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The Woolly West

By Andrew Gulliford

Winner, 2019 National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Western Heritage Award for the Best Nonfiction Book Winner, 2019 Colorado Book Awards History Category, sponsored by Colorado Center for the Book.

In The Woolly West, historian Andrew Gulliford describes the sheep industry’s place in the history of Colorado and the American West. In the competition for grazing lands, the sheep industry was as integral to the history of the American West as any trail drive.

With vivid, elegant, and reflective prose, Gulliford explores: the origins of sheep grazing in the region; the often-violent conflicts between the sheep and cattle industries; the creation of national forests; the segmenting of grazing allotments with the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934; the challenges of ecological change and the politics of immigrant labor; and the conflicts between hikers and dogs guarding flocks that have again put the sheep industry on the defensive.

Gulliford also weaves an account of his personal interaction with what he calls the “sheepscape”— that is, the sheepherders’ landscape itself. Visiting with Peruvian immigrant herders and Mormon families who have grazed sheep for generations, he explores stone cairns assembled by shepherds now long gone, and ponders the meaning of arborglyphs carved into unending aspen forests.

The Woolly West is the first book in decades devoted to the sheep industry and breaks new ground in the history of the Colorado Basque, Greek, and Hispano shepherding families whose ranching legacies continue to the present day.