Wire Cutters

The first novel to portray seriously nineteenth-century cowboy life, The Wire-Cutters was Mollie E. Moore Davis's tour de force inspired by Texas' Fence Cutting Wars fought by competing cattlemen and ranchers. First published in 1899, the novel introduced readers to a new kind of storytelling that prefigured an entire American literary genre - the Western - and predated Owen Wister's The Virginian (1902) and Andy Adams's Log of a cowboy (1903), two novels widely regarded as the first Westerns by many unfamiliar with Davis's groundbreaking work. Centered around the destructive fence-cutting war waged against ranchers by cattlemen whose herds were cut off from water, The Wire-Cutters recreates the colorful vernacular and often quirky personalities of the cowboys, the rich folk culture of the region, and the particulars of daily life on the Western frontier. Now, with an introduction by Lou Halsell Rodenberger which delineates the historical and literary significance of this important but forgotten novel, The Wire-Cutters is available for the first time since its initial publication to literary and cultural scholars and historians, as well as to aficionados of Westerns and Texana.