Historians portray the Texas Fence-Cutting Wars as a male-only civil conflict in which landless cattlemen and wealthy ranchers fought over natural resources. In this costly struggle that began around 1883 and lasted roughly until 1890, landless cattlemen disagreed with wealthy ranchers purchasing public land, alleging that the latter illegally enclosed grazing pastures and watering holes with barbed wire fences. Ranchers enforced their private property rights and did not allow others to use the natural resources, forcing landless cattlemen, who came to be known as fence cutters, into financial hardship. As tension between ranchers and cutters escalated into a statewide conflict, cutters retaliated by attacking the ranchers’ barbed wire fences under the cover of darkness. They clipped the fences with wire cutters, pulled up posts, burned grass, and made death threats. In response, ranchers armed themselves and initiated patrols of their property lines. Once the ranchers and cutters used hostile tactics against each other, the Wars required government intervention.
In this rendering of the Wars, women’s participation is altogether unrepresented. Women often inherited ranches when their husbands died and had to manage and maintain property for their heirs. Fence cutters targeted ranches regardless of whether a man or a woman owned the property. This forced women to fight for their rights as property owners. In contrast to male ranchers, female ranchers did not respond to the cutters with shotguns or threats. Instead they used diplomacy to stop the destruction of their properties.
Rancher Mabel Doss was one woman who battled fence cutters and did so without using violent strategies. She employed two plans to stop them. Mabel relied on male associates to reach out to state officials on her behalf, and she tactfully confronted the cutters through published letters.
Mabel was born in Brunswick, Missouri, in 1854. She lived in Missouri until she attended Hocker Female College in Lexington, Kentucky, and she graduated with honors in 1872. Shortly after graduation she moved to Sherman, Texas with her brother John Doss. Seven years later she married William Henry Day in January 1879. After their wedding, the couple moved to Day’s ranch in Coleman County, Texas. In 1879 Day used barbed wire to enclose pastures on his ranch and had plans to enclose the entire estate over time. Mabel spent her days beside her husband and observed his management of the land, cattle and employees. After a little less than two years of marriage, the couple welcomed a daughter, Willie Mabel Day, on December 19, 1880. William died in June 1881 from injuries sustained two months earlier when he crushed his stomach on his saddle horn during a stampede.
Mabel assumed control of the estate when her husband died, and she learned that the ranch had accumulated more than $117,000 of debt. Her education and experience with her husband gave her the skills to handle the ranch’s financial issues. After much consideration, she reached out to a friend from her college years in Kentucky who put her in contact with investors. She formed the Day Cattle Ranch Company, which was a two-hundred-thousand-dollar partnership comprising five Kentucky businessmen and her. The partnership represented a half interest in her cattle for her investors, and Mabel retained full title to her land.
Fence cutters initiated their attacks in Coleman County in the fall of 1883, and several ranchers, including Mabel, suffered property damage. Being the widow of a well-known cattleman, she had influential and wealthy friends she could ask for help. The chief clerk of the Texas House of Representatives, John W. Booth, was one such friend. She wrote to Booth, outlined the issues she faced, asked him to talk with Governor John Ireland about the subject and inquired as to what he planned to do about fence cutting. Her letter to Booth, however, did not generate any help for her ranch.
After her first letter failed to provide her any relief, Mabel changed tactics and decided to talk to the fence cutters. The only safe way for her to engage in a discussion was through the print media. She wrote a long letter that was published in the county newspaper, the Coleman Voice. She attacked the cutters’ justifications for damaging private property. She argued that she owned or leased the lands that her husband enclosed, thus countering any claims of illegal fencing. Mabel highlighted the fact that she retained title or rights to the land, and that meant “no one has any right to grass or water except by my consent.” Next Mabel maintained that she had placed, in accordance with the law, gates on the roads that led through her enclosed pastures. She did not complain of “parties tying down the wire so they could pass over any portion of my fence—only requested such parties to untie the wire so the stock could not pass out or in until my fence rider could get around to repair it.” Lastly Mabel acknowledged that she had made an agreement with some out-of-state businessmen but contended that the business relationship would not bring financial harm to anyone. After addressing the cutters and their actions, Mabel spoke to her fellow ranchers, asking “Is there no recourse for us in the matter? Should you, as business and law-abiding men adopt any plan to protect your property I would beg to be considered as one among you.”
Mabel used her intelligence to force consideration of logical, reasonable arguments regarding the situation, never bringing up gender. She kept the focus on her rights as a landowner. By outlining how she not only followed the law but also tolerated damage to her private property, she demonstrated her desire to find a peaceful solution. From her perspective, using violence would not solve the problem. Mabel reasoned that since she did not break the law, the cutters should not attack her ranch. While she was correct in her assessment of her situation, her arguments did not address the cutters’ grievances. They did not care that she followed the law; they only cared that Mabel’s fences cut off their access to natural resources. Since Mabel made it clear that she would not remove her fences, the cutters were not motivated to listen to her appeals. In her letter, she did not plead and did not bargain with the cutters. Nor did she back away from the fight.
