 1: America's love affair with the gun actually shows that gun

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00:27:06,280 --> 00:27:08,760
Speaker 1: ownership in the latter part of the nineteenth century, especially

455
00:27:08,920 --> 00:27:12,480
Speaker 1: on the frontier, was incredibly common. People had guns, sure,

456
00:27:12,560 --> 00:27:15,600
Speaker 1: of course, they just like today, rarely used them to

457
00:27:15,680 --> 00:27:18,679
Speaker 1: kill a stranger because he liked a different brand of

458
00:27:19,080 --> 00:27:22,480
Speaker 1: rock gut than they did exactly. But my real reason

459
00:27:22,560 --> 00:27:24,320
Speaker 1: for emailing you is that you should totally do a

460
00:27:24,400 --> 00:27:28,240
Speaker 1: credit mobi a r H podcast. You reference thousand dollar

461
00:27:28,320 --> 00:27:31,600
Speaker 1: toilets and the like. Credit mobier may have invented that

462
00:27:31,720 --> 00:27:33,840
Speaker 1: scam in the modern era. And that is the thing

463
00:27:33,880 --> 00:27:37,120
Speaker 1: we talked about ben with crooked contractors and the kind

464
00:27:37,119 --> 00:27:40,040
Speaker 1: of things you see in the Sopranos, with you know,

465
00:27:40,320 --> 00:27:47,040
Speaker 1: laundering money by overcharging for relatively typically inexpensive things. He

466
00:27:47,080 --> 00:27:48,680
Speaker 1: goes on to say, what you may not know is

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00:27:48,760 --> 00:27:51,600
Speaker 1: one of the chief congressional architects of the bribery scheme

468
00:27:52,000 --> 00:27:55,200
Speaker 1: was Oaks. Aims Oaks. Now there's a name you don't

469
00:27:55,240 --> 00:27:57,040
Speaker 1: hear anymore, and it's a good one. I like that.

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00:27:57,080 --> 00:27:59,359
Speaker 1: I think I might name my second born Oaks Oaks

471
00:27:59,400 --> 00:28:01,720
Speaker 1: and his brother Oliver Oaks and Oliver. It sounds like

472
00:28:01,760 --> 00:28:06,960
Speaker 1: a comedy duo, thinking acoustic coffee shop. Oh that's very good,

473
00:28:07,200 --> 00:28:09,200
Speaker 1: like almost lately, you know, like a Simon and garfuncle

474
00:28:09,240 --> 00:28:12,080
Speaker 1: from Oakes and Oliver. They didn't make it Simon and

475
00:28:12,080 --> 00:28:15,240
Speaker 1: garf Uncle Overshadow. They're like Fulkner and Falcon, very much

476
00:28:15,280 --> 00:28:19,120
Speaker 1: like that. So Oakes and Oliver um owned the Aims

477
00:28:19,320 --> 00:28:22,600
Speaker 1: Shovel Shop in Easton, Massachusetts. His roots are in Easton,

478
00:28:22,920 --> 00:28:27,280
Speaker 1: says Dennis. The Aims shovel Shop invented the pointed tip,

479
00:28:27,560 --> 00:28:31,880
Speaker 1: curved blade shovel. Really, uh, and it was that shovel

480
00:28:32,000 --> 00:28:35,320
Speaker 1: that built the railroad and various hand dug subways and

481
00:28:35,359 --> 00:28:39,040
Speaker 1: also mine gold in California. So this shovel and these uh,

482
00:28:39,200 --> 00:28:42,040
Speaker 1: these brothers Aims, they figured into a lot of the

483
00:28:42,120 --> 00:28:44,480
Speaker 1: episodes we've done of late and don't they. Yeah. Absolutely,

484
00:28:44,560 --> 00:28:47,160
Speaker 1: we have been on a bit of a Wild West

485
00:28:47,200 --> 00:28:49,480
Speaker 1: Frontier kick. Is there is there more to the story?

486
00:28:49,480 --> 00:28:51,280
Speaker 1: It really is. This this letter just kind of keeps

487
00:28:51,360 --> 00:28:53,120
Speaker 1: keeps giving. So he goes on to say, you had

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00:28:53,120 --> 00:28:56,520
Speaker 1: Congressman Aims involved in the bribing scandal which overpaid for

489
00:28:56,640 --> 00:29:00,240
Speaker 1: railroad supplies such as wait for it, the very he

490
00:29:00,360 --> 00:29:04,840
Speaker 1: shovels he was selling. Further twist, the reason he did

491
00:29:04,840 --> 00:29:07,280
Speaker 1: all of this wasn't to pat his own pocket or

492
00:29:07,280 --> 00:29:09,960
Speaker 1: to scam the county. He was asked to take this

493
00:29:10,160 --> 00:29:14,240
Speaker 1: over and complete the railroad at any cost by wait

494
00:29:14,280 --> 00:29:19,240
Speaker 1: for it, Abraham Lincoln. Dunt dunt dune. No, it was

