Stone Johnnies
Crowning lonely buttes or standing at the edge of mountain trails are carefully constructed rock towers, built without mortar by Indians, early settlers and sheepherders — vestiges of a bygone era.
Found throughout Montana and over much of the range country west of the Missouri River, the rock cairns are called Stone Johnnies, Rock Johnnies, stone men, butte markers, water markers, and, because many of them were made by sheepherders — sheepherders’ monuments. Unfortunately, these historic landmarks are rapidly disappearing due to weather, animals, and especially vandalism by man.
Indians used rocks in many ways — to mark water and caches, as memorial cairns like the piles of stones Lewis and Clark found on top of the 200-foot tall formation they named Pompeys Pillar, and as markers to designate the route along which they intended to drive buffalo before a hunt.
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On the prairies of south central Montana, where the expanse of sky seems to go on forever, travelers along trails long since relegated to history books needed guideposts to direct their way. Trail markers along the Bozeman Trail, like the one pictured, were made by piling one rock on top of another, and then a rock was laid adjacent to the stack indicating direction.
The tradition of sheepherders’ monuments developed centuries ago in Spain, where the trans-humantes system of sheep raising — the transferring of sheep from mountain to lowland pastures and back according to the season — originated.
Sheep came to America with the conquistadors and the priests, and the trans-humantes system came with them, first into the Southwest and California then up into the Northwest, Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas. With many of the sheep came Basque sheepherders from the French and Spanish Pyrenees mountains. They called the rock markers “Rock Boys,” a possible origin for “Stone Johnny.” These markers were silent guides — good landmarks in a storm, indicators of water holes, and as boundary markers.
Though little praised and often scorned, sheepherders were a dedicated group who endured the solitude and loneliness of their life alone with their dogs and the sheep — seldom seeing another person except for an occasional visit from the camp tender who brought supplies.
Allegedly one proud herder admonished a writer not to picture a sheepherder with a long-handled crook, a face like Jesus Christ, and a few sheep crowding close to him. “Give him a sizable flock of at least 1,000 and let them keep a respectful distance. He’s a sheepherder, not a shepherd,” he said.
By the early 1900s, sheep were big business in Montana with 4.2 million of the woolies grazing the immense open ranges of the Big Sky Country. The sheep were most often grazed in bands of 1,000 to 3,000 head, with each band watched over by a sheepherder and his dogs. The sheepherder’s life was not glamorous, but the solitude and responsibility produced a resolute and thoughtful breed of men, many of whom became citizens of substance and wealth.
The stone columns built by these men were probably built to indicate distance and direction to waterholes. Many of the stone markers indicate a stock driveway and a sheepherder’s range, but it has been speculated that they also provided the sheepherder with a pastime while tending his flock, to make a windbreak for warmth, or to get warm.
“We have tons of them throughout the county,” wrote Lauren McMullen, Director of the Carnegie Public Library in Big Timber. “Anyone who roams around the range on foot can’t help but notice them and think about them. I have sheep, and there’s a broken down monument on my place. I can see how a crusty old sheepherder might while away the midday hours making piles of rocks.” Among the early sheep producers in Powell County were T.B. Mannix and his son, Charles N. who ran nearly 3,000 sheep during the late 1920s and early ’30s.
On the Mannix ranch near Helmville, the wind sighs through the tops of majestic fir and pine trees towering above a cairn built of massive, lichen-covered boulders that measures 4½ feet in height. It apparently was a water marker indicating a nearby spring and Pole Creek that runs at the foot of the hill.
It stands guard at the edge of a high mountain meadow where wild flowers dance in the sunlight among grasses swaying in the breeze; one can almost hear the bleating of sheep coming over the ridge.
An 8-foot tall stone sentinel stands high on a rocky ridge north of Avon from where a herder could survey the rugged mountain ranges that march off into the distance. Built of shale, the Stone Johnny marks a grazing boundary as well as refreshing water at a nearby mountain spring.
Tiny Mellot, who in 1978 was herding on “the largest sheep ranch in the Northwest, near Wolf Creek, north of Helena” wrote that he had helped make maybe a hundred or more sheepherder’s monuments.
He explained, “Someone starts one, and every old herder puts some more rocks on each year. There are a lot of reasons for building them — some to pass the time away, others for a windbreak to sit behind, some to mark one herder’s boundary from the rest. They come in very handy on a foggy day — you know where you are at, for no two are alike — some are rather tall, maybe 11 feet, some are larger around. It depends on how many builders there are handy.” The different types of rock and designs make each of the monuments unique. Fred Benson, a rancher north of Deer Lodge, tells of a monument he once saw that looked like a mound built within a mound and was almost the size of his kitchen.
A cross is attached to a double-tiered monument located northeast of Deer Lodge, but no one knows why.
Now an elevation marker, a monument southeast of Deer Lodge probably was built by a sheepherder. It stands watch at the edge of a high mountain park overlooking the Deer Lodge Valley, and marks water — a cool mountain stream running at the base of the hill.
Before he died, Mellot lamented, “A lot of the monuments get torn down by “city dudes” who want to build a rock garden and just back in a pickup and load up.” There is a lot of history connected with these markers wherever they are found throughout the West — they are not just “piles of rocks,” but true landmarks of the lonely hills.
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