The Deseret Live Stock Company in northern Utah was organized and incorporated in January 1891. “Deseret” is a Book of Mormon word for “honeybee,” a symbol of industry. Brigham Young and many of the early Utah pioneers hoped that the Territory of Utah would become a vast state named Deseret. Those early settlers knew that if they were to succeed in the high dry country of the Great Basin, they would have to work and cooperate like honeybees. In 1896 the Territory of Utah became a state named Utah, in recognition of the ancestral home of the Ute Indians. The...

The elderly Will Sorensen was at my side, and I was at the wheel of the black Chevrolet pickup as we wound our way up the dirt road. I was listening, asking a question now and then, and also mulling over what Walter Dansie, general manager of the Deseret Live Stock Company, had told me a few days earlier in the company office in Salt Lake City. My major job would be to take over the day-to-day management of their forty thousand sheep, plus their lambs, in twenty-six summer herds on the 250,000-acre Home Ranch in northeastern Utah. The ranch...

Breakfast at the shearing corral was substantial. Either ham or bacon and eggs were served, along with hash brown potatoes, hotcakes or hot biscuits, cooked or cold cereal, and stewed prunes or fresh-canned fruit such as peaches, pears, or apricots. The pretty high school girl kept the bowls and platters filled, replenished the syrup and canned jam, and made sure everyone got filled up to last until noon.

Our crew had the herd completely separated before the shearing started at 8:00 a.m. Will told me that while the lambs were in a corral by themselves, we had to carefully look...

With shearing completed, it was time to close up the houses at the shearing corral and move to summer headquarters in the high country. The sheep operation was responsible for a summer fencing crew of six husky highschool-age boys, a man cook, and Bill Watts as fence crew foreman. Bill had worked for the company for several years before going off to fight in the U.S. Army in the Pacific area in World War II. He was in his early thirties, unmarried, and was a man of great energy and ability. He was muscular and trim, five feet ten, and...

During that first week of September, while we were still living on the summer range, Will Sorensen and I went to the Home Ranch to get a pickup load of baled hay. Ralph Moss told us that he did not have a bale of hay on the place. The hay was all stacked loose, but he would hook up a team to the oldtime baler and bale a pickup load for us. There was a team of horses harnessed and standing in the barn, and we could use them for a while before they went back out into the fields....

In October, when the market lambs and cull sheep had been shipped east, Will Sorensen and I were discussing the work still to be done. I told Will we had 41,800 ewes and replacement-ewe lambs as we prepared for the winter. He told me that I should put these in fifteen herds for the winter, about 2,750 to 2,800 in each herd. He liked to put 500 to 600 ewe lambs in each winter herd. I told him we had 7,800 replacement-ewe lambs, and the way he had done it in the past would work again that year. Earlier, I...

The Deseret Live Stock Company’s winter sheep headquarters was at the main ranch in Skull Valley, located in the old townsite of Iosepa, 20 miles south of the Great Salt Lake. “Skull Valley?” I muttered to myself. Just the name Skull Valley stirs the imagination. What kind of skulls? Ancient buffalo skulls? Skulls of wild mustangs? Or could it be human skulls? I had been told that long ago, Skull Valley was a sacred burial ground for Indians. I conjured up visions of all of these and still wondered.

Skull Valley runs south from the lakeshore and is over forty...

December 15 and 16 were the days when the rams were scheduled to join the ewe herds for the six-week breeding season. The rams in the “buck feedlot” at the ranch were being fed plenty of grass/alfalfa hay, along with some grain, and were in strong breeding condition. They had to be. Some of them would walk thirty miles to the most distant herds. We started them on the fourteenth. Will had previously advised me that it was the responsibility of our two riders to drive the rams out to the herds, so I followed through. On the thirteenth, Joe...

Glen Hess did lots of riding, knew the country where everybody’s cattle grazed, and knew where most of the hundreds of wild horses “hung out.” He always conferred ahead of time on things we did together. We butchered another twenty-one hogs on February 20, while the nights were still freezing. This process was a repeat of the one in December.

