(bright music) - [Narrator] The cruel massacres that once ravaged Colorado's
vast pasture lands have left behind few
memories of the fighting men and innocent victims in the
state's longest conflict. - [Patty] The Sheep and Cattle
Wars are a disturbing episode in Western American history. - [Andrew] The Sheep
and Wattle Wars raged the length of public
land in Colorado on both sides of the
continental divide, from the New Mexico border
all the way to Wyoming. - [Zebulon] Between
1885 and 1934 we see cattlemen, we
see sheepmen murdered. There's truly
blood on the range. - [Narrator] But these
pastoral battlefields could also be a paradise for raising the fatted
calf and lamb... for making a home and a life. - I grew up following
the sheep, basically, just like my father
did and my mother. It was in our blood. - Our family's
been producing beef in western Colorado
for five generations. - [Narrator] Although it
was an undeclared war, it became an all out
struggle for survival between the factions that
fenced each other out or trampled each other's rights. - [Dan] They fenced everything. Barbed wiring fences put
an end to that free range. - [Shirley] We have Hispanic
families in the valley who have prospered and
survived all of that, and still today have their land. In our family, that
wasn't our story. - [Patty] Anybody who was
planning to be nostalgic for the colorful old
days of the west, will just have to get over that. - [Narrator] Even today,
hostility still haunts Colorado over the senseless slaughter
of animals and people. It's a legacy of
hatred and healing from the great civil
conflict that became infamous as The Sheep and Cattle Wars. - [Male Announcer] This
program was made possible by The History Colorado
State Historical Fund. - [Female Announcer]
Supporting projects throughout the state to
preserve, protect and interpret Colorado's architectural
and archeological treasures. History Colorado
State Historical Fund. Create the future,
honor the past. - [Male Announcer]
With support from the Denver Public
Library, History Colorado, and the Colorado Office of
Film, Television and Media. With additional support
from these organizations and viewers like you. Thank you. (adventurous music) - [Narrator] In 1873, the
scientist, Ferdinand Hayden, followed his successful
geologic and geographic survey that made Yellowstone
the first national park by turning his attention
to mapping Colorado. Hayden thought it would
be the next best place for the rapid expansion of
railroads and agriculture. But the other experts
on his expedition saw little practical use
for what they described as the stunted sage
brush and alkaline soils of the Western Slope. And a New York Times
correspondent on the trip also dismissed it as a desert. - They reported back
that it was a place unfit for human habitation, that it was absolute desolation, that there is absolutely no way anything could grow or
prosper in the valley. - [Narrator] Although
the landscape didn't look very promising,
there was plenty of it. And after the U.S. government forced the Ute people out
of Western Colorado in 1881 settlers saw it as
free for the taking. - [Zebulon] We don't have
much vegetation per acre, but we do have a lot
of acres of land. Agriculture's always been
one of Colorado's top, top industries.
