Guy Edwards ended a long day of working his sheep ranch north of Wright, Wyoming, a little after midnight Monday morning. About five hours later, he watched in disbelief and anguish as his large barn, and the 170 pregnant ewes inside, burned.
“We didn’t have a chance to let the sheep out,” he told Cowboy State Daily on Tuesday. “It was so hot. That barn was engulfed. You couldn’t even get to the doors to try to get the sheep out it was so hot.”
All but four of those 170 ewes were pregnant, representing his entire crop of lambs for the year, Edwards said. He still has another 120 ewes, but they aren’t “going to lamb,” he said.
“It was everything I had that was going to lamb this spring that was in that barn,” Edwards said.
Now they’re gone, along with the large 60-by-200-foot barn that was built in the 1940s and had been in his family for generations.
“I grew up in that barn,” he said.
It held decades of memories of learning to become a rancher from his father and grandfather.
“There’s a lot of history in that barn,” he said, adding that it was built to last. “You can’t find good rough-cut lumber like it was built with anymore.”
The Response
Edwards said he put all the sheep in the barn for the night, then went into the house for some sleep.
At about 4:30, his wife checked on the animals and the barn, “and everything seemed fine,” he said.
By 5:15, they went outside again to find the barn fully engulfed in flames.
“I have no idea what started it,” Edwards said. “I have no heat lamps or anything in there.”
Just what sparked the fire hasn’t been determined, but the Campbell County Fire Department is investigating, said county Fire Marshal Stuart Burnham.
“It’s a challenge based on the extent of the damage,” he said, adding that crews from Wright and Gillette responded to the rural area.
Because there are no hydrants there, firefighters have the water they bring with them. In this case, the barn was lost, but crews worked to keep it from spreading to other areas.
“They did the best they could, but unfortunately it just takes some time to get where they’re at,” Burnham said of the response.
Edwards said he’s grateful for the work the firefighters put in, but it was just too far gone to save the barn or those animals inside.
Now, Edwards said he feels a little shellshocked as he deals with the aftermath, which includes the burned remains of 170 ewes, along with cleaning up.
“I’ve had sheep all my life and I’ve heard about (things like this happening), but I’ve never seen it,” he said. “It’s pretty depressing walking through everything that’s left, which is pretty much just the concrete poured for the doors.”
Edwards said he believes all those sheep died from breathing the smoke from the fire before they burned.
Lost Genetics
Along with the financial impacts of losing the nearly 170 lambs he would’ve had to sell this year, Edwards choked up describing the emotional loss.
Those ewes didn’t just represent a crop of lambs, they were part of a decades-long effort to develop their genetics, he said.
“I don’t know how to explain it. You watch 45 years’ worth of genetics and work, and it’s just gone,” Edwards said. “It’s going to cost me a lot of damn money to buy the sheep back.
“But I was raising yearling lambs and ewes and all those genetics are gone.”
Then there are the sheep that once belonged to his grandparents.
“Some of those ewes (that burned in the barn) I bought six years ago when my grandparents died,” he said. “I bought them from their estate. I called them my third-generation sheep.”
Farmsteads in rural Wyoming can be far apart, but word travels fast. I didn’t take long for the local ranching community to hear about the fire and start turning out to help, Edwards said.
“All the neighbors are stepping in and helping trying to get the cleanup done,” he said. “The community is helping quite a bit, and big thanks to those guys.”
When asked if he’d do the same for one of his neighbors, “You’re damn right,” Edwards said. “That’s what neighbors do. This is a very close-knit community I live in, and thankfully I do.”
A GoFundMe campaign has been started for Edwards and his family.
Watching his barn burn and now facing a daunting cleanup, Edwards said the reality of the situation still hasn’t sunk in.
“I’m still kind of numb. I can’t breathe,” he said. “I’m really just mad at myself, because as a rancher, you’re supposed to protect them, but there was nothing I could’ve done.”
Greg Johnson can be reached at greg@cowboystatedaily.com.
