Cowboys aren't supposed to own up to this but I have spent time with sheep. Not in the prurient sense of the character in Dirck Van Sickle's Montana Gothic, and not even in Montana. This was in the borderlands country south of American Falls, Idaho.I worked for a fellow named Barkdahl, and he ran sheep on government grazing in the higher lands above Rockland Valley where Highway 37 goes south. He had some of the best Basque sheepherder-dogs-horse teams that I ever ran into. Those sheepherders all lived out with the sheep in Sheep Camps like the one pictured here. These Conestoga Wagon-looking "camps" were probably among the first travel trailers. They were well equipped and could be pulled from graze to graze over some pretty serious terrain.
When I came up with the idea of walking the western borders I tried to find one to use as a portable base camp but these babies are not cheap these days. You can grab the one in this picture for a mere $35,000. Etsy, the web site with all the info, has some great pictures of the inside of this custom-built sheepwagon. The guy who built this camp, Jimmy Howard, lives in Seattle and displays his rustic art in all the posh western ski towns. I'll have to look him up.
Check out the Walk the Lines, Tell the Stories site too. I plan to put up another Tall Tale there soon. And hopefully some diagrams of sheep camps. In the meantime if you want to get some idea of what it is like to live in a sheep camp check out this true account.
I ended up with a little 16' RoadRunner trailer that isn't nearly as salty as a sheep camp but I got a deal on a new one for about 1/3 the price of Etzy's camp. Maybe I'll through up some diagrams of that, too, and we can compare them to the tried and true Basque floorplan.
