In Loneliness, Immigrants Tend the Flock

This is an amazing story about immigrant sheepherders who work under horrible conditions. No local people will take the job, so immigrants are hired. DP

By DAN FROSCH

ROCK SPRINGS, Wyo. — Somewhere in Wyoming’s vast, barren sagebrush country, Lorenzo Cortez Vargas pokes his head out of the rickety camper where he lives and stares into the dirt.

Mr. Vargas, a sheepherder from Chile, spends his days and nights on lonesome stretches of the Rockies, driving 2,000 sheep across Colorado and Wyoming as part of a federal temporary worker program he signed up for more than a year ago.

But like the other sheepherders, or “borregueros,” in the West, Mr. Vargas has barely any contact with his new country, where he earns $750 a month for working round the clock without a day off.

He lives alone in the crude 5-foot-by-10-foot “campito” with no running water, toilet or electricity, save for a car battery he has rigged to a small radio. A sputtering wood-burning stove is his only source of heat in winter, a collection of faded telephone cards his only connection to home.
Be sure to read the rest of this story! This is only a small part of it.