My Guest author today is my Granddad as he recounts tales of life on the Montana prairie. I can still see his face as he told tales of sheepherders. A shadow passed over him as he told of the old sheepherder losing his life, but his whole face lit up when he told about the Cotter brothers.
the storyteller
Charlie Leap was a sheepherder up along the Missouri River in Montana. He hadn’t started out that way, he got in some sort of a jackpot back east and joined the cavalry. They put his outfit out west protecting the builders of the Great Northern Railroad. After the rail line was built, Leap became a cowboy. He had cursed up and down about the people who were bringing sheep into the country. But when he got so crippled up he couldn’t ride anymore, he got a job herding sheep. The sheep in the northern plains came in by the thousands. The Veseth outfit was big into sheep. Some of the cowhands, who used to run their horses through the sheep scattering them every which way, ended up as Veseth’s herders. They didn’t know that the coming of the sheep would be all that would give them a job when they got too stove up to ride.
The Phillips outfit must have had 30-40,000 sheep. Jim Cotter had only four bands. His partner, Marvin Jones, was with him in the business. When the bad winter hit, their herd was almost wiped out. One night they were following the sheep. The wind was blowing snow. They couldn’t see anything. The partner stopped Cotter. “Don’t go any further,” he said. In the dark they knew something was wrong. The whole band had gone over a bluff. By the time the winter was over most of the sheep were gone.
That was the “bad winter.” There were several bad winters. I believe the worse one was ’87. It changed the livestock industry in the Northern Plains. Until then some cattle and sheep herds were wintered without hay. After that the livestock men started making hay while it was summer. The livestock killing winter would long be remembered.
A herder stays with his flock. Sometimes the sheep will leave the bedground on a stormy night. One herder followed his sheep on a blizzardy night. They came to a drift fence. The herder held out one arm and let it ride against the top wire. The arm was freezing and without feeling. He’d raise it up at each post. They found him the next day, frozen to death, his arm sawed deeply from barb wire.
sheep wagon
Jimmy Cotter came over from Ireland. He knew about sheep. He didn’t have any money, so he got a job herding sheep on shares. After a few years the share was doing so good that the boss said, “You ought to be paying me. You’re doing as good as I am. Maybe you better get off on your own.” So Jimmy got a partner and went off on his own. His brother, Mickey, came over from the old country and helped Jimmy.
When Jimmy married the Indian girl that was doing the cooking, Mick moved out of the house. But he still kept working for his brother. One winter, after several weeks being snowed in and running short on supplies, Jimmy sent Mickey to town. That was Malta, forty miles away. When Mick didn’t show up at the end of ten days, I went after him. When I found him, he was having a good time in one of the saloons and saying, “Me brother James will foot the bill.” I think that may have been the same time that Mickey failed to get the groceries. “Me brother, James, gave me sixty dollars for grocery money,” he said, “and I spent eighty of it for whiskey.”
Mickey was quite a herder. He stuck with his sheep during a storm and froze his feet. He lost his toes and the balls of his feet and stumped around on the end of his legs. He managed to get out in public and took in a dance, but he wouldn’t get on the dance floor. A lady by the name of Stella said, “I’ll get old Mickey out on the floor.” She went over to coax him to dance.
He declined the favor. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I’ve lost me balls you know.”
Stella spread the news of why Mick couldn’t dance.
my Granddad and his team