Whilst travelling the wide-open San Luis Valley in southwest Colorado, one notes roadside signs acknowledging the historic role of the once enormous Hispanic-dominated sheep grazing industry in the area. The vast numbers were eye-opening, with one sign mentioning a long-ago loss of a 3,500 flock in a sandstorm. One also notices the presence of old wool collection warehouses along a railway line. Yet today, in this vast area, sheep flocks of any size are rarely seen – albeit not many cattle either. This historic Colorado curiosity was revealed in a book “The Wooly West” by Andrew Gulliford. It’s a remarkably insightful and detailed book describing the sheep industry’s historic role in Colorado and the adjacent American States.
Large-scale sheep grazing was pioneered by Hispanic families in the 1700s; they were the first non-indigenous settlers in the area. Hispanic families and subsequent Basque, Spanish and Greek immigrant settlers became the West’s principal sheep owners and herders to this day. Due to the favourable geography, sheep-preferred vegetation, climate and grazing logistics, much of the western slopes of the Colorado Rockies were soon inundated with hundreds of thousands of sheep in the general area. The expansion was mind-boggling and happened over a relatively short period – about 50 years. One ponders how this happened.
It was all about money – sheep in the American West between 1860 and 1930 consistently made fortunes for their owners. Unlike cattle, where open-range steers took 4 years to be ready for market, sheep had an immediate return on their investment from the annual wool and fat lamb crops. Wool was the real money-maker – prices averaged 50 to 80 cents a pound – ironically, that was much more money than wool is worth today. Add in lamb sales, and sheep were profitable indeed.
Real money was made in low production costs – sheepherders cost $30 a month, and grazing land was free until the late 1890s. The latter is where sheepmen came into conflict with cattlemen – both competed for free grazing on the same public lands. In most of the American West, public land was open to unregulated free grazing by anyone with a herd of cattle or a flock of sheep. The inevitable was bound to happen – massive overgrazing occurred that destroyed millions of acres of native grasses and forbs that have not recovered to this day.
Wars broke out between cowboys and sheepherders, with the latter getting the worst of the carnage. An estimated 500 to 600 mainly anonymous sheepherders were killed by murderous cattlemen. Herders were at a disadvantage. They were usually alone on the range and were mostly illiterate young Hispanics or Basque and Greek immigrants, most of whom spoke little English. It got so bad that wealthy sheep owners once marched a flock of 21,000 sheep and 100 armed riders straight through prime cattle grazing areas as a show of strength.
By the late 1890s, owners also armed herders with the latest Winchester rifles and pistols to shoot back at marauding cowboys. Yes, there was a wild west in the mountains of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. The range wars ended in the early 1900s when the US Forest Service took over range management, and cattle and sheep owners were allotted specific grazing permits. It was also the first time sheep and cattle owners became united in their outrage against the US federal government – for the first time, both groups had to pay grazing fees for public land use.
However, the end came quickly for big sheep flocks grazing in the Colorado mountains. Synthetics killed the price of wool forever, and the changing mandate of managing public lands favoured conservation and recreational use over sheep and cattle grazing. It was death by a hundred cuts – regulatory cuts – government land managers kept instituting ever more onerous environmental regulations that made grazing sheep and cattle on public land uneconomical. It worked – at one time, there were 40 million sheep in the US, mainly in the West. Today, a hundred later, less than 9 million remain.
Ironically, removing grazing animals and suppressing fires have caused mountain meadows to become infested with invasive aspen trees, weeds and brush. Now, there is a train of thought that the solution may be returning sheep grazing to those infested meadows to preserve the ecology. But it’s too late; changing markets and government conservation policies have driven almost all of the old sheep ranching families out of the business. The irony of it all.
Will Verboven is an ag opinion writer.