And for many years, ranching survived by having
an abundance of open land. At the end of the Civil War, the United States appetite
really shifts away from pork and really is
interested in beef. Beef turns in to the
all-American food. And as expansion moves to the
west, pigs don't do very well. Cattle is a food source
that does do well in these really dry regions
of the American west. - After the Civil War
there's a lot of cattle roaming around Texas and it's been disrupted
and it's chaotic so there's a lot
of opportunities to
seize that cattle and to start bringing
the cattle north. - [Zebulon] Taking
advantage of that water, taking advantage of
the wide open spaces, and pretty soon,
cattle ranching becomes the dominant industry
in Western Colorado. - Certainly that was
the big economic driver in the area at that
time, was the beef. It was certainly needed here
by the miners that were here. And the community, as it began
to grow, had an appetite. - [Narrator] And with
a growing country that was hungry for all the meat the new Western Colorado
Railroads could deliver, the cattle barons were
even more ravenous for a bonanza of beef raised on cheap land
with flourishing feed and flowing water. - Millions of
acres of open land. Millions of acres that
nobody has any claim to. Millions of acres of land
owned by the federal government that nobody is currently using. - [Janie] Water was abundant
and the grass was green and it just seemed
like a perfect place. - [Narrator] Especially
for the early trailblazers who made Colorado into
cow country by enforcing one of those unwritten, but
ironclad, codes of the west. - [Zebulon] We started
developing a system of first in time,
first in rights. But basically what it says
that if you were a rancher and if you came to an
area, that area is yours. But this first in
time, first in right also came with a problems. Because there's no
true legal vessel to give you the
rights to that land. - [Narrator] That put the law
on the side of the farmers who were backed by Abraham
Lincoln's 1862 Homestead Act, and the free-ranging
sheepherders who took their own license
to graze on public lands. - [Zebulon] Cattle
ranchers found themselves fighting on two fronts. One was from new
operations coming in and people homesteading the land from people actually
farming the area. They also saw competition from
the sheep industry coming. And so pretty soon, we start finding ourselves
in the range wars. - Really the conflict
focuses almost completely on winter grazing, and
you simply cannot have cattle and sheep in the
same place at the same time without conflict. - Those skirmishes were constant and it was really about range. And that was about grass,
and it was about water, and so it was about survival, and the cattlemen saw everything
the sheepmen stood for as a threat to their
continued survival. - [Narrator] And the more
their flocks prospered, the more sheepmen,
like Teofilo Trujillo, were thought of as a threat. - My great-great-grandfather,
Teofilo Trujillo, came up with livestock. He came up through San Luis, and then moved up into the
area by the sand dunes. He wanted to raise
sheep and at the time lots of the Hispanic families
were doing the sheep raising. They lived in an adobe house. It was one of the nicest
houses, they said, in the area. They had stained glass windows. We know that it was one
of the largest ranches in this part of the valley. They were growing big,
and they were successful, they were prospering,
they were a threat. The cattlemen were saying that the sheep were grazing
too close to the ground, and so that was destroying
some of the pasture. They weren't able to graze their
cattle like they wanted to, they felt like it was
harmful to the land. - That's what
starts the clashes. Herded sheep, if you've got a band of a
thousand or two thousand ewes, and you get into an area,
you can graze the area. You can take the sheep right
where you wanna take 'em. Now the cattle usually
will scatter out, and you'll have a
few head everywhere. If many bands of sheep
come into an area, they can wipe the area out. Then there's nothing
left for the cattle. - [Zebulon] Now we have
massive competition for the same land. You have cattle ranchers who feel that they
were there first, and that this is their
right to that land. You have sheep herders
coming in, filing homesteads, or moving into the
lands, and they have just as much of a legal
right as the cattlemen. - My father came
from Greece in 1912. They ended up in Price, Utah, and they worked
in the coal mine. He came over with his
brother and slowly they accumulated enough
money to buy a few sheep. They didn't own any land, but they just went
where the grass was. They trailed them by foot. My mother used to
say he trailed, he had overshoes at one
time, and they wore out. That's how it was,
how the sheep business got started in our family. - It was really easy for the first couple of
cattle operators to say, well, this is my free grass
and this is my opportunity, but we can't have the third and
