Distinctly Montana Magazine

66 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • S U M M E R 2 0 2 4 Did they sing songs while they worked, or did they grow increasingly silent as their hands and clothes grew darker with blood? Consider this: if six men killed one sheep in a minute each, it would take over 8 hours to kill 3,000 animals. • • • As the 19th century came to a close, the "open range" seemed definitively closed, reduced to a patchwork by homesteaders, railroads, and settlements. Cattle drives under these circumstances meant navigating a maze of fenced-off and private land. Sometimes this led to clashes be- tween cowboys and settlers, and if the cattlemen employing the cowboys were powerful enough, it might lead to guerilla cam- paigns against "suspected rustlers." Some such alleged crimi- nals were hung outside their own homes, while cowboys snipped the barbed wire of their fences. But while hon- yockers were irritating enough to the cowboy, he had special ire reserved for the sheepherder. Histo- rian Ted Morgan writes that the cowboys had "sound economic reasons" for this hatred: "[s]heep required much less of an in- vestment than cattle. One sheepman and two collies could han- dle 3,000 sheep," and "they cropped the short grass left by cattle and weeds that cattle wouldn't touch." And the sheer number of sheep in Montana must have been alarming to those with a stake in cattle; by 1900 there were 3,047,745 sheep in Montana, outnumbering cattle by nearly ten to one. The cowboy began to see them as verminous. Some called them "hoofed locusts." In the Tongue River Valley, attackers galloped horses through shepherds' flocks, and in December of 1900, they held a sheep- herder at gunpoint as they spent most of the day clubbing be- tween 2,000 and 3,000 sheep to death. The men left, discard- ing the bloodied clubs and returning to town. They were never caught. Sheriff O. C. Cato of Miles City, himself a cattle rancher, said that he had found the clubs and would arrest anyone who came and admitted it was their club. Not surprisingly, no one claimed any responsibility, although some cowboys came and joked that they didn't see their club among the assembled evi- dence. None would admit that they had wielded the weapons, or that they knew who had. The Wool Grower's Association offered a bounty of $19,000, but no one came forward. This, by the way, is the actual incident in which the attackers asked for, or rather demanded, coffee from their victim. Further south, in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming, 4,000 sheep were clubbed to death in 1905. Three years earlier, several shep- herds and another few thousand head of sheep had been killed in Thermopolis. In one Powder River Valley saloon, a cowboy shot a sheepherder's dog, and the sheepherder and the cowboy shot and killed each other. Sometimes, as in a slaughter on Bear Creek, local ranches threw big hooplas on the night of the killings. Then, just in case one of the masked men were identified, they would have an alibi. Everyone would simply say they saw him at the dance, swinging THE SHEER NUMBER OF SHEEP IN MONTANA MUST HAVE BEEN ALARMING TO THOSE WITH A STAKE IN CATTLE; BY 1900 THERE WERE 3,047,745 SHEEP IN MONTANA, OUTNUMBERING CATTLE BY NEARLY TEN TO ONE. MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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