Nash Draw in the Bookcliffs.

Max begins herding sheep 

The story goes that my dad, Max, went to work herding sheep when he was about 13.  That is when he left school.  Must have been just after the 8th grade.  The school at Woodside must have burned down about that time because he used to joke that they had to burn down the school to get him out of the 8th grade.  He told me this many times.

I guess I never knew where he went to herd sheep at this time.  I thought that he went to Elliott Mesa. My brother Leon told me that he went to the Bookcliffs east of the Green River.  A large part of this area is now part of the Uintah-Ouray Indian Reservation.  They did not always get crummy land. The Bookcliffs here are very beautiful.  It is remote and hard to get to but it is beautiful.  I spent a couple of summers there working for the Utah State Forest Service in the 1970s.

Before it was part of the Reservation it was cattle county and outlaw country.  At least three outlaws met their demise at or near these Bookcliffs.  Joe Walker and Johnny Herring were killed by a posse. Flatnose George Curry was also killed near there along the Green River.  George was a big trophy for the posse.  He was the leader of the Hole-in-the-Wall gang at one time.  He had also just recently participated in the Wilcox Train Robbery.

This was also the domain of the Webster City Cattle Company.  This cattle company was owned by some men from Webster City, Iowa.  There was no Webster City in Utah.  There was a headquarters for the ranch but it was not called Webster City.

Leon told me that about 1957 they went hunting at Nash Draw on a late deer hunt.  Dad was somewhat familiar with the area because he had herded sheep there as a young man.  That's the area he went to when he started out at 14 years of age.  I went with my dad on a deer hunt there a few years later. Probably about 1962.  I love this area and think about it often.  It has a deep and special meaning to me to know that my father and I had been in the same area though at different times and under different circumstances.

I don't know the exact areas where he was but I spent a bit of time on Hill Creek and even met William Cunningham at his ranch in Bogart Canyon.  I believe this was the headquarters for the Webster City Cattle Company.  It fits the descriptions from some of the newspaper articles that I have read.  It seems like Bill Cunningham even said that there used to be a lot of buildings there.  Buildings like bunkhouses for the cowboys. quarters for families, hotel, saloon, school and maybe even a church.

I have other stories that I will post at some future times.  My dad met my mother at Clear Creek when he was herding sheep.  I was deer hunting with him on a late hunt near Scofield.  He spent a month on the Elliott Plateau without seeing another human being.
Nicholas