The Woolly West
Colorado's Hidden History of Sheepscapes
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4155576 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nathan F Sayre (0000-0002-9243-2219, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 106 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 481-482 |
| Publication date | 2019-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of American History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/jahist/jaz425 |
| OpenAlex | W2969740974 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 2 |
Cowboys and cattle ranching have long dominated the historiography and myths of Euro-American settlement of the West. Sheep and the people who tended them have received far less attention, even though recent scholarship suggests they were every bit as important, if not more so, especially in certain places and times. Andrew Gulliford's The Woolly West adds to this growing body of scholarship, with a specific focus on western Colorado and adjacent areas in New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. The book comprises nine chapters, each preceded by a short, first-person vignette—Gulliford calls them “sheepscapes”—recounting his travels in search of remnant traces and contemporary successors of Colorado's sheepherders of yore. Drawing heavily on local newspapers, government records, and memoirs, the first five chapters provide a fine-grained and rather circuitous narrative history of the period before World War II. The dominant theme is a familiar one: the sometimes–brutally violent conflicts between “cattle men” and “sheep men,” in which herders were usually victims and cowboys usually the hired thugs. Gulliford's account is long on details—colorful and occasionally grisly—but short on interpretation and analysis. He makes no attempt to explain the extent, persistence, and moral depravity of antisheep sentiment (which routinely veered from vigilantism into what would now be termed hate crimes or even terrorism), other than that sheep were often more profitable than cattle and that many flocks were owned and tended by Hispanos, Basques, Greeks, or Mormons. The problem with that conclusion is that Gulliford's own research turns up countless exceptions—cattlemen who embraced sheep production, and Anglos who hired and befriended minority herders—and he misses a chance to test the overlooked but compelling hypothesis advanced by John Perkins that sheep were despised by erstwhile southerners as symbols of the antebellum North
Archaeology · Art · Art history · Ethnology · Gulag · Historiography · Literature · Memoir · Mythology · Narrative · Political science · Scholarship · Theme (computing · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture · Archaeology and Natural History · Classics · History · Law
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| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2021 - 2025 (5) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |