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Officer/Cant Sheep RanchThe Cant Ranch Museum, a recently-developed part of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, intends to show what life on a sheep-ranch was like in its heyday*. This historical site, the pleasures of John Day, and, of course, the formations and fossils of the Monument, were the main part of our entertainment this trip -- although watching alfalfa grow also has its charms, just not for more than a day or two. A short aside. A National Monument can be designated by the President; a National Park must have Congressional approval. The monuments can be managed by almost any federal agency, but usually it's the Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, or the Forest Service. In this case it's the Park Service. It's pretty much a budget thing. If you're a National Park, Congress is obliged to fund you; if a National Monument, your managing agency has to fight for the budget among all its other priorities. At least that's the theory. There are about 100 monuments across the U.S.We lucked out and discovered that we were wandering around the area the very day that a Park Ranger was going to give a tour of the house and grounds of the Officer/Cant sheep ranch. This area is under a different federal program, it was designated as a National Historic District in 1976, a designation which appears to be an administrative process. Whatever the bureaucratic maneuvering, it seems to be working okay. This ranch is said to be the first homestead permit in the John Day area. You may remember that after our government took all this land away from the Native Americans, people were allowed to claim parcels of 160 acres as their own if they built a house, lived in it and worked the land for 5 years. (The Homestead Act was all tangled up in the politics of the U.S. Civil War and didn't pass until 1862, after the (agrarian) south seceded.) This part of the country wasn't homesteaded until the 1880's, after Congress had acknowledged the realities of farming in parts of the west and expanded the allowable claim to 640 acres. The first claim on this property was filed in 1881 by Eli Casey Officer, whose family had immigrated to the Willamette Valley from Missouri earlier. He is said to have brought the first flock of sheep to the area. This ranch was especially desirable because, in addition to bordering on the John Day River, it contains a wonderful fresh-water spring. The Indian Wars, rampaging throughout the area in 1878-9, were not truly over until the later 1890's, but here and there, settlers and Native Americans came to a reasonable approximation of co-existence. This appears to be one of those places. According to our Park Ranger guide, Lia, the Officer family sold the ranch in 1910 to James Cant. He and his wife, Elizabeth, are responsible for developing this property as a lucrative ranch, a charming oasis in the desert and a welcome haven for travelers. James and Elizabeth's story is wonderful fodder for a romance novel. James emigrated from Edinburgh Scotland in 1905 and went to work for other sheep ranchers in the area. It didn't take him long to realize that he needed to have his own ranch to be truly successful. So he took half his pay in sheep and began building his own flock. It took him about five years of hard work and no pleasures to get ready and then he sent for Elizabeth, his own true love, and bought the best property in the valley. From there, they worked harder and harder, planted lilacs and a fruit orchard, built a spring house to keep food cool, made a lot of money, had four children and, as they worked, generally went about civilizing the area. Maybe that was mostly Elizabeth. She is said to have been such a hospitable woman that James got tired of giving up his bed to traveling strangers, so built her a huge house -- three stories, the main floor for the family, six bedrooms on the second floor for guests and visiting dignitaries, and a loft-of-many-uses on the third. When their children needed schooling, instead of sending them away, the Cants hired a teacher, housed the teacher on the second story, and turned the third story into a classroom for all the children in the area. When the Elizabeth recognized that the ranchers in the area, even those who belonged to extremely restrictive religious groups, needed some recreational outlet, she organized "Skip-To-My-Lou" parties on the third floor. These were NOT dances, you understand, just innocent parties. They ranched here for many years, had many adventures and lived to ripe old ages, surrounded by children and grandchildren. The house is lovely with etched glass in the front door, beautiful wood throughout, furniture donated back by many of James and Elizabeth's descendants and the original lilacs still gracing the front gate. I really thought there would be photos on the web, so we didn't take any. I was wrong, here's