I think there is no subject related to New Mexico’s past that I don’t find utterly fascinating. Take, for example, the fences of early-day New Mexicans, both Hispanos and Indians.

That’s something you won’t find written up in the history books, even though it was of sizable importance to the rural economy.

Fences served several purposes in rural New Mexico. A chief use was to protect kitchen gardens, orchards and vineyards from wild-animal predators and human thieves.

Of equal importance, fences kept loose farm animals at bay. Stray cattle or horses, if not watched, would head straight for corn and wheat fields, where their grazing could do serious harm.

Fencing also marked property boundaries surrounding house lots and gardens.

The banks of irrigation ditches in New Mexico were sometimes fenced to keep cattle away. The heavy animals with their sharp hooves were prone to cause sides of the acequias to cave in and disrupt the flow of water.

Easterners entering New Mexico for the first time over the Santa Fe Trail invariably noticed the lack of fences on grazing lands and around the large grain fields.

One of them, Frederick Wislizenus, in 1839 recorded that here fences of that kind were not needed because, according to old custom, “grazing stock is guarded by herdsmen.”

The ironclad rule was that all stock when not corralled must be accompanied and guarded by a herder or shepherd. Careless owners whose animals caused injury to cropland or acequias had to pay for damages.

In the eastern United States, split-rail fencing was the predominant style in use. New Mexicans, on the other hand, built a variety of fence types using accessible local materials.

A juniper-post fence was perhaps the most popular. Thick posts, touching, with their butt ends set into the ground, were held together halfway up by a horizontal pole tied to each post.

Juana López, a wealthy woman in the Española Valley, is reported in 1762 to have enclosed a small field near her house with a post fence, resembling a palisade.

Santa Fe blacksmith Bernardino de Sena, in his 1765 will, mentioned a juniper-post fence on his property. And the pueblos made abundant use of such fences, as did the Navajos in constructing horse corrals and sheep pens.

A variant of the heavy log fence was a lighter version, built essentially in the same way but employing palings or sticks for the uprights, which were lashed at a right angle to a thin peeled pole.

Archaeologist Adolph Bandelier in 1880 described one of these light wood fences he saw at Santo Domingo Pueblo. According to him, the sticks averaging 8 to 10 feet tall were tied to their cross poles with rawhide thongs.

This general kind of fencing, routinely called coyote fences, is seen in abundance today along narrow rural roads, where the contemporary purpose often is to screen residences from passing traffic.

Another form of fencing, particularly for corral construction, involved laying up masonry walls of either stone or adobe. Cemetery walls to shield graves from livestock were also of this sort.

In places where loose stone could be easily collected, the wall might be pieced together tightly without mortar. Alternately, adobe mortar could be used to bed the stones in place.

Taller walls of adobe brick, 6 to 10 feet high, were used around Bernalillo to enclose that area’s valuable vineyards.

There and elsewhere, prickly pear cactus was placed on top of the walls, taking root and preventing plundering of the grapes.

That custom is still found in Mexico. The only place I know that it can now be seen in New Mexico is at El Rancho de las Golondrinas Museum in La Cienega, which also displays other examples of traditional fencing.

Now and then, one finds in the old records passing mention of unconventional fence styles. A U.S. soldier in 1846, for instance, wrote of encountering “a living fence or hedge composed of briers growing to the height of 10 to 15 feet.” It’s impossible to identify his “briers.”

And then there’s the case, perhaps unique, of a fence in the high country of the Rio Arriba made entirely of elk antlers. New Mexicans, it would seem, believed in the old maxim, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

Historian Marc Simmons is author of numerous books on New Mexico and the Southwest. His column appears Saturdays.