Essays

Moseying: Living La Vida Llanero

Sheep ranching
January 7, 2004

When folks go spinning down the road in many parts of west Texas they go through sheep and goat country. San Angelo is known as the Wool Capital of the World, by golly. Sheepmen have never tooted their own horns much -- so most folks know very little about the industry. The history of the industry is not common knowledge, either, and that is a shame, for sheepherders played an important role in the settling of the region.

Lamb is a "high-tone" meal at fancy restaurants locally. Hardly anybody in the region eats mutton, unlike towns in Navaho territory where mutton is on the menu in almost every cafe. Goat cheese and lamb chops are available in supermarkets, and in some Mexican restaurants a person can fill up on cabrito.

Francisco Coronado brought the first sheep to the southwestern United States in the 1540s. Robert Maudsley (whose story Winifred Kupper tells in "The Golden Hoof") called him, "a d___ poor sheepman." Coronado lost all but 28 of 5000 sheep. Onate brought sheep to stay in 1558 -- churro sheep -- small-bodied, bare-bellied, long-legged, light-fleeced. Churros are renowned for their hardiness, their ability to forage for themselves, good-tasting meat, and their ability to live and multiply under adverse conditions. Their wool was long and coarse and light in weight. Some have multiple horns branching in odd directions.

The Spanish put the Pueblo Indians to work as sheepherders (pastores) and through their intermarriage with Navajo Indians, by 1700 the latter tribe began weaving blankets for which they are now world famous. They and the Spanish settlers of New Mexico preserved the churro breed, for not long after Coronado's visit, Merino sheep with fine kinky wool had become the breed of choice in Europe. In northern New Mexico 20 Spanish families became "sheep kings (ricos)" with over three million sheep by the mid-1750s. They exported over a half-million to Mexico every year. New Mexican pastore Jesus Perea brought 30,000 sheep to the area from Gail to Tahoka in 1876. Merinos, often herded and owned by English and Scottish settlers (Maudsley came to Big Lake and Howard's Draw,) turned the hill country of Texas into sheep country in the 1880s.

John Braun, a former member of the board of directors of the Sibley Nature Center and a sheepman south of town, has not sold a "wooly" since 1996. "My family has been raising sheep here since the 1930s -- raising Rambouillets with superfine 19 micron wool. Drought is keeping me out of it, for now. We lost the wool incentive, so economic factors play into it, too. The incentive was paid from the import tariff on wool products. The State of Texas cut money for paying the trappers of the predators that constantly come after sheep, as well."

"Labor problems are also a factor. For years we hired the same shearers and then their sons. But now, the present generation stay in school, attend college, and become professionals. It is tough work, with long hours spent bending over and manhandling the sheep. It can be dangerous, too, because the clippers can easily cut flesh, and when a sheep panics the shearers would take hard knocks."

The best shearers could fleece 200 sheep or 250 goats in a day. For the first 2/3rds of the 20th century, shearers (trasquiladores) were often better paid than many other Hispanics, who were unable to find anything but menial work. By the 1920s shearing tools run by motors, instead of by hand-cranking. By the 1930s the trasquiladores had figured out how to hook up the tools to power plants on the back of trucks. Texas trasquiladores traveled as far north as Wyoming and Montana and be gone from home for months. By the 1950s conditions improved so much that the shearers and their families dressed well and drove new vehicles.

Angora goats came to the southern Edward's Plateau near Uvalde in the 1860s and spread to the Eldorado and Ozona region by the 1880s. Their long, silky white hair, known as mohair, is valued for clothing, draperies, and furniture upholstery. By 1892 Williams Leslie Black had 8000 Angoras at Fort McKavett, and established the first meatpacking and tanning factory in Texas. His book on Angora production, published in 1900, helped secure the importance of mohair production in the region.

Both goats and sheep were originally watched over by shepherds who stayed with the flocks "24/7." The invention of woven wire by 1920 and aggressive predator control changed that. Nowadays, many of the bands of ovines are left alone in the pastures, but quite a few sheepranchers use guard dogs (Anatolian shepherd dogs and others.) Some use guard donkeys, including minature donkeys. The ornate and stylized sheepherding wagon, manned by a Basque immigrant, was never common in this region, as they were further west in the Rocky Mountains. Here, early day sheepherders often walked, carrying their gear, and camping in lean-tos if bad weather threatened. Some used wagons -- especially the "drifter sheepmen" of the open range days.

Cattlemen often did not like the sheepmen -- calling the sheep "hooved locusts" that ruined the range and fouled the waterings. The drifter sheepmen carried along a broken wagon wheel, and when they found good forage, would put the broken wheel on the wagon, so that if a cattle rancher came to run them off, they could say they were waiting for a wheel to come from town. In Colorado City in the 1880s a sheepman won a "pitching" (bucking horse) contest, but the cattlemen that put on the rodeo refused to award the prize to him.

As time went on, however, many west Texas ranchers incorporated sheep and goats along with cattle. Sheep paid the bills, goats controlled the brush, but they were still "cattlemen." Sheep eat broomweed with no ill effects, while cattle lose calves when they eat broomweed and "get the bloat." Sheep die from eating bitterweed, though, which explains the many west Texas signs at sheepranches next to a watertank at the gate that read "No vehicles allowed without a bitterweed wash." Mr. Braun often ran cows along with sheep, noting that sheep liked the deeprooted short grasses, while the cattle ate the taller grasses.

Mr. Braun "lambed in March so eagles wouldn't get them." In April he marked his lambs, as he vaccinated and castrated the males. In May and early June he sheared and sold the ones with poor fleece quality. The lambs would weigh 85 pounds by September and he would sell the ones he did not need for replacement stock. In late September he would always buy new rams and put them with the ewes by mid-October so the lambs would be born at the proper time. Three rams would go in with every 100 ewes.

In late December and early January he "pull the bucks off the ewes" and would "clean up" the sheep, shearing their bellies and tail regions so the wool there would not be filled with litter from the pastures. He would also "face" them, trimming the hair from around their eyes and mouth. Needlegrass (three-awn) with its sharp barbs could make their mouths so sore they would not eat if he didn't face them. They could also become "wool-blind," unable to see where they were going.

Looking back, Mr. Braun wryly commented, "In a good year I can run 10-12 sheep per section, and in those good years I got a 140% lamb crop. Every decade has an average of one or two good years, a couple of average years, and at least six bad years. My best years were 1973, 1984, and 1993 -- I can remember the dates because those were the years I bought new pickups!"