COTTAGE GROVE SENTINEL • DECEMBER 12, 2018 •
9A
Off beat Oregon: Range-wars veteran put Oregon on map as sheep country
By Finn J.D. John
For The sentinel
T
he notorious cattle-
man-sheepman wars
of the 1880s had not
been good to John G. Ed-
wards — known to friend
and enemy alike as Jack. But
then, they hadn’t been good
to anybody.
Edwards had been on the
sheep side. On his Wyoming
ranch and covering the
nearby hills of public range-
land, Jack had owned the
largest fl ock of sheep in the
country: over 100,000 of the
wooly critters. Journalists
called him the “Sheep King
of America.”
Th en had come the wars.
Th e range wars were
squabbles over public lands.
Th ose lands were theoreti-
cally open to everyone, but
the people using it had a ten-
dency to assume they had a
right to keep others out.
Most of the time this
took the form of cattlemen
and sheepmen fi ghting like
Bloods and Crips, and the
squabbling continued in
deadly earnest until the fed-
eral government changed its
grazing-permit practices in
the early 1900s.
In those battles, Edwards
and his employees gave
as good as they got, and a
number of cowboys as well
as more than a few sheep-
herders found their way into
lonely graves on the wind-
swept prairie as a result.
But, winning or losing, it
was not a life one could set-
tle into.
Th en one day in July of
1896, a gang of heavily
armed cattlemen bent on
convincing Edwards to yield
the range to them got the
drop on him, tied him up,
and put a noose around his
neck.
When he refused to prom-
ise to move his sheep, they
lift ed him off the ground
with the noose and let him
dangle until he blacked out.
He surely must have
thought he was being
lynched.
Although he refused to
give the cattlemen the assur-
ance they demanded from
him, this episode seems to
have convinced Edwards that
something had to change. So
he started looking around
for a place he could move
to where he could raise his
sheep and mind his own
without having to deal with
range-war drama — a nice
big spread with lots of land
that was good for little else
but running sheep, with
good access to public range-
land and international ports.
He found it in a spread 25
miles north of Prineville, in
a place called the Hay Creek
Ranch.
T
he Hay Creek had start-
ed out as a 160-acre
homestead, which a Bos-
ton physician named David
Baldwin bought in 1873
to try his hand as a sheep
rancher. Although I haven’t
been able to confi rm why Dr.
Baldwin decided to leave the
medical profession, usually
when an urban professional
did this sort of thing it was
because he had contracted
tuberculosis and had been
advised to move to a cleaner,
drier climate to recover.
If so, Dr. Baldwin didn’t
exactly rest in bed. On his
new ranch he founded the
Baldwin Sheep and Land
Co. and stocked it with
registered, purebred Span-
ish Merino sheep hauled in
from the East Coast; then
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he bought as many adjacent
homesteads and acreages as
he could and started irrigat-
ing and planting alfalfa on
them.
Th e alfalfa would be the
key to his success. But be-
fore that could happen, his
health failed.
By the time Jack Edwards
started looking into it, Dr.
Baldwin had been out of the
picture for some time, and
the Baldwin Sheep & Land
Co. was owned by a group
of businessmen out of Port-
land. He bought in in 1898,
and by 1901 he’d arranged
to buy his partners out and
take over.
Edwards had learned a
thing or two from the range
wars in Wyoming.
Th e number-one thing
he’d learned was that the key
to not getting involved with
range wars was not his fel-
low sheepmen, nor the cat-
tlemen who opposed them
— it was the sodbusters, the
homesteaders, who lived in
the neighborhood.
Back in the Wyoming
wars, the sodbusters had
been cordially hated by both
sides, and vice-versa. But
what Edwards had come to
understand was that the
homesteaders were there to
make a home and a com-
munity, not a buck.
Th ey would rally and
defend that community
against anyone who was just
there to make a buck; and if
Edwards settled down and
made his outfi t part of that
community, they’d rally and
defend him too.
So the Hay Creek Ranch
became the center of a
sprawling rural frontier
community of homestead-
ers working 160- and 320-
acre claims; and at the
ranch, Edwards provided a
general store and post offi ce
for their convenience, and a
school for their children.
He also provided jobs for
homesteaders who found
themselves pinched for
cash.
And, of course, every
time a sodbuster gave up
and started looking to sell
out, Edwards would be right
there, in a perfect position
to make an off er.
