Reed Point, Mont.
It began on Labor Day 1980 when folks auctioned off a dream date with an 87-year-old bachelor named Floyd Ferguson. It continued Sunday as several thousand visitors celebrated Labor Day by cheering 500 sheep trotting on this tiny town’s main drag.
In the quarter-century between, the “Spotted Asses” mule races came and went. So did the Great Montana Duck Racing Championships that sent 5,000 quackers waddling down Division Street.
Still, like so much that has happened in this sprawling state that averages fewer than seven people a square mile, it eventually boiled down to a battle between cows and sheep. In 1989, the cattlemen decided to celebrate their state’s centennial with the Great Montana Cattle Drive from Round Up to Billings.
Bachelor Daze, donkeys and ducks couldn’t compete with cattle as a Labor Day attraction, said Jerry Friend, president of the 18-member Reed Point Community Club. So the club decided to sponsor a parody event called the Great Montana Sheep Drive.
“It started out as a joke,” said Diana Hahn, who with her husband, Chris, owns the Waterhole Saloon. “But it grew to have a life of its own.”
What some folks now call “The Running of the Sheep” had nothing to do with the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain, Hahn emphasized. Of course, that didn’t stop a few runners in Pamplona garb from jogging in front of Sunday’s procession.
The 17th annual Reed Point “Running of the Sheep” drew less than a third of the 14,000 people at the inaugural event. But for a day, the crowd of roughly 4,000 swelled Reed Point – population 112 – to a bustling burg by Montana standards.
Lightning sparked wildfires near the town. Smoke billowed in an ugly plume, a backdrop to the annual sheep run.
OK, they didn’t run; they jogged.
Still, moon-eyed kids, along with parents, grandparents and assorted visitors, gawked and squealed. A sheep shearer shaved a ewe bald in under five minutes. Drivers in a parade of Shriner go-carts, fire engines, vintage cars and covered wagons threw candy into the crowd. Meanwhile, some 80 vendors hawked everything from tamales and tea sets to wool socks and wolf pelts, as a septuagenarian quartet of country fiddlers laid down a soundtrack just east of the petting zoo.
A Calamity Jane look-alike wandered the streets.
Ten-year-old Rory Lewis, clad in a “Doing Chores Never Hurt Anyone But Why Take the Chance” T-shirt, allowed as how the sheep drive is “pretty cool.”
“But,” he added, “I have my own sheep, so I get to do it every day.”
Jerry Shannon of La Jolla, Calif., discovered the Great Montana Sheep Drive in 2004. This year, the 71-year-old rented a couple of rooms at the Hotel Montana, Reed Point’s only lodging, and with his friend Tom O’Connor of Mission Viejo, Calif., drove 1,300 miles to get there.
“If it’s as good as last year,” Shannon said, “I’ll rent the whole hotel next year.”
But in a small town where anybody from the Hell’s Angels to Hank Williams Jr. is liable to drop in, life will never imitate Norman Rockwell’s art.
“The minute I left the interstate, I fell in love with the place,” said Dave Solvang, a disabled, tattoo-covered, ex-con/Vietnam vet/retired mechanic, buzzing around in a motorized wheelchair, drink in hand.
They did away with the “Smelliest Sheepherder Contest,” in which Jerry Friend’s mom once competed under the pseudonym “Little Bo Heap.” But this is still an event that with sunset morphs from family fun to a wild street dance. “It gets very Western,” said Diana Hahn.
I’m not sure what that means, but – after watching men in cowboy hats and women in tight-fittin’ jeans swing dance to ZZ Top’s “Tube Snake Boogie” – I have an idea.
As Chris Hahn removed a painting of a naked woman from the wall of his saloon, I asked his wife, “Is he cleaning the place up for the families?”
“No,” she said. “He just sold it to a sheepherder.”
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-820-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
