In the south west region of Idaho, it is said that John Hailey brought the first sheep into the Wood River Valley in the late 1860's. At that time, Idaho recorded a breeding sheep population of 14,000. As the mines began to play out in the Wood River Valley, the sheep industry filled an increasingly large role in the local economy. By 1890, there were a reported 614,000 sheep in Idaho. A 1905 newspaper photograph of a shearing plant in neighboring Picabo states that 95,000 sheep were sheared that week. In 1918, the sheep population reached 2.65 million*, almost six times the state's human population. (It was not until the 1970 census, after a large decline in the sheep industry and an influx of new residents, that human numbers finally exceed sheep in Idaho - 700,000 to 687,000.)

During this time, thousands of lambs were shipped by railroad from Hill City, Fairfield, Picabo, Bellevue, Hailey and Ketchum to markets around the west. As a major sheep center, Ketchum was second only to Sydney, Australia.

When Sun Valley was opening its winter ski resort in 1936, sheepman Jack Lane was holding forth at his general store in Ketchum. It served as the sheep center where ranchers congregated to swap stories about prices and weather. Today, the building is still located at the corner of Main Street and Sun Valley Road and houses Enoteca, a fine dining restaurant.

During the depression, when lamb prices plummeted, Lane was one of the few who extended credit to the sheepmen. It took some men four or five years to pay off their debts but Lane stuck by them. Of this famous gathering place Jack Lane's son Pete recalled, "They had telegrams come in daily with different livestock prices from Omaha, Chicago, Sioux City, Saint Joe, Kansas City and later on Denver and Ogden. It was a whole life of fraternity...there was tremendous competition -- not so much for the price you got, but the weight of your lambs and how good they looked. It was a real pride in doing business."

In this region of Idaho, the Scots, men like James Laidlaw, were among the first to settle into the sheep business successfully. Laidlaw arrived in the region with only the clothes he wore. He worked as a herder and took his pay in sheep. When he had gathered enough animals, he started his own operation in the Muldoon area bringing in relatives and friends from Scotland to homestead and to work with him. He went on to distinguish himself developing some of the finest lambs in the state including the Panama breed, which he created crossing a Lincoln ewe and Rambouillet buck. He is credited with bringing the first Suffolk sheep into Idaho. Today, the headquarters of the Laidlaw ranch has been incorporated into Flat Top Sheep Company, sheep outfit started by John Thomas (later U.S. Senator) in the 1920's. Today it is run by the third and fourth generation of Thomas' family, John and Tom Peavey.

In addition to the Scottish influence, the role of the Basques in the sheep industry was critical to its success. They began to arrive in the U.S. from their homeland in northern Spain in the mid-1850. They came in response to the gold rush but soon they began migrating around the west finding jobs as sheepherders. Their hard work and dependability made it possible for sheep operators to leave large numbers of sheep in lonely and remote mountain pastures in their attentive care. Many Basques stayed on in this country often beginning their own sheep operations - the Cenarrusas, Etcheverrys, Guerrys and Oxarangos among the others. Today, most Idaho herders are Peruvian. There are some Mexican, Chilean, and several Mongolian men as well

In 1997, the Wood River Valley began this proud tradition of honoring the history and heritage of sheep ranching in the region.

The Wood River Valley and the West were experiencing tremendous growth. Farms, ranches and open spaces were being lost to development at an alarming rate and economic losses were forcing families off the land.

“I was working on the Wood River Trail System, a paved Class I trail system, to connect all the communities in the Wood River Valley, explains former Executive Director of the Trailing of the Sheep Festival, Mary Austin Crofts. “When we needed some missing pieces of right of way to connect the Trail, I went to the local sheep ranchers to ask if they would agree to allow use of some of the sheep driveway that was dedicated in the early 1900s so sheep could move from southern Idaho through the Valley to summer grazing in the mountains. They graciously agreed,” Mary continued.

“But, after those sections of the trail were paved and the sheep came trailing through as they had done for 150 years, if you’ll pardon the expression, all hell broke loose. It was then that local sheep ranchers, Diane and John Peavey, decided it was time to tell the growing community of newcomers in the Wood River Valley about the place they had moved,” she added.