fourth other people come in. Those are range pirates,
those are people coming in, coming into our area,
and we were here first. - [Narrator] Once barbed
wire was patented in 1874, it spread its thorny
tangles into Colorado. Suddenly, the warring forces
became even more entrenched on either side of the fences
that scarred the land. While these barriers saved the
farms of many homesteaders, they also shaped a
chaotic battlefield for many decades to come. - The homesteaders
started coming in, started claiming the
better parcels of land that had the water, then the
big outfits would come in and start to push their way
around, and then the little guys would start rustling
a few cattle, then
you had barbed wire. - Barbed wire had put
an end to the range, the free range that you
had to have for cattle, and you could fence
off the water sources, because some homesteader
homesteaded that, and so there was no
water for those cattle. They fenced everything, it totally just
destroyed the ability for the cattle barons
or the cattlemen to even have what had
become the norm for them for that 30, 40
year period before. It put an end to that free
range, barb wiring fences, there's just no
question about it. - [John] It made it
hard for the cattle, the big cattle outfits, to
survive because they didn't have the free reign or the trail
from one end to the other without going through a
homestead or something, they wouldn't let 'em go. - [Narrator] Even after
the Superintendent of the U.S. Census of 1890 declared
that the West had finally been settled...a free-for-all
brawl was about to break out between the big
cattle companies, smaller ranchers,
farmers, and sheepmen. (dramatic music) - By the 1890s,
it's a grim scene. Some of that is mystifying because by some views of
Western American history, that's when the frontier
closed, in 1890, when things calmed down, when
a more orderly form of living and being with one's
neighbors settled in. - [Narrator] Not everybody
was ready to be neighborly, or to give up their
wild Western ways, especially in the face of
rumored invasions by foreigners trailing sheep across
traditional cattle pastures. - The 1890s were
especially bloody. During the 1890s, there's
a big worry amongst the Montrose and Mesa
and Garfield counties that thousands upon
thousands of sheep were going to enter
the area from Utah And so the cattlemen in the area decided to take this
issue into their own hands and, sadly, this oftentimes
was in a very violent way. One day, in September of 1894, John Holbert came
to Grand Junction to celebrate the
Peach Day festivities, and he left his
sheep herd behind. He had about 3,400 sheep. And on that day, masked men, about 40 of them, went
up to the sheep herd, and they massacred all
3,400 of the sheep. Some were clubbed to death, some had their
throats slit open, some had their legs broken
so they could not move. Many of them were
actually suffocated by having other
sheep on top of them. John Holbert came back and
he was absolutely devastated. And he was financially ruined. - [Narrator] It
was just the kind of screaming and
bleeding headlines that would sell local papers, and start their
own war of words. - Many of the
newspapers in Fruita took a lot of sympathy
for the cattlemen. They're the ones
building a community, they're the ones paying
taxes in this area. Who are the sheep
herders who coming in and taking their land
and their opportunity? Some of the newspapers
in Grand Junction saw it slightly
different and they said this is still the
destruction of property, this is still taking
something from somebody else. To create even more competition on this limited resource
of great grazing areas, in the 1890s, there's a big push to pull out lands from grazing
and create timber reserves. - [Narrator] Then
in February of 1905, President Teddy Roosevelt,
who had been a cowboy and became an early
conservationist, signed an act of
congress that created a more powerful and
controversial US Forest Service. Its expanded federal
control of timber lands, grazing rights and
fees, was described by one cattle-friendly
newspaper editor as semi-socialistic nonsense. - [Patty] Theodore Roosevelt
was a former rancher, and he had seen things go well, and he had seen things go badly from unrestrained resource use. - Teddy Roosevelt
believed in, quote, "small farmers and
small ranchers." So he really wanted the
Homestead Act to succeed. He did not want the
large Texas cattle herds that had damaged so much
of Colorado's ecosystems. Neither did he want the
large Basque sheep herds. - So the regulation of
grazing on the forest reserves and the creation of the
Forest Service to govern that, that's a Roosevelt project. But that, in some ways, adds
to the pressure cooker quality because there's less
access to public lands. - [Narrator] And more reason for men like George
Woolley of Craig, to try sheep as a means
of economic survival even if it meant betraying
his cattle background and risking retribution, which came swiftly at the
hands of night raiders. - It was about income and it was about making a