That winter our family became acquainted with some enjoyable people. Jess and Leona Charles owned and operated a restaurant, motel, and service station on U.S. Highway 40, a few miles west of Grantsville. Whenever we left Skull Valley and went...

When our family arrived at Wahsatch, the last herd had been unloaded off the railroad, and the sheep were grazing toward their lambing range. It was noticeably cooler here, at a 6,800-foot elevation, than down in Skull Valley. It was exhilarating, driving over the rolling hills for the three miles from the railroad station to the shearing corral. It was May, and we’d been gone half a year. It seemed as if we’d been gone only a week, except now it even smelled like spring. The grass was up six inches. The creeks were overflowing, the reservoirs full. It was...

In July 1947, it was a marvelous, exhilarating experience to be back on the gently rolling ridges of the 9,000-foot-high summer range, fragrant with wildflowers, conifer trees, quaking aspens, and abundant grass. Kathryn said this was beautiful, but the living conditions were not easy for a family with two small children and expecting another. She was right. I told her we could handle this situation for now, and things would get better for us as time went on. That summer, I did the work of the north rider in addition to being foreman over the whole sheep operation. I saddled...

I was awakened at 5:00 a.m. by loud knocking at the door. When I opened it, Glen Hess told me that Kathryn had just phoned, and that we had a new baby boy, born November 5, 1947. She said everything was O.K., and that the baby weighed nine pounds. I thanked Glen, and told him I would call Kathryn later that morning. Now wide awake, I was thankful and happy. We had decided on the name Dale Conrad if it was a boy. When the crew gathered over at the cookhouse at six thirty for breakfast, there were some of...

Will told Kathryn and me that he was going to town for a couple of weeks. He had eaten most of his meals, particularly breakfast and supper, with us for the past two years, and we missed him. Also, Austin Christofferson recently decided that he had enjoyed the far-out country long enough, and returned to his hometown, Spring City, to live. This left Kathryn cooking only for our family, except when company came. When Will returned, he was towing a new mobile home, and had an attractive gray-haired lady at his side. He introduced her as his wife, Vera. Kathryn...

The winter of 1948–49 was the winter of the “big snow” throughout much of the West. It was my third winter as sheep foreman for the Deseret Live Stock Company. The feed on much of the winter range was extremely short, and to make matters worse, too much snow was piling up. It was a good thing Will Sorensen had married Vera and decided to stay on and give me counsel and help as needed. Will had parked their mobile home at the ranch in Skull Valley. He and Vera were now living in the house where Kathryn and...

The snow continued to fall. The two D7 Caterpillars and drivers arrived from Evanston. One was transported to the ranch in Skull Valley, and one went directly to the west side of Cedar Mountain. For the immediate future, Will Sorensen would take primary responsibility for the herds of sheep in Skull Valley, and I would work to get feed to all seven herds on the west side of Cedar Mountain. The day after the Cats arrived, there was another heavy snowfall. Returning from the west side of Cedar Mountain, I found the road up Skull Valley closed, absolutely blocked with...

On the west side of Cedar Mountain, at the edge of the flat area at the mouth of Quincy Canyon, lay the rusted-out shell of what was once a 2,000-gallon horse-watering trough. It had been installed in the early 1900s, when the Standard Horse and Mule Association grazed several hundred horses year-round in this area. This horse association had their last roundup in the late 1920s. Originally, they piped water down to the flat from Quincy Spring, about a half mile up the side of Cedar Mountain. The underground pipeline had long since gone the way of the water trough...

When Mr. Dansie came to the summer range a couple of weeks later, I pulled him aside for a conference. I told him word had come to me that Will Sorensen blabbed around Spring City that he really wanted to retire, but couldn’t, because now he had to train another new sheep foreman. I said, “If you fellows plan to let me go on account of last winter’s sheep losses, I need to know.” Mr. Dansie was totally surprised that Will had talked and that now I knew. He said after that bad winter of deep snow and poor feed,...

