The Great Sheep War: Seattle’s Political Flocks and the Independent Goats

Our enterprising fellow citizen, Mr. Northup, has just published a city directory which contains quite an amount of interesting historical and statistical information... But my object now is to give a few statistics on sheep and goat husbandry, as carried on in Seattle, which I presume neither of the other directories will touch upon.

There are at present kept here seven different flocks of sheep, looked after and tended by seven different shepherds, who train and discipline them to come and go at heck or call in a wonderful manner. Each flock has a separate fold when they are regularly put up and it is very seldom that a sheep of one fold ever strays off and gets into another fold. The sheep of each fold are distinguished by peculiar styles of docking and clipping. They have but one mark in common which indicates that each dock is a variety only of a breed that dates its origin back about two thousand years; this mark in common is a cross on the shoulders.

It is singular, and yet no more singular than true, that notwithstanding the different flocks can all be traced to one common origin, there exists an antipathy and repulsiveness between the different flocks, which drive and keep them asunder. These sheep have the reputation of being very docile, and their shepherds train them in a peculiar and stereotyped way, to a high degree of proficiency, but they never learn anything beyond that nothing original can be claimed for them. All the lambs, at a certain age, are told together and are subjected to the usual docking, marking and clipping process, and emasculation, which ever after, as a rule, renders them impotent to the exercise of a free or original thought or independent and self-reliant action, and sinks their individuality into the common mass of the homogeneity of the flock.

The shepherds are remunerated, of course, by fleecing the flock; but the flock has been so trained that all are willing to be fleeced. The term was, when the goats were compelled to run with the sheep, and submit to being fleeced with them, against their will; but they finally became so obstreperous, fractious and troublesome about being stripped of what little wool they had, that the shepherds concluded to turn them out of the fold and let them go.

And so it is now with the Seattle goats. They are roaming at large without a shepherd or fold; they are independent, self-reliant, free; each one is an individual sovereign—carries a stiff backbone and takes care of himself.

And there are also quite a number of Wolves in Seattle—not a few of them in sheep's clothing and when they are not with the dump or arms, they congregate mostly in the twin institutions on the opposite side of the hill... hunt on the public grounds, of human flesh and blood.