The Idiom of the Sheep Range

HE open industry that emerged on the High Plains following the Civil War and the completion of the transcontinental railroads has occasioned a considerable amount of descriptive literature. For the most part, however, this centers about the cowboy and his trade. Long removed from the picture, the cowboy has been made into a more or less heroic figure by his admiring interpreters. His occupation, distinctive dress, and manner of life caught the imagination of a sympathetic public, and have been given serious study; his lingo and songs have been carefully collected; and more recently, Ernest Staple Osgood, in The Day of the Cattleman (Minneapolis, 1929), has subjected his employer to a careful scrutiny. But the cowboy's more submissive neighbor, the sheep herder, appears to have suffered from neglect. With his unpretentious garb, harmless trade implements, and dreary occupation, the shepherd could hope for little popular acclaim before such a competitor as the glamorous cowboy, with his chaps, pistols, lariat, and bronco. Less appealing and picturesque than his two-gun opponent, the successor of the sage shepherd of old experienced for a moment an unwanted notoriety, when, his flocks scattered and killed and his own life threatened and endangered, he occupied one side of a controversy that promised for a time to engulf a large section of the West. With an age-old tradition of peace, the shepherd, now transplanted to a western where cattlemen saw their long asserted range rights contested, found himself involved in a deadly war. But when this had passed he immediately resumed his former obscurity. The sheep and his employer, the flock master, even before their conflict with the cowboy and the cattleman, had begun to make an indelible impress on nomenclature and lingo. The distinctly open character of western wool and mutton production gave prevalence to methods of conducting the business only suggested at an earlier date. Phrases and words expressive of new ways of doing things came into general use on the western sheep range, and the war itself made accretions to a vocabulary that was already becoming somewhat distinctive. Open sheep raising has always required the services of at least two men for each outfit, the herder and the camp tender. 355

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