One whose job requires months of isolation on the Western landscape, overseeing the
welfare of a band of sheep in a transhumant way of life. A sheepherder is required to
keep an accurate count of his charges, take note of their health, and move them over their
grazing area in such a way as to prevent the abuse of soil and vegetation. Regardless of
how modern his outfit is, the sheepherder’s work is permeated with tradition, with folk
culture.
From the late spring until early fall, he will live in a tent or a sheep wagon as his sheep
graze on summer range, often Bureau of Land Management range or U.S. Forest Service
lands. From late fall until late winter, he lives in a sheepherder’s wagon, an insulated and
portable home, while he looks after his charges on their winter pastures or feeding
grounds. Almost without exception in the Euro-American tradition of sheep raising,
sheepherders are male.
In the American West, herding sheep is at, or very near, the bottom of the success
scale. It is a job for those who, for whatever reason, can do little else. The immigrant is a
good candidate for a job as sheepherder because he does not have to know English, he
does not have to be elaborately trained, and he does not need to own special tools or
equipment. Remuneration is low, but that fact is misleading. Sheepherders are provided
tobacco, room and board, and they eat well, making legendary the hospitality that sheep
camps provide their occasional visitors.
The numbers of sheep making up a band will vary from time to time and from season
to season, depending upon the purposes for which a band is put together. Sheep may be
banded together on the basis of age, by grade of wool, or for any reason that a sheepman
might wish homogeneity. When pregnant ewes and short yearling ewe lambs (those not
quite a year old) are trailed from winter ranges or feeding grounds prior to lambing and
shearing, they often make up bands numbering 3,000. For the lambing itself, ewe bands
typically number 1,000 individuals; if they all produce a living offspring, the band
numbers 2,000, although the birth of many twins might cause the size of the band to be
reduced to keep it at the optimum size of 2,000. Each band has one herder; for every two
bands, a camp tender is customarily provided whose duty is to move the herders’ tents or
wagons from location to location, perhaps bake some bread for the herders, restock the
supply of food, and do for both of his herders whatever is necessary to enable each herder
to concentrate on his sheep.
The customary preparation of a sheepherder is a fairly simple process: The neophyte is
placed with an old-timer. If there is any basic sensitivity to animal nature and a corresponding sense of responsibility,
the newcomer becomes a sheepherder.
Seldom if ever is a sheepherder called a “shepherd” in the American West, and it is the
West, of course, that developed large-scale range sheep operations. Although the two
words denote the same thing, connotatively they are quite different.
In the British Isles, more particularly along the borders where Scots and English have
shed and mingled their blood for centuries, one of the world’s great livestock hearths
developed. There, where sheep thrive on the bent grasses and heather of the Cheviot
Hills, those who tend flocks are shepherds. But to Americans, whose sheep eat the native bunch grasses and shrubs, diat word suggests the Christian Church with Jesus the Good
Shepherd and with the tradition of the pastor. Even the shepherd’s crook, which in
churches with an episcopate has become stylized as the crozier, is different in the
American West. The European crook, or staff, has a wide hook for catching sheep by the
neck. Sheepherders, by contrast, use sheep hooks with a small crook for catching sheep
by the leg. Further comparisons could be made, but the point is secure that there is a
semantic fracture between these two words.
Such a linguistic dislocation is a bit surprising in view of the prominence of folk of
British ancestry in the development of large-scale American livestock enterprises. In
many parts of the West—the Southwest may be an exception—those involved with cattle
and sheep raising were mostly from the British Isles and Ireland. From ownership and
management down to the herders themselves, folk with names identified with Wales,
England, Scotland, and Ireland are prominent if not predominant. In the sheep business of
Oregon and Idaho, for example, Scots by way of Appalachia (the Scotch-Irish), by way
of emigration via Canada, and by way of direct removal from Scotland to America were
prominent. However, since herding sheep was a job anyone could do regardless of
language skills or previous training, many different linguistic groups were represented in
sheep camps throughout the West. Greece contributed men from the Peloponnese,
veritable Arcadia, for instance. But the linguistic group often incorrectly presumed to be
the founders of sheep ranching in the West is the Basques. These enterprising folk,
seldom sheepmen in their homeland, learned to be sheepherders in the American West
following the precepts and examples of their British-descended teachers.
Whether from Tennessee or Visaya, the herders shared a routine that was traditional,
varying according to local circumstances of rangeland and such other variables as the
price of lamb and wool and the fiscal strategies of the sheepman. That routine is best
exemplified when the sheepherder is out on the range in late spring, summer, and early
fall.