living in a difficult area that had long, cold
winters and short summers, and he got into
the sheep business. And so he had put sheep
up on the public domain, up in the forest,
for one season. Had a lot of 'em wintering
out here just east of Craig and all of a sudden,
they thought, we aren't gonna let that happen. So they cut the wires
coming into the ranch, they cut the telephone,
and there was only one boy by the name of Lewis Everly
taking care of the sheep. Woolley was actually in Denver getting more sheep to
come in in the spring and so they actually
clubbed all the sheep. I think only one or two out
of that whole group survived. - [Narrator] The nation
was fascinated and aghast at the accounts of such
massacres...and public opinion was swaying against acts
of cattle driven violence, but the sheep--and their
many immigrant herders-- were still easy targets for
slaughter and propaganda. - [Dan] One of the names
that they call sheep is range maggots, which is certainly not a
complimentary term for sheep. They'd hate sheepmen because
of what they stood for, and everything about 'em. - You have a lot of Basque, you have a lot of
Mexican-Americans, you have a lot of Greeks
running the sheep industry. And so we do see racial tension. We see that the cowboys, the
cattle, that's all American. The sheep? Well, that's something
coming into our lands, that's something
being introduced not by the red
blooded Americans. - The cattle moving through
the state are often Texas herds and Texas cowboys were
extraordinarily racist, extraordinarily hard
to get along with, hard drinking, hard riding, and very used to pushing
Hispanic herders around. - There was one incident where
these cowboys came through and killed some of the sheep,
quite a few of the sheep, and the prized ram. There was a prized ram that
Teofilo was very proud of and that was killed. The head of the prized ram
was hung up for them to see, like look, this is your warning. They were going to a hearing
over what had happened and no one was ever
found guilty for that. The family was in the
wagon coming home, very very cold at night,
and could see flames. The house was totally destroyed. They lost, you
know, their house, they lost some of
their outbuildings. That was what finally made
them decide we can't stay here, because their lives
were threatened. And after they had been there
for 40 years, working hard, they had to leave. Then then decided to sell. Everything that they did to
build things from nothing, to build one of the largest
ranches in Colorado. They had to leave, no
one ever had to pay for what they had done. - How bloody were the
Sheep and Cattle Wars? Harder on the sheep. Thousands of sheep were killed. We will never have an accurate
account of how many herders who may have been shot,
or wounded, or killed. - Once we start seeing
very gruesome events, once we start seeing occasions where sheep herders
are being massacred and herds of sheep
are being massacred on lands traditionally set
aside for sheep grazing, we start having people question, well, what really is right here? - These things were
news at the time. News at the time saying that
this innocent elderly man who was upstanding citizen, the news was that
what was happening down in the southern states was
now coming up to the valley, like, we're having
this in the valley, look what happened
to Teofilo Trujillo. Look what happened. - If you look at the
chaos in Western Colorado at the end of the 19th century and the start of
the 20th century, then you don't have to
walk around bewildered, asking yourself, why is there so much
federal authority over land? Where did that come from? Why did that seem
like a good idea? - The issue is finally
largely resolved in 1934 with the passage of
the Taylor Grazing Act. Edward T. Taylor was a
Western Colorado congressman. He saw that this issue
really needed to be resolved, that there's no
way we can continue having this conflict
out on the range. And so Taylor proposed
a very radical idea and that was let's take this
approximately 142 million acres that had not been homesteaded
upon and let's remove that from the public access
for homesteading and let's create
grazing districts. Let's re-draw the map. - [Narrator] There
were low expectations and less support for
Taylor's revolutionary act... but the First Director of
Grazing, Farrington Carpenter, who was described as having
the peculiar qualifications of being both a cattleman
and an attorney, showed the wisdom of Solomon by convening a summit
in Grand Junction where he urged
the warring forces to split up the
contested territory to their own satisfaction... or let the federal government
draw the lines for them. - He sat down with the
sheepmen and the cattlemen, and he said, "We're going to figure out
these grazing districts. I want ten representatives
from the sheep industry, ten from the cattle industry and we are going
to take this map, and we are going to divide
it up." And he got by. And by saying either I can
make this decision for you and people on the East Coast
