That history is on display in La Crosse, Kan., at the Kansas Barbed Wire Museum. You can see more than 2,000 unique varieties of the vital tool, which corralled livestock and, in many ways ...

One among their ranks had a particularly dramatic tale to tell. He recalled crawling under the coiled rolls of barbed wire surrounding German trenches and suddenly looking up to see a small tag.

Brad Penka can't say enough about barbed wire's winning of the West. Eli Reichman “Barbed wire was a lifesaver for this region,” says Brad Penka, president and curator of the Kansas Barbed ...