The Festival and The Community Library share a new podcast, “Sheep Stories.” This podcast series explores the history and culture of sheep ranching in the Wood River Valley, produced by the Library’s Jeanne Rodger Lane Center for Regional History. Episodes use archival recordings and interviews from the Trailing of the Sheep Festival to tell the story of the Scottish, Basque, and Peruvian immigrants who have worked in the sheep industry for the past century. “Sheep Stories” podcast is available in a distribution partnership with Boise State Public Radio.
Listen to all three episodes on their website or download from wherever you get your podcasts. To listen directly from the Boise State Public Radio webpage, go to https://www.
The first episode is about sheepherders who emigrated from Scotland and found their way to the American West to herd sheep. The second episode is about sheepherders from the Basque Country/Euskal Herria, including tales of comradery in a Twin Falls Basque boarding house and the loneliness found in the mountains. The third episode is about sheepherders from Peru.This is the first podcast for The Community Library. It was produced by the Jeanne Rodger Lane Center for Regional History in collaboration with Boise State Public Radio. Vance created it out of presentations and recordings from one of the Center’s archival collections: the Trailing of the Sheep Festival Archive.
Vance is a senior at Western Washington University and completed the Patricia Crandall Lane Trailing of the Sheep Festival Archive internship from June through August 2025. His project was to listen to and watch the media in the archive and describe it in the inventory. As he listened, he developed a theme of immigrant sheepherder stories. He is the host of the podcast and narrates the three episodes from his point of view as a newcomer to the Valley and as someone who is just learning about the sheep industry and sheep ranching. “My love of public history and community storytelling goes back to my time working for the Museum of History and Industry during high school, where I worked on the Rainy Day History Podcast," says Vance. “This summer, that work continued at The Community Library, where I created the podcast ‘Sheep Stories’.”