495
00:29:19,280 --> 00:29:23,800
Speaker 1: Abraham Lincoln, not a question market, Abraham Lincoln. Abraham honest abe,

496
00:29:23,800 --> 00:29:27,000
Speaker 1: He says, wow, I put the new spin on hold

497
00:29:27,040 --> 00:29:30,600
Speaker 1: honest ab anybody who puts honest in their name and

498
00:29:31,040 --> 00:29:33,680
Speaker 1: is clearly a deceptic coloring. Well, it's sort of like

499
00:29:33,720 --> 00:29:35,719
Speaker 1: when you're like a gangster in your name is tiny,

500
00:29:35,960 --> 00:29:38,560
Speaker 1: it usually means you're a big bruiser, or like the

501
00:29:38,560 --> 00:29:41,440
Speaker 1: old prison joke where you know the toughest guy in

502
00:29:41,480 --> 00:29:45,600
Speaker 1: the in the facility has a name like Smurf or

503
00:29:45,800 --> 00:29:49,880
Speaker 1: baby Cakes. Anyway, Dennis finishes by saying the credit movie

504
00:29:49,880 --> 00:29:52,600
Speaker 1: a story is fascinating. Aims was never really vilified for

505
00:29:52,720 --> 00:29:56,520
Speaker 1: It's still a hometown hero and he got the railroad built. Uh,

506
00:29:56,560 --> 00:29:58,880
Speaker 1: there is a monument to him and his brother out

507
00:29:58,960 --> 00:30:02,360
Speaker 1: near Layer me You, Wyoming. Of course, several years after

508
00:30:02,400 --> 00:30:04,960
Speaker 1: it was built, they moved the railroad and has sat

509
00:30:05,040 --> 00:30:07,120
Speaker 1: alone for the last hundred and thirty years or so.

510
00:30:07,480 --> 00:30:10,840
Speaker 1: That's it. Enjoy, have a great weekend, Asta, bombasta and

511
00:30:10,920 --> 00:30:14,640
Speaker 1: all that. Dennis. Oh, thank you so much for writing

512
00:30:14,720 --> 00:30:18,480
Speaker 1: to us, Dennis, and you as well, Chris. We immensely

513
00:30:18,520 --> 00:30:22,200
Speaker 1: appreciate it. And this concludes our list mail but not

514
00:30:22,360 --> 00:30:25,840
Speaker 1: our show. If you would like to learn more about

515
00:30:25,960 --> 00:30:30,080
Speaker 1: barbed Wire, specifically, check out an episode of Stuff of

516
00:30:30,160 --> 00:30:33,800
Speaker 1: Genius about barbed Wire's inventor little Easter Egg for you.

517
00:30:34,080 --> 00:30:39,400
Speaker 1: It's voiced by our own long time best friend, Matt Frederick.

518
00:30:40,080 --> 00:30:42,320
Speaker 1: Tell them, you know what, Tell them that we set

519
00:30:42,360 --> 00:30:46,080
Speaker 1: you just yelled at at the at the laptop screen.

520
00:30:46,120 --> 00:30:48,280
Speaker 1: He'll he'll hear you in his heart. But for now

521
00:30:48,320 --> 00:30:51,080
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to ride off into our own friscalating

522
00:30:51,160 --> 00:30:53,800
Speaker 1: dusk light. But in the meantime, you can write to

523
00:30:53,920 --> 00:30:56,640
Speaker 1: us at Ridiculous how Stuff Works dot com. You can

524
00:30:56,800 --> 00:30:59,320
Speaker 1: hit us up on social media where we are Ridiculous

525
00:30:59,360 --> 00:31:03,080
Speaker 1: History on the Graham Facebook. Um. The other stuff that

526
00:31:03,240 --> 00:31:05,880
Speaker 1: the Den's friends start is popping off Man. Let me

527
00:31:05,920 --> 00:31:08,000
Speaker 1: tell you, Yeah, it's then your geo cities. That's what

528
00:31:08,080 --> 00:31:10,040
Speaker 1: I hear. Um. And of course we'd like to thank

529
00:31:10,040 --> 00:31:13,360
Speaker 1: our super producer, Casey Pegraham for putting up with us

530
00:31:13,560 --> 00:31:17,240
Speaker 1: uh to the bitter end, our long suffering producer, as

531
00:31:17,280 --> 00:31:21,040
Speaker 1: well as our regular contributor Laurie L. Dove, who wrote

532
00:31:21,160 --> 00:31:25,160
Speaker 1: Ridiculous history Ranchers hacked barbed wire fences to create phone lines.

533
00:31:25,680 --> 00:31:28,680
Speaker 1: And our composer, I like that we can say we'm

534
00:31:28,720 --> 00:31:34,000
Speaker 1: our composer, Alex Williams be incomparable. And most importantly, you

535
00:31:34,400 --> 00:31:39,080
Speaker 1: friends and neighbors, fellow farm cooperative fans, thanks for giving

536
00:31:39,160 --> 00:31:39,680
Speaker 1: us a listen