THE PEOPLE'S FARM AND STOCK CYCLOPEDIA. 



In California and Oregon many large flocks are managed some- 

 what in the Spanish fashion, being driven in summer to the 

 high sierra, where there are luxuriant meadows between the 

 double crest, or over to the vast sage-brush plateaus and river 

 basins of Nevada and Idaho. Some flock-masters have their 

 summer ranges, which they claim by prescriptive right, and 

 over these they wander and camp in pioneer fashion. Little 

 flocks of Merino rams are driven up to the flocks in September, 

 often in the proportion of two or three to the hundred ewes, as 

 the unrestrained character of the service is wasting and de- 

 structive. The flocks are driven down in the fall and wintered 

 in the foothills of the sierra or the coast range or in the vast 

 tule swamps of the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers. Many 

 perish unsheltered in the cold rains and northers of winter 

 more probably than in the colder, but drier interior. From ten 

 to forty per cent of the lambs have died in a single cold rain 

 in the Eel River Mountains. More than two-thirds of the 

 flocks have succumbed to an occasional drought in Southern 

 California. 



Still, California and Oregon have been a hive from which 

 bands of sheep have swarmed all over the central and northern 

 West, even to Nebraska and Minnesota. The large, rangy Cali- 

 fornia Merinos are sought as breeders on the northern parallels. 

 Crossed with the British mutton breeds they yield excellent 

 flesh-formers, which sell in Chicago at five dollars and a half to 

 six dollars a hundred. Thousands of French and Spanish Me- 

 rinos have been shipped by rail from Los Angeles to western 

 Texas, to start flocks. On the Pacific coast wethers are often 

 fattened on wheat stubble ; the saying of California farmers is 

 that their stubble must pay their taxes. Large flocks are driven 

 eastward by slow marches until they meet the western corn ; 

 fed on this a few weeks their large grass-grown frames make 

 exceptionally good mutton. 



Wool is generally shorn unwashed on the Pacific coast in 

 March and April ; in the interior later. Lambs are clipped in 

 the fall. The yield is from three to six pounds per head, vary- 

 ing as the flock has been graded up from the Mexican originals. 