While Mabel avoided mention of gender, other county residents talked in the Coleman Voice about the cutters’ violation of their gender roles. One man declared, “The Coleman County fence cutters might have had gallantry enough to have let Mrs. Day’s wire fence alone. She may be rich, but she is a woman and that ought to go a long ways with true men.” Another report stated, “The average fence cutter has very little respect for anybody or anything; and so far as gallantry is concerned he never heard of such a word. He who wantonly destroys the property of his neighbor, be he man or woman, is not a ‘true man.’”
Mabel’s attempts at forcing a conversation with the fence cutters proved fruitless. They continuously cut her fences throughout the fall of 1883. Eventually she hired a line rider who patrolled her fences, but he did not stop the cutters. In just one instance a group of armed men with their faces blackened rode to Mabel’s ranch during the day and brazenly cut ten miles of her fence, leaving a threatening note that promised more destruction and potential death if she repaired the fence.
After this episode, Mabel wrote to Booth and asked for his help a second time. Booth telegrammed Adjutant General Wilburn H. King requesting that a company of Texas Rangers be sent to Coleman County to investigate the fence cutting. Booth’s telegram coincided with action taken by the governor in October 1883. The governor ordered Adjutant General King, along with a handful of Rangers, to Central Texas because fence cutting had become a statewide issue. In the fall of 1883, Texans sent hundreds of letters and telegrams to the governor’s office asking for help, and the governor sent the Rangers to Central Texas where the most contentious fence cutting occurred. The governor’s orders to send the Texas Rangers were not the result of Booth’s telegram.
So that everyone could be heard and discuss the issue without bloodshed, the adjutant general and the Rangers spent a couple of days meeting with Coleman County residents. They listened to concerns of both ranchers and cutters. The Dallas Weekly Herald reported, “Adjutant-General King, in a conservative address, said that he had come to meet the people—to hear their grievances—so he could make an intelligent report to the governor of the true condition of the affairs.” Upon returning to Austin, King recorded his opinion of the fence cutting in Coleman County in the Report of the Adjutant-General of the State of Texas (1883). He said that he found the two warring groups to be upset with each other over the issues but that he did not find enough evidence to warrant arresting anyone. He added that he found “the most friendly feeling existed between many of the owners of pastures and those who openly opposed large pastures, and who thus gave encouragement to those who were lawlessly and secretly cutting down and destroying these enclosures.” King stated that he believed those motivated to cut fences were limited to people who were feuding with other county residents. The adjutant general also reported that these situations were limited in number and that “the great body of the people in town and from the country were as good-natured, frank and friendly, and manifested as little sympathy with or encouragements of a bloodthirsty disposition on this all absorbing question as could be looked for in the most orderly community.”
Lastly he commented on the trustworthiness of the county authorities. He described the local constabulary as being sure of their abilities “to arrest any violator of the law that could be found,” and he said that it was the opinion of the local government officials and citizens alike “that there was not the slightest danger of a resort to arms over this matter, in any organized form.”
Mabel had a different opinion than the adjutant general, and she expressed her disappointment in a letter to Booth. She wrote, “I suppose I ought to thank you for your efficient efforts in getting General King to Coleman. But I am sorry to know his going did not help me any. I have been informed that his going (that is the result of his being there) was worse than if he had not gone.” She continued, “He had about ten Rangers with him. But that made no difference, since he refused to do anything.”
Recognizing that Booth, Coleman County authorities and the state government would not stop the cutters from damaging her property, Mabel decided to stop asking for help from other people and published a second letter in the Coleman Voice to ask the fence cutters for mercy. She asked the cutters to consider that “I am not a man who can go with my cattle as they drift this winter, and hence as a woman I ask that you leave me at least my ‘old’ pasture.” Mabel then outlined the reason for her actions in forming the business partnership with the investors. She stated, “Everyone knows that my husband’s estate was greatly in debt, and I was obliged to sell one half of the cattle for cash to pay this indebtedness off.” Mabel tried to reassure the cutters: “Myself and little child owns the land and one half of the cattle. These men will not come here. I am to live here and run it myself. Thinking you may find it to your pleasure and convenience to oblige me.”
The tone of this second published letter contrasts with that of the first letter. Mabel employed her gender as a lens through which she asked the cutters to view her and her financial situation. She repackaged her message to the cutters as a way to get them to stop attacking her ranch, and she tried to use the privileges that her gender and her status as a mother afforded her. In this letter she did not plead, and she did not allow her womanhood to prevent them from accomplishing their goals.
