SHEEP. 1001 



twenty-eight dollars and twenty-cents, and two hundred bushels 

 of corn, worth thirty dollars to fifty dollars, will winter one 

 hundred head. A shed and racks of pine lumber for one thou- 

 sand sheep will cost five hundred dollars ; " a Kansas shed " of 

 poles, hay, sorghum stalks, etc., can be built for a trifle. In 

 Kansas, sorghum and millet are given to sheep. More are shorn 

 unwashed than in the East (about April 15th in the latitude of 

 Kansas City). Merinos increasingly predominate over all other 

 breeds as we approach the one hundredth meridian and the arid 

 plains. Scab and foot-rot are stated to be almost unknown in 

 Minnesota. Foot-rot is troublesome in Illinois and Iowa ; scab 

 in Kansas. 



The systems of the Far West, including California, 

 Oregon, and Texas, were at first essentially vagabondizing ; but 

 are now assuming permanence. Some roving, adventurous man 

 would purchase five hundred to one thousand ewes, generally 

 Mexican, at one dollar to one dollar and fifty cents a head, get 

 a mustang or two, and follow them up with tent and " chuck- 

 box," camping where night overtook him, and resuming his wan- 

 derings in the morning. Soon the flocks crystallized about the 

 watering-places. Frequently the pre-emption of a spring or 

 pond or an eligible water-front gave a monopoly of thousands 

 of acres of government land, and insured the pioneer a speedy 

 fortune. The basis of sheep husbandry in the vast Rocky Mount- 

 ain and Pacific coast region is bunch-grass, with buffalo grass as 

 the main adjunct in the Rocky Mountains, circle and sage grass 

 in the Utah basin, and alfilerilla and burr-clover in California. 

 In Texas it is the various kinds of mesquite grass ; in New 

 Mexico and Arizona the grama grass. The bunch-grass is a 

 wonderful compensation of nature in those desert and alkali 

 wastes, curing into standing hay, nutritious as grain ; but the 

 absence of it in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona is more than 

 balanced by the two rainy seasons of that region, and the almost 

 unequaled grama. 



In the interior of the continent, remote from all cultivation, 

 the sole resource winter and summer is the native grasses, with 

 some sporadic chance provision of wild hay for a hard season. 