can make this decision for you or you can help me
make this decision. And so it was the people that helped create
these grazing districts. It was the ranchers on the land. (peaceful music) - Bringing the government,
if you will, into it, I think that helped to educate
producers to some extent. I'm sure that it also felt like they were being
choked for a while. - I used to, in my Western
American history classes, I used to have a competition
for the most significant event in Western American history,
and because I wanted to win, I often, for myself, chose the
Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, because it is the
statement that says we will have to work
in a different manner. - [Zebulon] The Taylor
Grazing marks the end of the Sheep and Cattle Wars. For the most part,
the very violent days, the days of the
cattlemen saying that we're going to stop sheep
from coming into Colorado even if the blood flows all the
way up to the horses bridle, are largely done. - [Narrator] After so
many years of acrimony on the grazing lands of
Colorado, cattlemen and sheepmen finally realized cattle and
sheep can graze together. - [Dan] You have
more people realizing it makes economic
sense to have sheep, that these two animals can
actually sort of benefit themselves and each other if
you work on not overgrazing, because sheep eat things
that cattle don't eat. - [Narrator] And
season after season, the meat and wool of the sheep made their shepherds rich
in money and in land. - The sheepman gets a
lamb crop once a year plus a wool crop, so
the sheep guys made six times the money
the cattleman has. They just bought banks,
they bought ranches, they bought thousands of acres. They will buy
high-mountain meadows and those high-mountain
meadows will, by the 1970s, become the basis for
some of Colorado's most elaborate and
expensive ski areas. - I grew up following the sheep just like my father
did and my mother. You know, basically,
it was in our blood. I like moving cattle. I just liked being
with the cows. It was a little
more satisfactory 'cause I had more hands-on,
I could control it better. It fit my soul better
than the sheep did. - My grampa was one of
the very early innovators in running sheep
and cattle together. It was a management decision
to bring the sheep in and move the sheep through, particularly in the high
country on the forest, bring those sheep in and let
them graze off the poison, if you will, larkspur,
giant larkspur, some of those kinds of issues that were poison to the cattle. - [Narrator] In
the post-war period following the 1934
Taylor Grazing Act, the benefits of
conservation and regulation, and even cooperation
have created a less toxic and
hostile environment. - Nobody has to fear going to the Western
Slope in the 21st century, nobody has to fear
that they'll get caught in a crossfire between
cattlemen and shepherds. That's nothing to
take for granted. - [Narrator] For the casualties of the more then
40 year blood feud, some old wounds are still raw and suspicions still linger. - It does still hurt
because you think what if? If it had been something where they had been able to
hang on to their property, some Hispanic families did. You know, we have Hispanic
families in the valley who have prospered, who
have made it through and survived all of that and
still today have their land. In our family, that
wasn't our story. Because of the situation
and having to leave the way they did, they
were in a hurry to sell. - When we go out on these
ranges that are unfenced, down to the west here,
there's some hostility there. Sheepmen don't like to
see cattle on their range. Not at all. It's okay if they go on
somebody else's range but they don't want any
cattle on their range, I guarantee ya. It's alive out there. It's still alive, guaranteed. - [Narrator] Today, many
of the wars descendants have made their peace in this
land of droughts and bounties by sharing the labors of making a sustainable home on the range where cattle and sheep
are both appreciated. - My father in law,
they were out someplace, and found a stray lamb. So he took the stray lamb
and put it in the Cadillac, in the car, and somebody said what are you doing with
that lamb in your Cadillac? He said, well, that's that
lamb that bought this Cadillac, so he can ride in it, too. - [Janie] This is good country. We all say that we can
wean bigger calves, which we sell pounds,
we can wean big calves off the Uncompahgre
and out of the Unaweep. We talk about that a lot. So it is good feed, it's
a naturally a good feed. - [Connie] The sheep really,
they took care of the land. The herders, they knew
when to graze them, when not to overgraze them,
they took care of everything. - [Janie] We're doing our
best to sustain the resources in caring for the land and
caring for the animals. So I think those are some
really important pieces that have been passed from
generation to generation. - [Connie] We are
shepherds of the Earth and of the animals, too. And of our people, too. (peaceful music)
