Sheep camp days

Here's my favorite picture.

"Donna, and Spot, on the lease 1937 (about 50 miles north of Soda springs)" She would have been nearly 24. I can guess that the "lease" must have been the Bureau of Land Management property that they paid a small fee to use as sheep range. Now anyone who knows, please correct me if I've got this wrong. I understand that they would graze the sheep across southern Idaho from Soda Springs to Wendell two months in the summer. They would winter in Wendell and "Lamb" in the late winter, about February. Then head back to the stockyards somewhere near Pocatello or Soda Springs in the spring, where they would sell the sheep. Once I asked grandpa about having lived through the great depression. His answer was short. "We didn't hardly even notice the depression. We were out with the sheep, and it didn't make any difference to us. I do remember one year when the stock yard informed us that they hadn't brought in enough money from our sheep and that we owed them money! There were always men around looking for jobs, but none of them were any good workers. The men who would work already had jobs. You didn't want to hire any of the bums."

Then of course there was Grandma the hunter. Nathan might be a little squeamish, but obviously not Grandma.


Whenever I try to do dutch oven cooking I think of Grandma in the sheep camp. Her friend Evelyn told the story of her trying, without success to make bake a chocolate cake. Every time it would fail, so she would go bury it. One day the dogs dug one up and drug it into camp. Donna was so embarrassed. When Renny found out she didn't know how, he taught her to bake a chocolate cake.
I remember the green camper that sat in the back yard and looked like a sheep trailer to me, but Evelyn tells that they lived in a Tee Pee while on the range. Usually 15 miles from any roads, back into the Caribou National Forest. Everything was packed in on horseback