Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/243

Rh bearing lands of Nebraska. The mutton sheep trail in this direction kept as near as possible to the old Oregon trail over which the first sheep were driven west in 1844, until the close of the century, when local settlements and locally owned sheep and other stock, and especially locally owned watering places, so intervened that shipping by railroad had become the prevailing practice as most economical in 1892, and "trailing sheep" has fallen or is now falling into past methods. Up to 1890 stock sheep from Eastern Oregon were purchased and driven on foot to the ranges of Eastern Washington, Idaho, Montana, and mutton sheep reached Chicago via the feeding farms of Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa; but by 1892 buyers for North and South Dakota generally preferred to ship by rail.

The history of the occupation and development of Dufur and Heppner will indicate the general growth of well-watered sheep camps to towns and cities, and centers of wheat growing. The Dufur family, after some years conducting a dairy farm near Portland, concluded to change to sheep husbandry in the early '70s. They purchased