Oregon range wars were all about shooting sheep

By Finn J.D. John
January 7, 2024

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article is a rewritten and re-researched version of a much shorter article published Sept. 20, 2010, which you can find here.

IN THE EARLY 1880s, visitors in the Klickitat Valley, just across the Columbia River from The Dalles and Biggs Junction, recalled seeing some very singular signs posted regularly along the right-of-way:

NOTISE:
All land in woods past
Draper Springs is for Settlers
cattle. No sheep is allowed.
Sheep men take notise.
   — Comitee

By “Comitee,” it was clearly understood, the writer meant some sort of vigilance committee, a coalition of cattle ranchers and sodbusters who had come together to fight the encroachment of the flocks of sheep that seemed to be taking over the public rangeland.

Similar signs, and “comitees,” were springing up all across the Columbia River basin. And over the decades to come, the problem would only get worse … and bloodier.

Luckily, nearly all of the blood would be coming from sheep, not men.

WHEN YOU HEAR the term “range war,” chances are you think of the classic Western Shane, either the novel by Jack Schaefer or the 1953 movie starring Alan Ladd. Or, drawing from another famous pulp Western author, maybe you think of the Pleasant Valley Massacre in Arizona, the one Zane Grey wrote about in To the Last Man.

If Zane Grey had decided to write a novel about Oregon’s contribution to the Western range-wars saga, it would probably have been titled To the Last Sheep. Tens of thousands of the wooly animals were butchered in the course of the hostilities, including several thousand that got herded off a “buffalo jump” by hostile cattlemen near Silver Lake.

In Oregon, as with other Western states, when the story of the Western range wars is told, usually it’s a bit oversimplified. Cattle, they’ll say, are picky eaters, so they eat the bunchgrass but leave the weeds behind to hold the soil in place. Sheep, on the other hand, will take everything down to the soil line and tear up some of the roots for good measure.

All of this is true, as far as it goes. Overgrazing with cattle will result in a hillside full of inedible weeds; overgrazing with sheep will lead to soil erosion. Either outcome is bad, which is why ranch owners are always very careful not to let their livestock overgraze the land no matter what kind it is.

Which gets directly to the actual problem that led to the range wars. That is, none of these stockmen were running their animals on their own land. The range was open to the public, and anyone was welcome to use it for any purpose.

For landowners with homesteads next door to public land, that was great, at least at first. It meant you could stock your homestead with more cows than the land you owned could support.

And in much of the West, being able to use the adjacent public land meant the difference between proving up a land claim and failing.

The politicians who had created the Homestead Act of 1862 had sort of assumed that 160 acres would be more than anyone would need to set up a farm. That was often true – the allotment was very generous indeed if your claim was in a verdant basin like the Willamette Valley.

But 160 acres of high desert is barely enough to provide forage for two cows. The only way some settlers in the “dry side” of Oregon could survive was to run some of their animals out on adjacent public land, which they would fence to keep the livestock from straying off in search of a new herd to join, as cattle especially were wont to do.

BUT EVEN AS these unlucky sodbusters were making their plans to augment their stingy land claims with public-land pasturage, a small but growing cadre of entrepreneurial-minded men, mostly Scottish, Irish, and Basque immigrants, had figured out that a person could make quite a decent living without bothering with buying or owning any land at all. All they’d need to buy to go into this lucrative business was a handful of sheep and some camping gear. The business plan was simple: Drift from pasture to pasture on the public range, protecting and caring for their animals as they ate, bred, and multiplied into a large flock; then, bring the flock to Shaniko for shearing and selling the lambs.

This was a business plan that worked for sheep, but not for cattle. Sheep are tougher and more weather-resistant than cattle. Their flocking instinct keeps them together in tight packs, which can be made even tighter with a couple of good sheepdogs. Most of these sheepherders didn’t even bother with filing a homestead claim — they wouldn’t be able to prove one up anyway, because they’d be wandering the public lands with their flocks all year. They were true transients — the sodbusters and cattlemen called them “tramp sheepmen,” and the moniker really did fit. They were always on the move; their sheep would spend the summer munching on alpine herbs near the timberline, then migrate with the cooler weather down close to rivers and lakes.

