A series where we take a #lookback at the stories and history of our community, brought to you by Mick Pryor, Financial Advisor with Edward Jones.
Thanks to his extravagant mansion in Lost Cabin that still stands as a testimony to his success in the sheep industry, many people in Fremont County are familiar with the legendary “Sheep King of Wyoming”, Mr. J.B. Okie. What a lot of people might not know, however, is that Fremont County is also where another successful figure in the Wyoming sheep industry got her start, the “Sheep Queen of Wyoming,” Mrs. Lucy Morrison Moore.
Embodying the “Wyoming Tough” mentality, Lucy not only survived out on the Wyoming frontier during the heyday of the sheep industry in Wyoming, she thrived to become one of its most successful figures alongside prominent men such as Okie and Francis E. Warren of Cheyenne. Yet, despite her prosperity, she placed little value on personal possessions, preferring instead to live out of her sheep wagon in the summers among the sheep that built her empire and which she valued above all of her other possessions.
Born in late November 1857, the future “Sheep Queen” was first known as Lucy Laurette Fellows, the third of eight children born to her parents, Darius and Lauretta (Holton) Fellows. At the time of her birth, her parents were living in Deadwood, Calif. Now a ghost town, Deadwood was formed when gold was found in the area in 1852. Gold was exactly the reason Lucy’s parents were in California, her father being one of the many men who hoped to strike it rich during the Gold Rush years. Like most other men who attempted it, however, Darius was not successful in California. So, in 1858, the family followed the Oregon Trail back to their home state of Illinois with baby Lucy riding in one of the saddle bags strapped to a string of mules.
During most of the Civil War years, the Fellows stayed put in Illinois, but by 1863 they were once again journeying west to the gold fields in Idaho. They eventually settled in Soda Springs, Idaho where Darius started a freight hauling business. Up to this point, the Fellows had been practicing Methodists as far as anyone knows. According to family records, however, on Sept. 12, 1864, Darius took a second wife in Salt Lake City, Utah. The bride was Amelia Baker, the family’s hired hand who had traveled west with them. Together, Darius and Amelia had five children between the years 1864 and 1869. In 1868, the Fellows family officially joined the church of Latter-Day Saints and Darius took a third wife, Emily Jane White, in December of the same year. Three more children were born of this union.
Family history indicates that, besides Darius’ future second wife, his daughter Lucy’s future spouse also joined the family in their Idaho travels. Luther Curtis Morrison was an educated man who had grown up in Pennsylvania and, in 1851, became one of many pioneers who traveled the Oregon Trail to claim land under the Donation Land Act. Having also settled at Soda Springs, Morrison began a successful sheep business and, on Dec. 15, 1873, he and Lucy Fellows were married.
On her wedding day, Lucy had just turned 16; her husband was 44. Despite the age difference, the couple is reported to have had a successful marriage. For the next 11 years, they continued to grow Luther’s sheep business together to a herd of 3,000, and Lucy gave birth to three daughters.
However, when the Union Pacific completed two new railways through Oneida County, Idaho in the years 1878-1880, it came with a population boom to the area. This, combined with increasing sheep grazing regulations in Idaho due to pressure from the cattle industry, had the Morrisons looking for other prime locations on which to move their operations. And so it was that, in 1882, the Morrison family trailed one of the first bands of sheep into Wyoming Territory. With Lucy carrying her infant daughter in her arms and her two older daughters walking by her side, they moved 3,000 head of sheep into Wyoming’s Wind River Valley.
Originally, the family had intended to winter between Badwater Creek and Poison Creek. But when they stopped for a rest at Pacific Springs in the South Pass region, they were reportedly warned by locals that it was not safe for a woman and young girls to be so far away from other white women and 90 miles from the nearest doctor or store. The locals also assured them that last winter hadn’t been so bad “with only 8 inches of snow.” On the advice they were given, the Morrisons chose to stay in the South Pass region, wintering their herd on Rock Creek near Fort Stambaugh instead. There’s no doubt this was a decision they later regretted for that winter was especially hard, and out of 3,000 head of sheep, only 200 remained in the spring and half of them were wethers.
Even so, the Morrisons pushed on, continuing the trek to their original intended destination near Badwater Creek. Once there, they persisted in growing their much-depleted herd and were able to establish a winter range northeast of the town of Shoshoni and a summer range at the top of Copper Mountain along the present-day Fremont County and Hot Springs County border. Huddled against the foothills, the chosen location allowed their herd to survive the brutal winter of 1886-7 much better than other ranchers in the area, and their operation grew to be quite successful.
