The Shepherder's Wagon

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Across three feet of the rear was the bunk bed. It was raised about four feet from the floor with a large wooden drawer fitted under each end. A wooden table slid in and out under the center, and below this was a large storage space for boots, bed-rolls and anything else that wouldn't fit elsewhere. There were no stools or chairs. Instead, between the bed and washstand on one side and the bed and stove on the other, was a bench sixteen inches high and twelve inches wide, with a hinged top and a capacious interior. Dried and packaged food supplies, canned goods, and the like were stored on the stove side and the washstand bench held extra bedding, townclothes and other miscellany. To get into bed, you slid the table out of the way, stepped up onto a bench and just rolled in, trying not to bump your head on the low ceiling.

In the rear wall of the wagon, just above the bed, was a window. about eight inches up and down and sixteen inches wide. This provided light in addition to the sixteen inch square window in the front door. The rear window was hinged on one side so that you could have fresh air at night and cross-ventilation in warm weather. It also was an ideal port-hole from which to take a pot shot at a marauding coyote and maybe knock over an unsuspecting rabbit or sage hen. If the herder was single the window was bare glass, but if he had a wife there would be a dainty little film of ruffled curtain at both the front and rear windows.

Every week or perhaps two weeks if the grazing was good, the wagon tender would come around with mail and supplies and would use his team to haul your wagon to the next location while you and the dogs slowly moved the flock of sheep in his wake. Ideal locations were near water and good grazing. The Powder River country has lots of small streams, many so narrow you can step across them, yet containing water enough for trout which lurk under overhanging grassy banks for a reasonably-easy-to-catch change of diet.

In winter there was always plenty of fresh meat since it could be frozen and kept for long periods. But in summer one quickly tired of salt pork, bacon or "summer sausage" and welcomed a mess of trout, or a tender half-grown rabbit or prairie chicken.

My introduction to the sheep wagon as a mobile home goes back to an age when I was just graduating from flour sack dresses to a boy's shirtwaist and short pants. There were no schools in the thinly populated sheep country and so during the nine months of winter and books, father was alone on the range while the rest of the family lived in Casper and we three boys went to school. But with spring vacation and the new baby, we were off to the ranch for a summer of following the "woolies."

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