Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/241

Rh was also much a matter of experiment. Some owners sent to Scotland for shepherds and their collies; but to them the conditions were so new and wild—attempts to herd thousands in a band, where the herdsman had been trained to hundreds; he lived alone and did his own cooking, not seeing his owner more than once in two weeks, and sometimes not for the entire summer season; these imported herdsmen did not satisfy themselves nor their employers. The passage of the homestead law attracted the attention of squatters and others in Australia, and an immigration from there of practical sheep keepers set in, which was not entirely stopped by Australian lawmakers trying to better the land laws of the United States. These Australians took hold of the range situation much more readily than the Scotch, and some of them became, for a time at least, fairly successful flock masters; but were notably more harsh to their employees than Americans, and often themselves seemed to fall victims to the drink habit. In the end Americans made the best success, both as herders and flock masters. Not rarely a young man starting as herder ended as a wealthy sheep and land owning banker. Among these were sons of Oregon pioneer families and frontiersmen who had never handled sheep before. It seemed to make little difference where the man started from, or what his previous occupation or condition had been. The field was so inviting that men who proved to have no vocation for it entered it. Farms were sold or mortgaged west of the Cascade range, and the value lost in a few years in the range country, chiefly because of inadequate provision for winter feeding. In no case within the writer's knowledge was there failure where adequate winter feed was kept ready for a possible bad season. Thus it was that, though the range was strewn with business failures, development went on and