Step Back in Time

From the October 1929 National Wool Grower Magazine

A LINCOLN STORY

Said a woolgrower: ?I don?t see why they are making all this fuss about a new system of wool marketing. We are getting along all right as it is.? This reminds me of an Abe Lincoln story told by Louis F. Swift:

Lincoln took a sack of corn to the mill to be ground for corn meal.

He said to the miller: ?That?s an awful old mill you have. My hound could eat that meal as fast as that mill ground it.?

?Yes,? answered the miller, ?but for how long??

?Until he starved to death,? responded Abe Lincoln.

From the October 1939 National Wool Grower Magazine

Sheep Fold: Big Gates on Little Hinges
By Joe Bush and Peter Spraynozzle

We are writing this column for the October issue of the National Wool Grower in the last week of September, cashing in on thirty days of sunshine from our credit in the First National Bank of Eternity.

Thirty days of autumn sunshine when the misty haze of Indian summer turns golden sunshine into mystery and the world into a dream; harvest time in field and orchard; harvest time when from the mountains and the foothills sheep and cattlemen bring home the flocks and herds ? tally them ? into the home pasture through ?big gates that swing on little hinges?; the cows and the ewes and the increase measured in calves and lambs.

Harvest time when the herders will account for the flocks and herds entrusted to their care. Spring and summer have come and gone since the herders left the home ranch for the summer range, and let it be said here, to the everlasting glory of the cowmen and sheepmen who ride the range for hire, that few, very, very few in the history of the sheep and cattle industry have ever betrayed a trust.

As I write this column for the National Wool Grower, I am sitting in the backyard of my Sheepfold home. The box elders leaves are drifting down; birds up in the branches are chirping and chattering, ?rounding up? for the long flight. To the south, garden spiders spin their webs. Through an opening in the trees, the sun sends down a long finger of sunlight to smack me between the shoulder blades. In the grass under my chair on two square feet of earth, there is creeping life, bugs and insects of which man knows little and cares less; crawling down the garden path is a caterpillar now, next year a butterfly.

It is not my intent to write here and tell in feeble words and stammering sentences the glorious picture that is everywhere for the eye to see and photo on the film of the mind. A new picture with every flicker of the eyelid; a picture that never was, never will be transferred to canvas and framed and hung in great galleries of the world to win the applause of those who love art.

O! They?ll see a picture sure, but not the picture that the grand old artist king, the Sun, paints and hangs on his mighty canvas up yonder on the canyon walls. The life, the lights, the shadows, the soft wind that moves the grass, the flowers, the branches of the trees, mixing the colors above the brown earth, the gray rocks; the movement of the scrub oak and the sage; the tall spiral of the cottonwood casting its long shadow; the quivering aspen grove, the acres of wild flowers moving in the wind; the shadow of a passing cloud, the bird and animal life of the range ? all that and more for the eye of man to see, but never to be transferred to canvas by the hand of man.

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