Wentworth cites a March 13, 1875, Cheyenne Leader article noting, “M.E. Edward Wentworth, in America’s Sheep Trails, claims that title belongs to Morton Post. There’s some debate as to who was the first operator to get into the big herds. In 1870, for example, Thomas Durbin brought 900 Mexican sheep – Churros – into Cheyenne for the purpose of turning them into mutton. The sheep industry in Wyoming had modest beginnings. The 1862 Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture estimated that the “cost of keeping sheep was only half as great in the West as in the East.”
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This drove sheep production west, where grass was free on the public domain.
This meant that people who wanted to make money in the sheep business had to be low-cost producers. According to a report from the American Historical Association, sheep production after the war, between 18, fell by 75 percent in the mid-Atlantic states and by 25 percent nationwide. The global supply of wool increased more than a third between 18 a large part of the gain occurred in the first half of the decade, “when the cotton famine was present,” Chester Whitney Wright noted in Wool Growing and the Tariff.Īfter the war, demand plummeted and prices crashed. 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. Small numbers arrived in Wyoming as early as 1847 but they, like their owners, were transient. It took a while for the notion to catch on: The eastern states and Ohio raised most of America’s sheep. Still, many a savvy 19 th century Wyoming flockmaster made a great deal of money in the wool, lamb and mutton business. 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. Sheep ranching in Wyoming or the West simply never earned the same cachet as running cattle. It must have taken financial restraint not to get into cattle, and instead invest in sheep. Some contrarians took stock in sheep, when the sheep business was still the financial ugly duckling of the range. Not everyone was seduced by the cattle boom, however. Cattle prices topped $7 per hundredweight that year, a historical high. Okie and a handful of others benefited from auspicious timing. The sheep business in Wyoming would gradually diminish to a mere shadow of what it was during Okie’s day. But 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. The state still had millions of sheep, and some operators were still making money despite the Depression.
What made him remarkable was his ability to catch the Wyoming sheep-raising wave at the right time and ride it until he died, in 1930.īy then, sheep raising in Wyoming was twenty years past its prime. Chuck Morrison Collection, Casper College Western History Center.Okie made his fortune running sheep out of Lost Cabin, Wyo., a town that he owned down to the last board and nail. But his eyes, intense with focus, and his sharp, waxed mustache suggest this man did not make his money collecting interest or litigating for Wall Street.Ī sheepherder's momument on the Chace Ranch, Carbon County Elk Mountain in the background. Trim but not thin, Okie sits relaxed in a dark, double-breasted suit, sporting a neat tie and stick pin, white shirt and collar stiff with starch. Okie, sheep king of central Wyoming, the subject looks as if he is about to return to a desk at a bank or law firm. Silas Reed, surveyor general of Wyoming Territory, from his report for 1871. “There seems to be no doubt that the vast quality of mutton can be grown here, pound for pound, as cheap as beef and, if so, then sheep-raising must be profitable if cattle-raising is.”
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