Everywhere they went, they ate all they could. Why wouldn’t they? The land was public range; nobody “owned” it. If a sheepherder moved on before his wooly charges had gnawed the land down to rocks and roots, someone else would just come along and finish the job later. It was a classic “tragedy of the commons” scenario.

Which didn’t really bother anybody much until the mid-1880s, when some important things started to change.

The biggest of these was, more and more settlers were moving out onto the range, staking land claims, and trying to prove them up. Naturally these sodbusters would pick the greenest and most productive bits.

That meant that even as more and more sheepherders moved onto the grasslands to try and hustle up a living, the amount of land available for them was shrinking. And it was shrinking a lot: Between 1880 and 1890, the amount of Columbia Basin grassland devoted to growing wheat increased sixfold. Competition started to heat up.

Plus, the threat of having prime grazing lands claimed and fenced off by some sodbuster actually incentivized the sheepherders to overgraze. A dead, brown, rocky field would be a lot less likely to catch a homesteader’s eye than a pleasant field of green grasses, after all.

From a sodbuster’s perspective, the itinerant flocks of sheep were like a swarm of locusts. In a worst-case scenario, they would pour into the public lands that he was counting on to feed his extra livestock, tearing down his fencing and devouring everything edible before moving on to the next spot. Homesteaders who planted gardens on the adjacent public lands might go hungry to feed the growing flocks of “tramp sheepmen” in the area. It could mean the difference between making it as a farmer, and failing.

Signs and threats like the “COMITEE” warnings in the Klickitat Valley showed that this threat was being taken very seriously. Fortunately, though, the worst-case scenario was very rare. There were a few sheepherders who insisted on their right to plunder the public domain regardless of how the neighbors felt about it; but on the Western frontier, disagreements like this had a tendency to get worked out with fists and sometimes pistols. Overall, everyone grumbled, but they all managed to coexist.

But then, something else happened to push the situation into full-blown crisis.

Actually, three somethings happened, all in the early 1890s.

The first was, the Northern Pacific Railroad figured out that it was under no obligation to let sheepherders graze on its undeveloped lands. Railroad lands, of course, tended to be prime country, close by the rivers where railroad construction was practicable. Suddenly, after 1892 or so, those lands were made off-limits to sheep.

This meant that thousands of sheep that had gotten used to fattening up on riverside pastures owned by the railroad had to find other sources.

The second event happened in 1891, but wasn’t really felt until 1894: The federal government created the National Forest Reserves system, which would shortly morph into the U.S. National Forests. Many of the sheepherders’ prime grazing lands were inside these new zones, which in 1894 were declared off-limits to sheep. When sheepmen ignored the limitation, federal marshals showed up and arrested them. So, the sheepherders’ rangeland shrank even more.

And while all this was going on, the Panic of 1893 broke out. Beef and wool prices crashed hard, and so did wheat prices. Desperation drove everyone out onto the public lands to try to get by, and for hard-pressed sodbusters that “worst case scenario” involving fluffy white locust swarms became less uncommon.

In the battle between the “tramp sheepmen” and the stationary settlers and cattle ranchers, the advantage lay with the sheepherders — they could move on to greener pastures any time they wanted, whereas the settlers and farmers, tied as they were to their land, had to just hang on as best they could.

In about 1895, settlers and cattlemen in the area of the little community of Izee, just northwest of Burns, decided to do something to turn that situation around. They got together and formed a little vigilance committee calling itself the “Izee Sheep Shooters.” Their plan was to basically post the rangeland around their place with “sheepmen take notise” signs warning them away, and take turns patrolling it for sheep sign. Then, any time a sheepherder was found inside their “dead line” bringing a flock of “meadow maggots” their way, they’d sneak up on his camp, capture him and tie him to a tree, and slaughter his entire flock with gun, knife or club.

Members of the Sheep Shooters were sworn to secrecy. They all agreed to try as hard as they could not to kill or injure any sheepman, but if that happened, they’d bury him on the spot and nothing would be said.

