Sheep Ranching in the Dry Corner of Wyoming

Abstract

ROCK Springs, Wyoming, is a mining town, booming today from coal and trona; its population has probably tripled to 30,000 people in the last decade. The town began with construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, and the downtown with its main streets still lined with many single-story buildings is cut in half by tracks. Housing in the old part of town is neatly divided: large, well-maintained homes on the south side of the railroad; on the north, shacks divided in tiny apartments rented at big-city prices to young people with $10,000 jeeps parked out front. Farther from the core, and extending until Rock Springs abuts public-domain lands, hundreds of new homes have been added helter-skelter in the last decade. Many streets are blind, incomplete, or under construction long after the houses on them are sold and occupied. Covered mostly with big sagebrush, smaller black sage, and pungent saltbush, the country around Rock Springs is dominated by a central dome called the Rock Springs uplift, bordered east and west by sedimentary basins (Fig. 1).' Major trona mines are in the western basin, drained by the Green River. Coal comes from the Paleocene beds whose cuestas neatly rim the uplift. Uranium and natural gas come from the Great Divide basin on the east side of the uplift. The landscape is so big, however, that visitors and even many residents miss its structural symmetry. This land of dome and basins-of railroads, mines, and boomtowns-is superlative winter-sheep country, a haven for all its barrenness. There is so little snow here that sheep find plenty of feed, yet snow enough that sheep need not be watered. The combination is precious in the Rocky Mountains: naturally provided winter-long feed and water. From December to April, motorists on Interstate 80, which parallels the Union Pacific Railroad through the basins and across the stream-breached uplift, see an odd turbulence in the distance or perhaps a winking mirror on the horizon. Suddenly they recognize the milling surface to be thousands of sheep, the mirror to be an aluminumroofed sheepwagon. Australia now dominates the lamb and wool market, and American growers are plagued by labor shortages, coyotes, and a dependence on publicgrazing lands whose use ranchers control less and less. In nearly constant decline since 1900, the number of sheep in Wyoming has decreased to the 1887 level.2 In Sweetwater County-its seat, Green River, is fifteen miles west of