The ranch has bred fine-wool sheep for more than 150 years, and its wool has gone to the same Oregon mill for ninety.^1,2

Eastern Oregon in the 1870s ran common-grade sheep with poor wool. The founder was among the first in the region to import better rams. He bought a celebrated band descended from the Hammond flocks of Vermont, whose long, white, dense fleece was what the trade wanted, and the ranch began selling rams to Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California. By 1894 it ran 20,000 sheep, 4,000 of them purebred.¹

In 1903 the ranch sent 7,000 sheep east in 25 rail cars, reported as the first shipment of its size from an Oregon wool grower. By the company's own account, it turned down $100,000 for 4,000 breeding ewes in 1926 to keep the flock in the Northwest, and by 1942 it had sent more than 100,000 breeding rams across the eleven western range states. That year 20,000 ewes produced more than 275,000 pounds of wool.^3,4

The flock is registered Rambouillet. Rams reach 300 pounds and ewes 200, with fleece often three inches thick and very fine. In 1979 a ranch-bred ram sold for $7,200 at the National Ram Sale in Salt Lake City, the highest price paid for the breed in the country at the time. Since about 1935 the wool has gone to the same Oregon woolen mill, which photographed its centennial catalogue on the ranch in 2009.^2,5

Today the flock is about 4,000 ewes, smaller by choice. Lambing is in the barn at the river headquarters in late winter; in 2022, 3,800 ewes raised between 4,500 and 4,800 lambs, a strong result for a breed that twins only a fifth to a third of the time. Then come shearing, the bands on summer range with their herders, and the trip home in the fall.⁶