Plants Used by .Sheep on Mountain Range. 5 



their employees for the numerous courtesies which made the work pleas- 

 ant and indeed possible. I am also indebted to the Potlatch Lumber 

 Company of Potlatch, Idaho, for information as to their forest lands 

 leased for grazing purposes. 



MANAGEMENT OF THE SHEEP. 



In the year 1911, McGregor Brothers raised about 12,000 sheep. 

 They were wintered on the McGregor ranch on the breaks of Snake 

 river, just east of the Palouse river, near Hooper, Whitman county, 

 Washington. The lambing season began about March 20 and con- 

 tinued for six weeks. Shearing was begun about April 25. The sheep 

 were started for the summer range as soon as possible after the shearing 

 season. Half of them were sent north of Spokane, Washington, into 

 the Huckleberry Range of mountains lying between the Columbia and 

 the Colville valleys. The other six thousand, with which we are con- 

 cerned, in two equal bands, started on June 1 for the Idaho range. 

 They were seven days on the road. 



McGregor Brothers had leased the grazing privileges from the 

 Potlatch Lumber Company on all its forest land lying between the head- 

 waters of Hatter creek (a tributary of the North Palouse river, which 

 rises in the Thatuna hills and empties into the Palouse near Princeton, 

 Idaho) and the Shay meadows, which lie about four miles west of 

 Bovill, Idaho, on a small tributary of the Potlatch river. The region 

 leased was two miles wide and about twenty-two miles Ion?. 

 The two drainage basins, the Palouse and the Potlatch, are separated 

 somewhat east of the middle of this strip by the Mica mountains, a 

 small range of mountains which rise to an altitude of about 4500 feet. 

 The grazing region crossed over a large section of this ridge and these 

 mountains furnished one of the most valuable sources of food supply. 

 Part of the strip of land has been logged; some of it is now being cut; 

 but much of it is still in virgin forest. Here and there arc a few home- 

 steads and developed farms belonging to individual owners and cleared 

 and developed by them, but these interfered but little with the grazing 

 of the tract. The same region has been grazed by the McGregor Broth- 

 ers' sheep for a number of years in the past but had been ungrazed for 

 a year or two about 1 908 or 1 909. It is bisected for nearly its whole 

 length by public and private roads which follow more or less closely the 

 township line. It is made easily accessible by the Washington, Idaho & 

 Montana Railroad, a fully equipped railroad about fifty miles long, con- 

 necting the Palouse line of the Northern Pacific at Palouse Washington, 

 with the Elk River line of the Chicago, Milwaukee & Puget Sound 

 Railway at Bovill, Idaho, carrying legular passenger and freight traffic 

 as well as being used for the hauling of logs to one of the largest saw- 

 mills in the United States at Potlatch, Idaho. 



The sheep reached the summer range at the west end and moved 

 slowly eastward throughout the summer, reaching the Shay meadows at 



