Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 3.djvu/245

Rh staples. J. Graham Hewison, of Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, thus started with the best 3,000 ewes as a wool growing flock money could then buy in Eastern Oregon, and kept it to the highest standard natural conditions would permit, and sold out at a fair profit when the pressure of population claimed his location for food production. His example was good for his day, except that it drew into the surrounding country other young Britishers with capital sufficient to buy a flock of sheep, and who. caring for neither citizenship nor land ownership, flourished for a season as grazing freebooters, sometimes impudently gleaning the grass of the American homestead settler up to their fences under circumstances which justified the latter's resentment and resistance to the imminent danger of both the property and the persons of these grazing scavengers. Indeed, it is safe to say that during the years of expansion of sheep husbandry over the portion of Oregon west of the Blue Mountains, more lives have been taken and more property destroyed over range feuds, provoked by a marauding spirit, than by the racial wars with the natives; and even in the last disturbance of the latter kind in Oregon, most of the lives lost were believed to be in revenge for injuries received or fancied, by the Cayuse Indians in strife for grass in the Blue Mountains between the native owners of hirsels of ponies and herders of the flocks of the white men. More sheep herders were murdered on the pony ranges of the Cayuse tribe, under cover of the "Piute raid," than of all other classes of men, and no one acquainted with local conditions believed that the murder of Mr. Jewett (himself a highly respected man and a leading flock master) was entirely clear of his line of business.

In these contests the numbers and the apparent effects of the close feeding of sheep on the pasturage have often