Ten Sleep: A Name, a Raid, and the End of the Range Wars

Ten Sleep sits at the base of the Big Horn Mountains, and its name comes from a Native American trail-marking system that counted journey-days as sleeps. Depending on the version, this valley was ten sleeps from Fort Laramie, ten sleeps from Yellowstone, or ten sleeps from Casper. Any way you count, it was remote enough that early settlers thought they were beyond the reach of consequence.

On April second, nineteen oh nine, they were wrong. Seven cattlemen attacked a sheep camp on Spring Creek just south of town, killing three sheepherders and burning two of them inside their wagon, in the deadliest sheep raid in Wyoming history. At the time, Wyoming had more than six million sheep against fewer than seven hundred thousand cattle, and the cattlemen had been raiding sheep camps for over a decade without a single conviction. This time was different. All seven attackers were arrested, two turned state's evidence, and the remaining five were convicted and imprisoned. The Spring Creek Raid marked the end of organized range violence in Wyoming. A bloody chapter closed here at the foot of the mountains, and the open-range wars that had defined the West for a generation finally ran out of room.