The Bar Ditch

The term "bar ditch" has recently intrigued me, since I have been unable to find it in dictionaries. Frequently, local writers of newspaper articles use this term, indicating that they are probably natives of West Texas.  I found this a curiosity because I had used the term since I was a young boy and never gave much thought to its uniqueness, or to its origin.  I mentioned the term in a January 13, 2013 essay on this blog, and the number of hits I got in reference to the term indicate that it beguiles a lot of people.  Therefore, after some reflection, I came to some conclusions about the term and decided that the term merits some expansion.

In West Texas,  I grew up on farm land that was sold to my father by the Yellowhouse Land Company, an agency that handled the selling off of some land that once was part of the famous XIT Ranch in northern Hockley County.  The land was still raw grassland when my dad bought it, and it had to be "grubbed out;" that is, cleared of mostly mesquite, cat-claw, yucca, broom-weed, pad and cholla cacti, and other natural flora of the South Plains. Our land was adjacent to the Yellowhouse Ranch land, on both the north and east side of our land, and it was all un-fenced until I was about 5 years old.

Until recently, I had not thought much about how the term "bar ditch" came into usage in West Texas.  I am well traveled, but never heard the term used outside of West Texas.  

Road maintainers, also called "road graders," used to grade the unpaved, dirt, county roads of West Texas on a regular basis, especially after wet weather caused vehicles to create ruts in them.  In /West Texas before WWII, there were very few paved roads, except for main, well-traveled highways.  The county road maintainers used to grade the many, county, dirt roads so that they had sharp, downward angles from the transit area of the road, into the bottom of the drainage ditches.  There was rarely enough rain to fill the ditches, but whether by design or by serendipitous accident, the roads served other useful purposes which probably led to their being labeled "bar ditches."  The outer sides of the ditches were almost vertical and had banks from about four to six feet in height.

During the open range era, these dirt banks, or cliffs, were very useful to cowboys herding cattle from one range to the other, and they served as fences to keep the cattle moving in one direction.  But there was yet another use for the "bar ditches" by ranchers.  They discouraged cattle from crossing roads from one owner's land to the other, or from the same owners land to another range.  Ranchers often moved cattle from one range to another to keep from overgrazing certain ranges.   I believe that the creation of these deep, sharply banked "bar ditches" was by the counties at the behest of ranchers in West Texas because the construction of wire fences was so expensive, and the deep, dirt barriers along county roads was a good substitute. In fact, I am quite sure that it was the ranchers that first gave these barriers the name, "bar ditches." Before barb wire fences, the bar ditches also kept "drive by" hunters from driving vehicles onto ranch land to pursue small game. There were graded entrances, but even these were often protected by gates before the land was fenced.   These "hunters," sometimes drunks from the oil fields, out shooting just for the "hell of it," were considered a real danger to herds of cattle that sometimes grazed near county roads, well within the range of stray bullets meant for coyotes, foxes, rabbits, prairie dogs, or other small game.

Nowadays we do not see the bar ditches anymore.  Higher speeds of autos and more graded county roads probably contributed to the demise of the bar ditch as well as wire fences for ranchers who no longer need any other barrier to cattle movement. When the bar ditches existed, 40 mph was considered very fast. Those ditches could be very dangerous to high speed drivers.  Shallow ditches with lesser grades now serve to drain off the rain water of mostly-paved county roads. However, the term "bar ditch" is still used to describe the ditch alongside or outside the shoulder of any road in West Texas.