He has trailed his sheep from the lambing area to the latespring pasture, which may be
at a fairly low elevation, perhaps 3,500 feet above sea level. His tent will have been set
up by his camp tender, who leaves him a supply of drinking water, wood for his camp
stove, food for the dogs, and food for the herder, which might include a fresh loaf of
sourdough bread. He will remain at this campsite as many days as the supply of grass and
water allows.
His day begins early, because his sheep will begin to graze at first light, and he does
not want them to scatter too widely. If he ate a sandwich before he left the tent, he can
stay with his sheep until the middle of the morning, when they tend to seek shade, lie
down, ruminate, and nap until the middle of the afternoon. During their repose, the herder
returns to his tent, cooks a meal, feeds the dogs, and, if necessary, waters them. If the
camp tender is still with him, the noon meal will have been prepared. Then the herder
returns to the beddeddown sheep before they begin to graze, gradually moving them in
the direction of the camp in order to be near there by sundown. He fixes his supper, feeds
the dogs again if they have worked especially hard, and after he eats he may fix a
sandwich to eat just before he leaves camp in the morning. He counts his markers—
customarily one black sheep for every 200 ewes—at least once a day. If he is a light
sleeper, he may be wakened several times by noises that could presage problems for his
band in the form of predators, electric storms, or any other source of trouble.
At the appropriate time, the sheep move ever upward to new grazing areas, the herder
and the dogs leading and urging them along and keeping the flanks controlled lest the
band expand and separate. By the time the sheep have moved to their subalpine pastures,
both lambs and ewes have gained weight. If feed is good and all has gone well, the lambs
will be ready for shipment by the middle of September.
With the total number of sheep reduced by the number of fat lambs shipped, the
herders reconstitute the remaining ewes and any lambs that need fattening into new bands
and return to the lowlands to fall and winter grazing areas, where tents are replaced by
sheep wagons. The sheepman must reduce his work force, for the reduced numbers of
sheep require fewer herders.
Many traditional stories circulate about how the laid-off herders spent their enforced
winter vacations in an earlier time when Tennesseans and Basques made up much of the
sheepherder population. Winter was a time when the unemployed herders checked in at
hotels or boarding houses and, if so inclined, went on monumental drinking binges and
kept company with prostitutes. By the end of winter, the savings were gone, and the
herders were eager to return to work, which began with lambing. Herders do not wince
when, after lambing, they castrate in the traditional way by using their pocket knives to
open the scrotum and their teeth to pull out the testicles and spermatic cords.
Sheepherders are the subject of many other traditional narratives. In some of these
stories, the herder goes insane from trying to make up his bedroll day after day, frustrated
because he cannot discover the long axis of his soogan, the quilt or tarpaulin-covered
blanket that is very nearly square. There is also the herder whose mind snaps under the
strain of the constant counting of sheep. Loneliness, too, destroyed the mental
equilibrium of more than one legended sheepherder. Some herders on whose hands time
hung heavily fought the waves of depression by stacking rocks, creating monuments to
aging intellect, by placing rocks in circles or other geometric shapes, and by carving on
aspen trees. And it is true that homesickness, isolation, and loneliness did conspire
against some of these sheepherders. An anonymous song puts the matter well in its
lament for this difficult life:
A tear runs down his wind-tanned cheek,
And a sob that shakes his frame,
For he’s just a poor sheepherder
And has sheep on his brain.
But is also true that for some the lowest rung on the success ladder was a temporary
condition. The herder who let the owner hold his wages, who proved himself reliable by
not losing any sheep, who was kept on the payroll over the winter because of the first two
facts could, after five years or so, collect enough back wages to make a good down
payment on an outfit of his own. More than one Scotsman, Irishman, Welshman, Basque,
or mountaineer from Appalachia connected with the American Dream of upward
mobility by this route.
Louie W.Attebery
References
Attebery, Louie W. 1984. Celts and Other Folk in the Regional Livestock Industry. Idaho
Yesterdays 28 (2):20–19.
——. 1993. Sheep May Safely Graze: A Personal Essay on Tradition and a Modern Ranch.
Moscow: University of Idaho Press.
Gilfillan, Archer B. [1929] 1993. Sheep: Life on the South Dakota Range. Minneapolis: Minnesota
Historical Society Press.
McGregor, Alexander Campbell. 1982. Counting Sheep: From Open Range to Agribusiness on the
Columbia Plateau. Seatde: University of Washington Press.