Sheep and wool festival packs fairgrounds

The Wyoming Sheep and Wool Festival was held in Thermopolis last weekend and featured demonstrations, hands-on workshops, a vendor fair, tours, exhibits, live music, MSSA stock dog trials and more.

Wyoming's sheep and wool industry provides feed and clothes for people around the world all while remaining environmentally sustainable.

Wool is a natural fiber that does not pollute the world's oceans and is the result of natural processes that convert vegetation into products that are necessary for humans, such as warm clothes in cold climates. Meat production is the result of those same natural cycles in which the sheep consume vegetation on lands not otherwise suitable for agriculture.

Ranchlands are essential economic components of our rural communities and we utilize our sheep flocks to provide ecosystem services (whether it's improvements to habitat for sensitive species, carbon capture, or using grazing for wildfire prevention), as well as preservation of the wide-open spaces, a defining characteristic of the American West.

The advancement of humanity has long been intertwined with sheep, one of the first species humans domesticated some 10,000 years ago. Major medical advancements - from blood donation, heart valves, vaccinations, and artificial hearts- came about from testing on sheep that paved the way for their use in humans. Wyoming's sheep and wool industry consists of individuals and families with sheep as the thread that connects us all. While these are commercial enterprises, they are so much more. The festival brings together, not just members of the sheep and wool-growing community (and we are a community), but expands the community to include members of the public who know nothing at all about sheep, agriculture, or ranching. It's an opportunity to share family stories, community stories and their common heritage.

Currently, a few of the large flocks of sheep in the area are run on ranches owned by the Jones, Robbins and Baird families.

History

The event included a wealth of information on early-day sheep ranching in the area including the following history.

Wyoming was a major trailing route for domestic sheep long before it attracted flocks to its ranges. Sheep flocks were trailed across the state enroute to Oregon and California from about 1840 to 1860, and after the Civil War, sheepmen began moving flocks into the state for permanent settlement. Many of those sheep flocks came from West Coast and were progeny of the flocks that had trailed West in the decades prior.

After years as serving as a guide for military expeditions, in 1871, John D. Woodruff built the first recorded white man's cabin in the Owl Creek area of the southwestern portion of the Bighorn Basin.

Woodruff established a cattle outfit and eventually brought 6,000 sheep from Oregon over the Oregon Trail and to the Wind River Reservation, after he had secured grazing privileges from Shoshone Chief Washakie. His ranch operation became one of the first and largest sheep ranching operations in Wyoming. After Woodruff's outfit was sold, the location eventually became the Embar Ranch.

Other famous sheep outfits in the region included the Padlock Ranch (now the Arapaho Ranch) and LU Ranch.

Lucy Morrison Moore was known as the "Sheep Queen of Wyoming" as she grazed sheep flocks throughout the region from the Wind River Valley and Shoshoni to Thermopolis and Kirby in the 1880s.

She employed herders and ran 16 bands of sheep at the peak of her ranching enterprise. David and James Dickie moved into the Grass Creek area around 1889, eventually developing a ranch enterprise that peaked at 40,000 ewes, including high grade Rambouillet ewes.

By 1900, the Union Pacific Railroad reported more than 387,000 head of sheep in the Bighorn Basin, and the state was home to more than 3 million sheep.

The Burlington Northern Railroad expanded from Montana to Thermopolis in 1910, providing for ease of shipping of live sheep and wool to distant markets.

But the unregulated use of western rangelands was subject to conflict and range wars between cattle and sheep producers. Many of the sheep grazing Wyoming rangelands were "tramp herds" coming from out of the state or region to eat the grass before moving elsewhere. Cattle producers established "deadlines" where they would defend their range from encroachment by sheep flocks. Rangeland violence ensued. By the start of World War I, the era of tramp herds ended, and resident cattle and sheep growers created grazing associations to control livestock use of the western range.

The Dust Bowl Era of 1930s involved severe drought conditions for much of the nation for nearly a decade. Dust from over-grazed and over-plowed land created huge dust storms over a large portion of the country, accompanied by crop failures, farm foreclosures and financial collapse for many people. People and their livestock needed feed, but there were more mouths to feed than food available.

In 1934 and 1935, the federal government purchased and killed cattle and sheep from farms and ranches in an emergency drought relief program. The animals that were deemed unfit for human consumption were destroyed on ranches, while the meat from the remaining animals was distributed in food programs nationwide. More than 586,000 Wyoming sheep were purchased and destroyed in Wyoming.

To improve the precarious condition of the rangelands, Congress enacted the Taylor Grazing Act, creating grazing districts where livestock use could be controlled and monitored. Congress also established the U.S. Soil Conservation Service to enforce soil conservation practices in American agriculture, but relief didn't come until the rains began in 1939, just as World War II began.

Today, Wyoming has an inventory of about 300,000 sheep and lambs. Hot Springs County has about 3,000 sheep.