It was not an easy endeavor, however. It took four years for Luther to be able to build a log cabin for his family. In the meantime, they lived in a tent banked with dirt and lighted by mutton-tallow candles they made themselves. On top of that, twice a year Luther would have to leave his family and go to Rawlins for supplies and to ship wool. The entire trip would take approximately 3 weeks. During that time, Lucy was left alone to defend her home, four children (Lucy gave birth to a boy, Lincoln, in 1884), and sheep from predators and potentially hostile Indigenous people traveling through the area.
Lucy claimed that between the years of 1884, when she gave birth to Lincoln in Lander, until 1889 – a period of five years – she never saw another white woman. However, many cowboys, miners, Native Americans and trappers stopped at their cabin on Dry Creek or tent on Copper Mountain when passing through.
Teri Geissinger, a descendant and researcher of Lucy Morrison Moore, related two stories to Cowboy State Daily in 2024 from this time period in Lucy’s life. The first involved her facing down a mountain lion who killed many of her sheep one night. According to Geissinger, rather than using a weapon to defeat her foe because it was too large for her to use effectively, she broke up pieces of glass and hid them in the sheep carcasses. Her strategy worked, and the mountain lion was dead within a few days.
The other story involved her protecting her family from indigenous peoples whom she didn’t know. When she saw them coming, she reportedly dotted her children’s faces with flour and had them get in bed. When the natives arrived, she would simply say, “Smallpox.” According to Lucy, the natives figured out her ruse eventually but they respected her cleverness and left her alone after that.
It is through stories such as these that the petite, 90-pound Lucy earned her reputation as a strong and clever woman capable of working and surviving in the frontier like a man while still retaining her feminine, religious virtues. For though Lucy lived in a man’s world, she still refused to tolerate drunkenness or profanity, turning away anyone who did so in her or her family’s presence.
Another value that Lucy and Luther both held sacred was education. The business of sheepherding required the family often work out on the range together. Yet, it was important to the couple that their children get an education. After the sheep were on the bedground in the evening, they would teach their children to read and write by candlelight. In 1890, the children were sent to Lander for the winter to attend school. According to an article in the Wyoming State Journal, they stayed at the Eliza Hornecker house on 4th Street.
“The older girls were almost grown and the mother had fashioned out of sheepskin their clothes from shoes and leggings, skirts, jackets and caps as well as gloves for their hands. The Lander children made great sport of their costumes and was somewhat embarrassing to the Morrison youngsters,” it said.
In 1891, Luther built a stone cabin near Casper so the family could winter there and the children could go to school. It boasted the first reservoir in Wyoming built outside of Casper. Luther also became a Natrona County commissioner and one of the founding members of a state organization that would later become the Wyoming Wool Growers Association.
Luther died on his 69th birthday on Dec. 20, 1898, and was buried at Highland Cemetery. Lucy continued running the sheep business and expanding its operations. At the height of her prosperity – the years surrounding the turn of the century – her operations included a winter range on Kirby Creek north of Thermopolis and 16 bands of sheep with hired herders to help her manage them. It is thought that during this time, Lucy’s nickname as the “sheep queen” of Wyoming began. At first, Lucy was insulted by the moniker, crediting it to other stockmen who were jealous of her success. However, she soon came to embrace the title.
Lucy probably disliked the term “sheep queen” at first because, despite her success, she continued to live the life of a nomadic sheep herder without the usual comforts one associates with wealth and royalty. In fact, she preferred to live out of her sheep wagon on the range with her sheep, spending the night under the stars wherever it overtook her. Unconcerned with social status, she ended up marrying one of her herders, Curtis Moore, in 1902. Like her, Curtis was a religious teetotaler. Prior to their wedding day, Lucy gifted him with a band of 1,000 sheep, reportedly so she could say she married a stockman instead of a penniless sheepherder.
Unfortunately, Lucy’s prosperity also made her family a target during the sheep and cattle wars of the 1890s and 1900s. Prior to grazing rights on public land, cattle ranchers would often set up headquarters and lay claim to large tracts of surrounding land despite having no legal rights to it. Sheepherders, on the other hand, were nomadic and would graze their herds on public lands based on the best weather and ranges at the time – oftentimes crossing onto territory a cattleman had claimed as his own. This led to inevitable conflicts between the two industries. Between the years 1897-1909, there were hundreds of incidents in Wyoming with 15 men, one boy, and 10,000 head of sheep killed in the conflicts.
Upon return to Casper after a trip to Thermopolis in 1897, Lucy found all her horses had been shot while she was away. This is just one of a series of threats she and her family received during that time. Though she confessed in letters to family and friends that she feared for her life, she refused to back down to the cattlemen. When a “deadline,” or unofficial boundary for sheep grazing, was established near Kirby Creek between Lucy’s summer and winter ranges, she chose to ignore it. The result was her family becoming key figures in a series of incidents that occurred in 1904 as the violence between sheep and cattle ranchers really began to escalate.
