Golden Fleece Hughie Call Vintage Montana History Sheep Ranch Story A B Guthrie. Introduction by A. B. Guthrie. Beautiful cover art. Map on endpaper.
Book is in excellent condition with slight wear. DJ is in fair condition with some tears that have been repaired with tape. No markings to text. No remainder mark. DJ is protected in removable mylar cover. Ships in a box and packaged with care.
"Available again after almost twenty years, Hughie Call's GOLDEN FLEECE is an American classic, telling the story of life in the wild Montana sheep country with humor, perception and a fine sense of drama. When it first appeared Struthers Burt wrote of this book: "GOLDEN FLEECE is the best book about the life of a sheep rancher...I have ever read," and Lewis Gannett said, "The book leaves you with the feeling you've lived on the ranch and that you've had a part in its struggles, its failures and its successes."
A tenderfoot from Texas and a city girl at that, Mrs. Call married a Montana sheep rancher and went to live in the isolation of his mountain ranch. The life and the people were so strange to her that at times she felt despairing, but her love for her husband, her sense of humor, her insatiable curiosity and her feeling for growing things sustained her, and she grew to like the ranch and the life of the sheepherders.
Dudes and automobiles may have changed Montana somewhat, but the sheep ranchers and herders live as they always have: for their herds. Many are men who seem to be made for a life of loneliness, whose devotion to the herds is almost incredible in view of Montana winters, marauding bears and wolves, sickness and accident. The ordinary ewe has a prima donna's repertory of stubbornness and vanity. Panicked, she can cause a stampede or a pile-up, disasters that will eat up the profits of an entire year.
Everything, even the seasons, revolves around sheep. The year begins in the late fall when the ewes are driven to winter range and bred in December. After the late snow melts in spring, the herders gather the drop bands, and the lambing camps move from day to day across flower-studded pastures. In the choking heat of summer, the sheep are sheared. And in fall comes the end of the sheepman's year when a specially trained black ram leads the noisy lambs into boxcars for shipment to market.
In this lonely country Mrs. Call raised her sons and ran the ranch. She learned to read tracks so that she could tell who traveled a trail before her or what had happened to a herd. The story of her life in Montana makes GOLDEN FLEECE not only a vivid book full of human interest, but also a book full of fascinating details about one of the oldest and most picturesque of occupations."