what there is about what I could find on the Cant Ranch Museum. A picture of the house Another picture of the house Bea and I enjoyed the tour of the barn and stockyards and machinery the most, though. First Mia pointed out the hut for the Spring lambing hands. Near the barn, in the middle of where all the pregnant ewes would be milling about (and bleating and whining, I'm sure), a man was on duty 24 hours a day to sort the happy mother and child into the barn and to help with any difficult births (well, probably two men, each on for 12 hours). No sleeping when you're on lambing duty, but apparently you get to be out of the sun, rain, snow, whatever February/March are bringing this year, when you're not actively assisting. Which is probably never. The barn itself is still divided into lambing pens, many, many small ones (5' by 2') for the single lamb births and several larger ones for the ewes who had twins and triplets. The ewes and lambs didn't stay here for long--maybe as much as 48 hours, but usually a shorter time, just long enough for the mother and child to imprint, so they could find each other in the huge flocks to be driven to summer pasture. This is not humanity, of course, but economics. If no ewe recognizes and feeds a lamb, it will die. The best part of Mia's lecture, we thought, was when she explained about shearing time. In the fall, the sheep are brought down from the hills, and trooped up in the barn stockyards again. The shearing teams are hired from wherever they go in the interim. At the height of its glory, the Cant Ranch had 10 shearing stations, each with "powered" sheep clippers, run from a gasoline engine (often the tractor engine) through an elaborate system of pulleys that would have lost me half-way through freshman physics. A good man could shear TWO HUNDRED sheep a day, take the fleece off in one complete piece and never nick the sheep. This set-up was an assembly line concept applied when I bet no one out here had any idea what Henry Ford had been doing. Well, maybe James Cant, it's almost impossible to over-estimate this man's entrepreneurial spirit and inventiveness. Then the wrapper, an important person, to make the fleece look as attractive as possible to potential buyers. Mia said they would fold the inner white fleece outward, and all the dirty, straw-sticky and poopy fleece would be inward, thus bringing a better price. I asked, "Well, how many times can you fool these fleece buyers?" Mia did not answer. Anyway, Mia said, they tied them with paper twine so as not to adulterate the wool. With what? Cotton? Hemp? How is that worse than straw and poop? Well, here's a good part, each fleece bundle was tossed in a LARGE burlap bag, maybe four feet wide and six or eight feet tall, suspended from a frame. The fleeces were stomped down by young boys. I never heard that any smothered, so I guess it's okay. But think about that job! There you are in the heat and the baaing and the stink at the bottom of a sack. Then Whomp! They throw a 10 lb. bundle of greasy wool on you (all that lanolin). You have maybe 5 seconds to stomp it to the bottom of the bag, then Whomp! Here comes another one. This goes on for six or eight or 12 hours. Man, I think the KIDS needed a "Skip-To-My-Lou" party! Well, the sheep business was great through WWI (lots of uniforms made from wool), pretty good into the 1950's and then gradually began to decline. Now, most of the mass markets have been taken over by synthetics. And probably more important, there are so few shearers available that a large operation is close to impossible. Look at this paltry list of professional shearers in the U.S. So far, I don't think anyone has managed to make a mechanical shearer, although I read about a chemical thing on Wikipedia that makes the wool fall off. Might be the future, who knows! (I have just found a marvelous history of the area, done by the National Parks Service. The section containing information on the ranch is quite informative. The whole thing, while a little dry, is a great resource for anyone interested in the history of the area. For example, here's a photo of a hay stacker just like they have on display at the ranch.) However glorious its sheep-ranching history, this valley is now full of goats, domesticated llamas, even some domesticated elk over by Sisters and cattle. Lots of cattle, even quite a few longhorns, which I think of as Texas cattle, of course -- the famous Texas Longhorns. Then again, the territory here is quite a lot like Texas--sparse, rugged. Just a lot colder in the winter. Farmers and ranchers and their livestock are all pretty adaptive breeds. But this installment is about sheep, so just to wrap up, here's a great story about modern sheep-herding from Range Magazine It's in Colorado, not Oregon, but the flavor is there. Next, another group of pioneers in the area -- The Chinese.
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