A couple of months ago we spent a day in Sun Valley. It was the weekend of the Trailing of the Sheep festivities. Trailing of the Sheep is a special celebration recognizing one of the rituals of ranching in the West, that of bringing the animals in from summer pasture.
It happened to be the weekend of our first snow storm this past fall, and we seriously considered turning around and heading home before we even got as far as Arco. It turns out that the snow storm was considerably less intense the farther west we traveled.
I had signed up to attend a writer’s symposium, “Women writing & living the West”. This was the first year this symposium was offered. Diane Josephy Peavey, author of Bitterbrush Country, Living on the Edge of the Land, was a co-chairman of the event. In the past I had attended a couple of other workshops where she was on the program and have read and enjoyed her book. I highly recommend it to anyone, especially women who are new at living on the land.
Teresa Jordan, moderator of the event and an award-winning author of several books, said, in her opening statement: “[Through writing we are] celebrating our history and our culture. Stories are the owners manual for our lives. If we don’t tell these stories they will be told by others who don’t understand either our history or our culture.”
Dianne Josephy Peavey advised us that “you will forget things if we don’t write them. No one else can do it for you.” She also brought out that ranching families work together – no one is left behind, quite different from jobs in town.
This turned out to be an interesting day with women from many states, telling their stories of ranching. A lot of them are involved with sheep, but some have cattle, and some have both. Quite a number of these women are owners of ranches, and they talked of the problems they face.
Many women at this symposium told their stories of struggles, heartaches, and challenges. But there were also uplifting stories of challenges faced and won, of helping each other, of overcoming the odds and being able to hold their heads up high among their male counterparts.
Agriculture is still mainly male dominated, and one of the last big businesses to accept women as leaders and equals in their domain. However, this is slowly changing.
One of the major things that make the business of agriculture different from other big business is that the CEO of a ranching or farming operation does not wear a suit and tie and sit behind a desk all day. The majority of times that person, male or female, is dressed in jeans or overhauls and boots, sitting on the seat of a big truck or tractor or in the saddle on a horse. Working at the desk takes place at night when all of the other work is done, and usually when everyone else is in bed.
This symposium wasn’t to encourage women to take over the ranch, but to encourage all of us to write our stories, to share what it means to live in the West, to write the history of the land we live on. It wasn’t a time to complain about what should have been, or what could have been, but a time to reevaluate what our position as women is in preserving our histories.
Because of family commitments, Boyd and I weren’t able to stay and see the actual trailing of the sheep. However, we were able to watch and enjoy some of the dog trials. We missed a lot of the activities of the weekend, but we saw enough to feel the excitement and to resolve to go back next year and stay the entire weekend. I would recommend attendance to anyone!
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