The cutters continued to attack her fences. Mabel, however, was a resilient woman who tried once again to stop the destruction of her fences. She asked Coleman County real estate agents J. E. McCord and E. A. Lindsay to write to Adjutant General King on her behalf. In their letter to the adjutant general, they discussed the issues that she faced and enclosed a list of people they thought were fence cutters. They accused the cutters of being “small stockmen into communistic proclivities” or greedy men who coveted her land and natural resources. McCord and Lindsay also requested that the adjutant general send an undercover detective to the county to infiltrate the fence cutters’ group and report on their activities.
In King’s response to McCord and Lindsay, he denied the land agents’ request for a detective, citing the expense of such an operation. He suggested that the “quiet but constant effort and watchfulness of this and of the citizens instructed in connection with the presence and effort of the Rangers in the infected district will accomplish more in suppressing this villanry [sic] than can be obtained or secured by temporary work on the part of even a superior detective.” However, King told McCord and Lindsay that he would send Captain Samuel A. McMurray to Coleman County to talk with Mabel and other ranchers, and he gave the captain the authority to make decisions independent of the adjutant general if he deemed it necessary. It is unknown whether the captain traveled to Coleman County or talked with Mabel. After this last letter to the adjutant general from male friends, Mabel halted her efforts to persuade others to help her defend her ranch.
She did not stop protecting her ranch; she simply decided to use one final tactic: patience. The state government sent the message that it was not going to help her to stop the cutters from attacking her property. It is possible that Mabel simply decided that it was more effective to wait out the unrest instead of repeatedly asking for help from a government body that demonstrated a lack of willingness to support ranchers in Coleman County. Other than sending the Rangers and the adjutant general to access the situation in Mabel’s county, the state government did little.
Mabel not only managed her ranch through her husband’s debts but also through the hardships of the Fence-Cutting Wars, withstanding the civil unrest and rebuilding her fences over time and on her own. In the end she defeated the fence cutters because she did not stop engaging in the cattle industry or conducting business, and she did not remain out of the public eye. Despite her financial debt, she was considered a wealthy rancher, and often newspapers ran stories on her business affairs, her travels and social events she attended.
As an active member of the cattle industry, she attended conventions like the Range Association annual meetings. At the 1888 meeting in Denver, Colorado her presence caused a stir. Several reporters found themselves eager to interview her or sit next to her at events. For example, one reporter commented:
“The original cattle queen of the West, Mrs. Mabel Day of Coleman is really entitled to the roseate title, although she does not see why the ownership of a big bunch of cows should confer it on her. She is a lady of rare attainments, a thoroughly good businesswoman, and, being alone in the world, has learned how to care for herself. She assures her admirers that she does not dash up and down the country after mavericks, in female road agent habiliments, with guns and knives galore all over her, but drives out as any other lady does.”
The reporter complemented her business skills as a cattle woman and noted that she successfully cared for herself without the help of a husband. Mabel’s comments were enlightening. She emphasized that she retained her ladylike demeanor, and she downplayed the attention she received. As a female rancher, Mabel conducted herself so as to maintain her gender roles while participating in a male-dominated industry.
Another reporter found himself sitting next to Mabel at an event at the Range Association meeting, and he described her as saying, “Left alone to manage her deceased husband’s business she has succeeded where men have failed. She is as self-reliant as a man and as womanly as a woman can be, the strong forces of her character being softened and subdued by the most delicate of feminine qualities.” In both articles, the reporters commented on Mabel’s intelligence and business skills that she employed to succeed in the cattle business. Also, they reassured the readers that despite her involvement in the cattle business, she did not lose her womanly charm.
In addition to writing on her social engagements, newspapers speculated about her love life. A Colorado newspaper commented on her personal life by saying, “Mrs. Day refutes the story circulated regarding her adventure with a New York suitor who went to the Lone Star state to woo her, but it is believed to have some foundation in fact.” Not surprisingly, when she decided to remarry, her second marriage made the newspapers. The Rocky Mountain News printed: “Captain Joseph C. Lea of Lincoln county, New Mexico, with his bride, née Mrs. Mabel Day, the cattle queen of Texas, is making a short visit to Denver. Captain Lea is president of the Lea Cattle Company and his union with Mrs. Day makes one of the strongest bovine combinations of the West, as well as a joining of chivalry and grace that is rarely equaled.” Mabel lived out her life on both ranches, often traveling between New Mexico and Texas to manage her business affairs in Coleman County. When she died in 1906, she passed her ranch, intact, to her daughter.
Texas Women and Ranching
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