One day, Glen Hess told me there were more than three hundred wild horses within twenty miles of the ranch. A couple of fellows who were experienced in rounding up wild mustangs were coming the next day and would spend two or three days gathering horses. They’d have a Piper Cub airplane to maneuver the wild bands in close to the ranch. Then Glen and the cowboys would get them running west, down the outside of the two-mile-long north pasture fence. Glen went on to tell me that when the mustangs rounded the corner of that long fence, they’d run...

The inventory count of ewes for December 31, 1950, showed 38,222 in Utah and 2,025 in California, for a total of 40,247. The cattle inventory was 5,058. The weather was favorable, an easy winter. At the annual stockholders’ meeting in Salt Lake City on March 26, 1951, Mr. Dansie reported that the sheep were in the best condition he had ever seen. At this point, Will and Vera Sorensen were in Florida for several months. He was helping with the land and water development on the Florida property. I lived in a new rubber-tired campwagon at the ranch, but drove...

During early November 1951, before shipping to the winter range, Mr. Dansie had confided to me that in a month the company would like to send Kathryn and me to the National Woolgrowers’ Convention, scheduled for December 4 through 7, in Portland, Oregon. They would bring Will and Vera Sorensen out of retirement in Spring City to accompany us, and we’d travel on the railroad. Kathryn and I spent an afternoon in Salt Lake City finding respectable attire.

We invited Will and Vera for dinner at our Granger home the day of departure, and it was a pleasant reunion. All...

I left a day early to receive the sheep at Wahsatch, and stopped in Salt Lake City to give the sheep counts and the schedule for shipping at Timpie, to Mr. Dansie. He told me that when he saw some of the herds a couple of weeks ago, they looked good; the winter loss was much lighter than in the old days. I replied that we now had four corrals on the west side of Cedar Mountain and five corrals in Skull Valley. We could get a big truck to all of them, except the corral at Cane Spring, on...

At summer headquarters, Mr. Dansie informed me that the Deseret Live Stock Company was in the beginning stages of changing ownership. He had been told we should not put any more money into this new house. The buyers were successful businessmen, mostly from Salt Lake City. They were organizing a syndicate of a dozen or more investors to purchase the company. Will had previously told me that occasionally a few shares of company stock changed hands, at $14 per share. Mr. Dansie said that the new buyers offered President Henry D. Moyle nearly twice the going price. They would pay...

The April sun was beating down as I drove my Jeep pickup west across Skull Valley, heading for Fred Cordova’s camp at the foot of Cedar Mountain, near Henry Spring, about four miles north of Eight-Mile Spring. I pulled up to camp, and Fred stepped out. I told Fred about the dates for shipping sheep off the winter range, and the herds scheduled for each day, so he would know who was just ahead of him, and who would be following. This was to prevent the herds from mixing. We visited a few minutes, shook hands, and I left. He...

I had invited Mr. and Mrs. Malecote to make a visit to the summer range while we were still at the shearing corral. In about a week they arrived, just after noon. They had already eaten lunch and could stay overnight. After a two-minute tour of the rustic facilities, they chose to sleep upstairs in the new, unfinished house. Bill Malecote asked me why we hadn’t finished the house on the inside. I explained that last year Mr. Dansie told me to quit working on it. He said that the company was in the process of changing ownership, and he...

Because of the feed shortage on the winter range, shipping was delayed by two weeks for the Nevada herds and even longer for those going to Skull Valley. We had kept only 3,200 replacement-ewe lambs, and our total inventory was now 37,000. The newly hired sub-foreman going to Nevada was “Big Joe” Guerricabeattia, six feet four inches tall, a dark, handsome Basque from Spain who had worked several years for Hatch Brothers, a close neighbor on the Utah summer and winter ranges. He had recently quit the Hatch outfit, and was “looking.” However, I talked to Alvin Hatch before offering...

After leaving the Deseret Live Stock Company I lost no time in contacting Ivan Johnson, manager of his own insurance agency for Pacific National Life in Salt Lake City. Some time previously, he had suggested that if I ever left the Deseret Live Stock Company, he would be pleased to have me go to work for him. Mr. Johnson conducted a training session for me and other new agents. I completed the first year of the LUTC (Life Underwriters Training Course), was making a living, and learning a lot.

Mr. Johnson gave me a quota to sell by June 1,...