WORD ABOUT THE Izee Sheep Shooters got around very quickly. Not surprisingly, lots of other homesteaders and cattlemen thought it was a fine idea. Another gang of range-enforcement vigilantes sprang up in Crook County, and another in Lake County. Soon they were everywhere.

By the early 1900s it was clear that a crisis was at hand. There were few places now that a sheepherder could bring his flock to that were not protected by a “comitee” of sheep shooters. So, sheep started to die, first by dozens, then by hundreds and even thousands.

In 1903, 2,400 sheep were slaughtered at Benjamin Lake, north of Christmas Valley, as well as 5,300 in two separate massacres in the Silver Lake area.

In 1906 a gang of masked riders galloped into a sheep camp in Lake County, drove most of the stock over a cliff in a “buffalo jump,” and massacred as many of the rest as they could catch before galloping away. In that attack, 1,800 sheep out of a herd of 2,200 were killed.

Estimates of the total death toll range from 12,000 to 25,000 sheep over the roughly 10-year period when Sheep Shooters’ associations were active. Most of these were small bands of sheep, just one or two hundred, which the vigilantes tracked and pounced upon.

SO FAR AS is officially known, no human was killed in the range wars. There are a couple of disappearances that may have been connected with them — especially Shorty Davis, a farmer who ran sheep on his own land who vanished in 1900. There are also anecdotes about gunfights and shallow graves in the Ochoco Mountains, some of which may actually be true.

That lack of human victims probably has a lot to do with the fact that the sheepmen didn’t try taking any vigilante action themselves. They must have been acutely aware that they were much more vulnerable than the farmers and ranchers who were attacking them. The sheepherders lived alone with their flocks and maybe a couple dogs in specially built camp wagons — the precursors of the modern camp trailer — that were pulled from place to place by horses. Sneaking up on them was often easy to do, and for sheepmen who had good guard dogs, all that was necessary was to turn out in force. No sheepherder could do much to defend himself against 15 or 20 masked riders with Winchesters at the ready. Farms and ranches were much more well defended; for the sheepmen, trying to fight fire with fire would have led to disaster, and they knew it well.

They complained to authorities, asking county officials to take action; the sheep shooters responded by urging county authorities to mind their own business and not get involved. For the most part, local governments took that advice.

Sheepmen from Antelope tried to set up a meeting with cattle ranchers from Crook County to work out a peace treaty. Probably sensing they had the upper hand, the ranchers turned them down.

Sheepmen offered a $1,500 reward for information leading to the arrest of the Sheep Shooters. But, nobody wanted the money badly enough to turn rat for it.

Everything was clearly building to some sort of horrible conclusion. But then, probably just in time, the U.S. Government stepped in and stopped the whole thing in its tracks.

IN A MOVE surely at least partly inspired by the violence and damage to land that the old system had caused, the federal government took action in 1906. The Department of the Interior ordered the rangeland supervisor to divide the public land into grazing allotments and give each one exclusively to one operator, for a lease payment.

Not only did this stop the wars, it also went a long way toward solving the tragedy of the commons. A herder who let his stock damage the land would be back again in the same spot the next year, reaping the bitter harvest of his bad decision.

And with the public rangeland now suddenly off-limits to all but one cattle or sheep operation, there was no longer anything to fight over. If one operator was caught grazing on another’s leased land, it was clear to all who was in the wrong.

By 1908, these changes had been fully implemented and started being vigorously enforced. And Central Oregon’s range war just faded into memory.

By the time it did, more than 15,000 sheep had been killed, and at least one sheepherder had been wounded by a stray bullet.

Not a single “Sheep Shooter” was prosecuted, or even publicly identified.

(Sources: Counting Sheep, a book by Alexander Campbell McGregor published in 1982 by the Univ. of Wash. Press; “From Oregon’s Range War to Nevada’s Sagebrush Rebellion,” an article by William R. Lindley published in the Jan. 1999 issue of Journal of the West; “Central Oregon Range Wars,” an article by Tor Hanson published July 7, 2018, by The Bend Bulletin; “The Central Oregon Range Wars,” an article by Melinda Jette published in 2004 by Oregon History Project.)

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