Not a lover, or even a fondness for sheep!

One evening I began to glance through the stories of ranchers in the Pioneer Stockman Ranch Histories, Vol XIX (year 2000).  There are many little snippets of information on the sheep industry found within these stories.  I had picked up the book to read about another person but got curious about the other ranchers within the pages of the tome. The first person in the book was C. Dilbert Pierce, a cattleman.  Now I’m not here to write about cattle, but sheep, and Pierce didn’t have sheep.  He had bought a small ranch east of Meyer on the Agua Fria River with a good portion of it being state lease land.  It just so happened that the state lease land had a sheep trail crossing it! In Pierce words, “The first year I learned why we bought this ranch perhaps on the cheap side.  One of the sheep drives from the Salt River Valley to Arizona high country went the length of the ranch.  The sheep cleaned up the grass and everything else edible as they passed through.  Today, the sheep are trucked — anyway we sold this place.” (pg. 7)  Clearly, Mr. Pierce did not have a fondness for sheep!  Unfortunately, Mr. Pierce does not state the year that he bought the ranch.  It will be another item to add to my list to determine a date, who he bought the land from and who bought it.  The reason this would be of interest is the that trail is still viable today and actually is the only one still in use.