There are hundreds of books on cowboys in the American West, but Durango historian Andrew Gulliford said it’s been 70 years since anyone wrote about sheep.
That is, until Gulliford recently published, “The Woolly West: Colorado’s Hidden History of Sheepscapes,” a look at the history of sheep grazing, conflicts with cattlemen, immigrant labor and ecological impacts in Colorado.
“For a historian, I was looking for a great topic, and there’s all these cowboy books, and there’s all these books on mining, and I went to look for books on sheep, and I came up with two,” Gulliford said.
The Montezuma County Historical Society invited Gulliford to speak to a packed room on Saturday at the First United Methodist Church.
“I didn’t know this many people were interested in sheep,” Ann Wilson Brown, president of Montezuma County Historical Society, said as she introduced Gulliford, who is as a professor of history and environmental studies at Fort Lewis College in Durango. He also writes the column “Gulliford’s Travels,” which appears periodically in The Journal and Durango Herald.
Gulliford discussed the vast impacts of sheep on the American West and Colorado’s role in shaping public land and grazing rights.
President Theodore Roosevelt, Gulliford explained, had a hand in protecting public land in Colorado. Roosevelt was on a bear hunt in 1905 near Glenwood Springs when he saw the effects of livestock overgrazing.
Gulliford said Roosevelt went back to Washington to begin establish grazing fees. When he took the train back to Glenwood Springs, Gulliford said ranchers were so irate they refused to let the president off the train.
But grazing fees went into effect and remain today.
“Very important legal precedent that gets set, again, because of Colorado,” Gulliford said.
This was far from the only time ranchers in Colorado were irate. Gulliford told stories of violent conflict between sheepmen and cowboys, often called the Sheep and Cattle Wars. In Colorado, he said the Basque, Greek and Hispano immigrant communities were often shepherding families.
He said disputes over grazing land was the top concern. Sheep and cattle graze in different areas during the summer, Gulliford said, but they share the same range in the winter.
Most of the Hispano, Greek and Basque shepherding families did not fare well during the Sheep and Cattle Wars, but there was justice in one case. Gulliford told the story of the Montoya family. They were bringing sheep below Wolf Creek Pass when a Archuleta County commissioner, distraught over recently losing his wife in childbirth, gathered a group of cattlemen to attack the shepherds.
Gulliford said Montoya was shot in the shoulder during the raid, but he kneeled and returned fire, mortally wounding the commissioner. Montoya couldn’t get a fair trial in Pagosa Springs, so the trial was moved to Durango, where a jury acquitted Montoya in 35 minutes.
In the American West, Gulliford explained, self-defense is never murder.
“As far as I can tell, that is the only case in Colorado where a Hispanic family and a Hispanic herder got justice,”
Despite the conflict, Gulliford said sheepmen were capable of making much more money than cowboys. Shepherds would get paid once a year for meat and once a year for wool, while it took a cowboy three years to raise a steer.
“All of the status went with the cowboys, and the status went with the cattleman, but the money went with the sheep,” Gulliford said.
In his book, Gulliford seeks answers to long-held questions. Why were sheep hated? Why was there animosity between shepherds and cowboys? Why are cowboys remembered in poems and myth as rugged individuals, while shepherds, who truly worked alone, have been forgotten or despised?
Gulliford was selling “The Woolly West: Colorado’s Hidden History of Sheepscapes” at the presentation. It also is available in hardback for $27.94 on Amazon.
On Jan. 23, Gulliford will join Cortez author Tom Wolf at the Cortez Public Library for presentation on the history of wolves in Colorado. Gulliford and Wolf edited the book, “The Last Stand of the Pack.”
sdolan@the-journal.com