Men Who Won the West
...hometown Hartford, Connecticut, and he continued to make them until his death. Joseph Glidden, born in Charlestown, New Hampshire, also had a great part in transforming the Great Plains of the West. He was the big inventor of the first commercially successful barbed wire. Before his patented barbed wire came along he first went to school at Middlebury (Vt.) Academy and a seminary at Lima, N.Y. Later, after getting done with his schooling, he taught school several years before returning to his father’s farm in New Orleans, N.Y. He then started moving westward before finally settling in De Kalb, Illinois, where he started his own farm. He went a county fair one day in the year 1873, and saw a sample of barbed wire. He thought it was very interesting and a good idea, so he decided to make it himself and make a few improvements on it. By 1874 he joined up with a man by the name of Isaac L. Ellwood, and they together formed the Barb Fence Company of De Kalb to manufacture their product. It became widely used across the West to protect crops, water supplies, and livestock. Glidden’s invention became a success and barbed wire is still used today all over the world. He eventually died in October of 1906 at the age of 93. The invention of the steel plow by John Deere was also very important to the West’s great rise in history. John Deere was born in Rutland, Vermont in 1804. He went to school in Vermont, and after school he served a four-year apprenticeship learning the blacksmith’s trade. He was a very good blacksmith that journeyed all around, and he gained considerable fame in doing so. In Vermont the business began to slow, so he moved west in search for better business. He came to a village in Illinois by the name of Grand Detour. There he found business very quickly and he was helping the pioneer farmers tremendously. After working there he found a frequent problem that was brought to his attention. Since the soil in the West was so rich it clung onto the cast iron plows and the farmers had to scrape the soil off the plow face every few steps. John Deere studied the problem and thought to himself that if the face of the plow were polished and smooth then the soil would not stick as bad. He put his idea to work, and in 1837, using the steel from a broken saw blade, he successfully made a steel faced plow that worked very well. This seemed to be the answer for the farmers to be successful in the West. He soon became well known for the steel plow and he began to import steel from England in order to build them. He then sold them throughout the West and it turned the farming around trem...