It started out in February of that year when 400 head of Moore’s sheep that were grazing near the Badwater Creek were stolen. Lucy’s son, Lincoln Morrison, now 21 years old, was able to follow the thief’s tracks to find the sheep, abandoned after a winter storm.
Then, on May 30, 1904, Lincoln was at the family’s camp near Kirby Creek when he noticed the herd getting frightened by something. Thinking it was a wolf, he stood on the tongue of his sheep wagon and shot his gun to scare it off. Another shot from an unknown source answered and hit Lincoln in the stomach. The unknown shooter quickly made his escape without being seen. Luckily, the bullet missed Lincoln’s vital organs. Disinfecting his wound with vinegar, the only antiseptic she had, Lucy worked tirelessly to nurse her son back to health and he not only survived but celebrated his wedding day nearly three months later in August.
In an effort to find the shooter, Lucy took out ads in the Natrona County newspaper advertising a reward of $2,500 for his arrest and conviction. She also promised her first husband’s estate would give a $1,000 reward for the dead body of the party who did the shooting. Despite the ads and Lucy hiring a private detective to locate the shooter, it would be 10 years before he was finally apprehended in Montana.
On September 14, the family’s business became the target of yet another attack. This one occurred at a camp south of Basin when someone threw dynamite in the sheep wagon and blew it up. Luckily, no one was injured in the attack. Trying to find those responsible, Big Horn County Sheriff John J. Fenton rode out, but returned a few days later without any suspects.
Though Lucy never really backed down from the cattlemen’s threats, the increase in population of central Wyoming during the 1900s which led to the decrease in public lands, did cause her to gradually reduce the size of her operations to half the number of head she had at the peak of her success. She was also getting older and health issues forced her to purchase a house in Los Angeles for the winter in 1910. She wasn’t there long, however, when she was summoned home by a telegraph informing her the sheep were facing one of the worst Wyoming winters in history. She returned to find a band of her sheep walled in by snow and so hungry they were eating the wool off each other’s backs. When a freighter finally shoveled his way in with hay, he reported they were so crazed with hunger they ate the tails off the horses before the hay could be unloaded. Lucy immediately sold her house in Los Angeles to buy corn and hay, stating, “The sheep paid for it and they need it now.”
The decade of the 1910s brought another threat to Lucy’s business operation, one that proved too great for her to resist, though she tried at first. It was oil exploration that became common in Wyoming during this decade. Fearing the desecration oil derricks would do to her beloved pastures, Lucy turned down offers from the industry during the first half of the decade. However, the need for fuel after the U.S. entered into World War I, combined with Lucy’s sense of patriotic duty, caused her to relent eventually. For this, she was given a $10,000 advance in oil rights which she used to once again purchase real estate in Los Angeles for a winter home.
As her son, Lincoln, and his family began to take over more of the family business, Lucy spent the rest of her winters in Los Angeles but returned every spring to her beloved sheep. In 1919, the famous author, Caroline Lockhart, spent a summer with Lucy and her family at the sheep camp. The experience inspired her to write a best-selling novel loosely based on Lucy’s life titled, “The Fighting Shepherdess.” A movie based on the book quickly followed in 1920. Though the book made Lucy more famous, it is said she wasn’t a fan of it and thought the main character was far too grumpy to be a good representation of herself.
In 1930, Lucy suffered a severe stroke. She died of encephalitis in October of 1932 at the home of her daughter, Elma Butler, in Casper and was interred at the Highland Cemetery. Following her death, Curtis liquidated her sheep business and moved permanently to Los Angeles. Only two years later, in 1934, the Taylor Grazing Act was passed, changing the way federal land was managed. The new system of land leases and per-head grazing fees caused the sheep industry in Wyoming to slowly dwindle away despite a boom experienced during World War II. It was the end of an era for the Wyoming sheep industry.
Author: April Peregoy
Next up for the Fremont County Museum
January 17, 7-9 pm at the Pioneer Museum, “PREZ ervation: The Art of All Hubbard; A Retrospective Collection of Contemporary Indigenous Art” Opening Reception
Call the Dubois Museum 1-307-455-2284, the Pioneer Museum 1-307-332-3339 or the Riverton Museum 1-307-856-2665 for detail regarding their programs.
The Dubois Museum, the Pioneer Museum in Lander and the Riverton Museum need your financial support. In the current economic environment, the museums are more reliant than ever on donations from the private sector to continue to provide the quality programs, collections management, exhibits and services that have become their hallmark over the last four years. Please make your tax-deductible contribution to be used specifically for the benefit of the museum of your choosing by sending a check to Fremont County Museums 450 N 2nd Rm 320 or taking it directly to the museum you choose to support.