Jan. 20, 2012

Herding the sheep down indian canyon

I seem to remember writing about this but have not been able to find it so here goes again and it’s not like I haven’t written twice about other things as well.

When I was young I used to love to go with my Uncle Mont and work with him on the Indian Canyon ranch. That is the ranch where mom and dad spent the first year of their marriage. We often had irrigation to do or hay to cut, rake, bale and haul. (When I was real young I went once when we hauled the hay loose and I was assigned to stomp the hay as the men threw it up onto the wagon. I got covered with hay leaves while doing it too. There was one day though when Lynn and I were asked by Mont to go with him and herd the sheep from the ranch to Duchesne.  It was only seven miles but I remember being pretty sore and stiff from being in the saddle all day since it took that long to move the sheep that seven miles. We herded them along the highway so we had to watch carefully  so that they would stay off of the road and not be in the way of any occasional cars that might come along. I learned the herding sheep was not real easy because when one decides to go across the road they all want to and they don’t care what’s coming. We did have Mont’s dog that helped a lot but even then we would have to hurry the horse around them to get hem back off of the road. Mostly however it was just a long time in the saddle because Mont wanted to let them eat while we were going as well which meant that we would just be sitting on the horse while we waited for the sheep to move a little further. It was a long day but I will always be glad that I had the chance to do it.