Francis to receive Pioneer Award

Encampment native Francis Herring is the 2021 Pioneer Award winner for the Grand Encampment Cowboy Gathering Outfit. Herring, best known as Francie, was one of the 16 children of Ellis and Gladys Herring. He was born in Encampment and has spent most of his life in the town, leaving only for a short time chasing work in New Mexico.

Herring will be presented with his award Saturday night during the Grand Encampment Cowboy Gathering All-star Cowboy Poetry & Music performance in the Encampment school gym. 

His first job as a child was sawing wood, using a two-person hand saw along with his older brother, Orville. They cut the wood for firewood to heat their home and use in the wood cookstove. This connection to sawing wood served him in good stead because when he was in school, he got a job in the Encampment sawmill and he went to work there full time the day after he graduated from high school.

When the mill owner died a couple of years later, the Encampment mill closed. By then Herring had been working with his dad on his homesteads. One homestead was on a portion of what became the Sanger Ranch (now Brush Creek Ranch), and the other was at the main headquarters of the A Bar A Ranch.

As a youngster Herring had a lot of chores which included helping in the family garden, milking a cow owned by his mother so his family could have a bucket of milk each day, helping his dad with livestock and helping after his dad became the school janitor.

"I went over after school and helped him sweep and do the janitor work at school. I didn't mind. He got paid for it and I got supper," Herring said.

From the time he was seven or eight years old, Herring worked on ranches, starting at the Romios Ranch, and helping with horse and cattle work at the Vyvey VX Ranch for more than 60 years. One annual job was taking cattle to the summer pasture on the Forest Service allotment. When Wood Mountain Grazing (Vyvey, Munroe and Saulcy ranches) organized, he helped take cattle to the mountains and when his youngest daughter Teresa had a summer job riding for Wood Mountain Grazing up in Hog Park, he helped her as well.

Working for the A Bar A cattle operation one year, he and Tim Barkhurst took care of around 10,000 head of steers and heifers. Many of those animals suffered from hoof rot and other ailments so they spent a lot of time doctoring the animals. They each worked alone, so when Herring need to treat an animal, he roped it, and then using the technique of steer tripping, laid it on its side and tied it up so he could handle the "veterinarian" duties.

"Doctoring is mostly what I did. I never went to be a vet, but I always kicked my rear end for not doing it because I always liked it," Herring said. "In my family, there was not enough money in that place to buy a good dinner, most of the time."

As a result, there was no money for the education needed to become a veterinarian.

Herring learned to shoe horses, and did farrier work throughout the Valley, over in Laramie, up to Elk Mountain, out on the desert near Rawlins, and even for sheepherders working in the Sierra Madre Mountains.

One of the early members of the Encampment Roping Club, he became the club president and helped with the first roping activity at the first Woodchoppers Jamboree. For many years he managed the calf roping chute at Woodchoppers. He also took part in the first steer tripping contests in Encampment – which became the King Merritt Memorial Steer Tripping.

He spent a couple of years logging in New Mexico, but missed his kids and his family, so came home and got a job at the coal mine in Hanna, working as a welder and mechanic. He spent many years working in the woods for R. R. Crow and R. L. Hammer lumber companies, cutting timber and skidding it with horses and later with equipment.

Herring always had a good connection with animals.

He said, "Horses will come right to me. People would say, I can't catch my horse. I'd walk down there and just stand there, and pretty soon the horse had his nose in my chest. Dogs were the same way." 

Herring and his wife Patty have three children, Don, Tina and Teresa. Don works for the Silver Spur Ranch, Tina works in Saratoga, and Teresa ranches in South Dakota. They also have four grandchildren.