Without range wars to
worry about, Edwards could
concentrate on what he re-
ally wanted to do, which
was develop the Hay Creek
Ranch into the world’s pre-
eminent sheep facility. Over
the next ten years — a sur-
prisingly short period of
time, really — Jack Edwards
did just that. In the process,
he put northern Central Or-
egon on the map.
Th ese were the boom
years for places like Shaniko
— which, although it’s an al-
most-ghost town today, was
the largest wool shipping
town in the Pacifi c North-
west during this time.
Edwards
experimented
with breeding, developing
a colossal breed of sheep,
weighing 200 pounds and
covered with wool, that he
named the Baldwin. He put
in a mechanical shearing
facility to speed the process
of harvesting wool. And he
bought or leased all the adja-
cent land he possibly could,
at every opportunity.
His ranch got bigger and
bigger, eventually covering
30,000 acres.
Meanwhile, a little farther
south in the state, the range
wars were breaking out
again. Th is time it was the
Crook County Sheepshoot-
ers — masked cattlemen try-
ing to force the sheep herds
off “their” public rangelands.
Th eir technique was to
creep up on sheepherders,
tie them up or hold them at
gunpoint, and just massacre
their fl ocks.
Th ey never moved against
Jack Edwards, though. Th ey
never dared. All the north-
ern central Oregon sod-
busters would have risen up
to defend him.
But the Sheepshooters
were part of the reason Jack
lost his empire. Th e federal
government, tired of the an-
archy and waste of the inces-
sant range wars, tasked the
U.S. Forest Service with set-
ting grazing allotments on a
per-rancher basis.
Th is took the wind out of
the sails of the Sheepshoot-
ers. Th ere was no point in
massacring herds of sheep if
everyone’s grazing allotment
was set in advance.
But it also gave the For-
est Service a suite of man-
agement tools that it really
didn’t yet understand how to
eff ectively use. And in 1906,
the forest service used one
of those tools when it an-
nounced it was cutting Ed-
wards’ grazing allotment by
40 percent.
Edwards negotiated the
cut to 25 percent — a total of
30,000 sheep. He reduced his
fl ock accordingly, and made
his plans on that basis. But
then, in 1909, they hit him
with another 30 percent cut.
At that point, no doubt
concluding that he was too
old to have to deal with get-
ting his business thrown
into chaos aft er every elec-
tion year by a fresh crop of
well-meaning Forest Service
bureaucrats, Jack rode into
Portland and made arrange-
ments to sell everything off .
“I mean no criticism of
the government,” he told an
Oregon Journal reporter, af-
ter explaining the situation.
“But the facts are as I have
stated. Twelve months from
the present date we expect to
have our entire sheep hold-
ings sold out.”
And so he did.
T
hat wasn’t the end of Hay
Creek Ranch, though.
Not by a long stretch. Its new
owners were able to contin-
ue operating profi tably in
spite of the grazing-alloca-
tion cuts — in no small part
because of the new Baldwin
breed of sheep Jack had de-
veloped.
In fact, in 1927 the ranch
sold 10,000 purebred Bald-
wins to the Soviet Union as
breeding stock — the largest
single sale of large livestock
to an overseas buyer in his-
tory at the time.
Unfortunately for the Rus-
sians, most of these expen-
sive “designer sheep” were
eaten within a year of their
arrival — and that surely
was the most expensive mut-
ton to ever pass human lips.
Although the boom years
of sending 500,000 tons of
wool a year down the Co-
lumbia are long past, the
Hay Creek Ranch remains a
going concern to this day.
As for Jack Edwards, aft er
he sold out he settled into a
long and happy retirement
in Portland, and took up
painting.
He died in 1945.
(Sources: “Th e Sheep
King of America,” an arti-
cle by David Braly in Little
Known Tales from Oregon
History, a book edited by
Geoff Hill and published in
1988 by Sun Publishing of
Bend; “Hay Creek Ranch,”
an article by Jarold Ramsey
published March 17, 2018,
on Th e Oregon Encyclope-
dia at oregonencyclopedia.
org; “Confl ict on the Range,”
an article by Candy Moulton
published Aug. 29, 2011, in
True West magazine; and
Th e Wooly West: Colorado’s
Hidden History of Sheep-
scapes, a book by Andrew
Gulliford published in 2013
by Texas A&M University
Press)
Finn J.D. John teaches at
Oregon State University and
writes about odd tidbits of
Oregon history. For details,
see http://fi nnjohn.com. To
contact him or suggest a top-
ic: fi nn2@offb eatoregon.com
or 541-357-2222.
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