The Last Ride

Nobody is in the picture. There is a worn brown hat on a fence post, a strand of barbed wire running off across a field of gold grass, and the sun going down behind a flat horizon.

The wire is the other half of the story. Before the 1870s, much of the Great Plains was open range, and a cowhand's job was to move cattle across country nobody had fenced. In 1874 Joseph Glidden of DeKalb, Illinois, patented a barbed wire cheap enough to enclose it. Ranchers and farmers fenced their land, trail drives lost their routes, and in central Texas the fence-cutting wars of the early 1880s turned violent enough that the state made fence cutting a felony in 1884.

The post in this picture is what that period left behind, standing at the edge of grass that was once somebody's trail.

The hat is the focus: a sweat-darkened felt crown with deep creases, a leather band at the base, the brim bent by years of use, all lit from behind. The picture says nothing about who left it there, and the light on the grass does the rest.