The sheep business in Wyoming would gradually diminish to a mere shadow of what it was during Okie’s day.īut there would be no more decades of steady, strong wool and lamb prices, and the free-grass, open-range system that had made the early booms possible was dwindling fast. Okie and a handful of others benefited from auspicious timing. Cattle prices topped $7 per hundredweight that year, a historical high. ![]() Not everyone was seduced by the cattle boom, however. Some contrarians took stock in sheep, when the sheep business was still the financial ugly duckling of the range. It must have taken financial restraint not to get into cattle, and instead invest in sheep. Sheep ranching in Wyoming or the West simply never earned the same cachet as running cattle. When historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in his famous Significance of the Frontier in American History essay, describes "the progression of civilization” marching past Cumberland Gap, he mentions “buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer”-but doesn’t say a word about sheep. Still, many a savvy 19 th century Wyoming flockmaster made a great deal of money in the wool, lamb and mutton business. It took a while for the notion to catch on: The eastern states and Ohio raised most of America’s sheep. Small numbers arrived in Wyoming as early as 1847 but they, like their owners, were transient. ![]() According to Levi Edgar Young’s The Founding of Utah, a Mormon pioneer company that left Omaha in July 1847 and arrived in Salt Lake City on September 19 included 358 sheep.ĭuring the Civil War, high demand for wool for uniforms led to high prices, which encouraged production worldwide.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |