Four Hundred Sheep Went Over a Cliff. Then the Herder Vanished.
A band of sheep near Roslyn plunged 35 feet to their deaths. The hired man in charge was nowhere to be found, and the owner was left to survey the wreckage.
J. H. Smithson, of Ellensburg, met with a severe loss last Saturday. He had employed a man by the name of Byron Turner, late of California, to take charge of a band of sheep, and who had them up near Roslyn. In some way the sheep ran off a cliff about 35 feet high, and Mr. Kimball says from the looks he should judge that fully 400 sheep were killed by the fall. At first he thought Turner was under the sheep, supposing that he had tried to keep them from going over the bluff, and in so doing had been crowded off himself; but Monday morning Kimball became convinced that Turner had left for a climate more congenial to his health. Mr. Smithson left for the scene Tuesday.
“Mr. Kimball became convinced that Turner had left for a climate more congenial to his health.”
Kittitas County’s sheep economy depended on hired herders working remote ranges, where a single cliff could wipe out an owner’s season. The dry line about Turner seeking “a climate more congenial” is an old newspaper wink at a labor disappearance—a reminder that rural work has always mixed risk, migration and accountability.
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