The Story of Wool

A telegram signed by a stranger reaches the Clarks’ Cambridge house: you would do well to visit Crescent Ranch. Mr. Clark’s Boston wool firm has owned that Idaho sheep range for thirty years without anyone in the family setting foot on it, so he pulls his son Donald out of school and heads west. Who Sandy McCulloch is gets answered early. What follows is a year of range work, told through the dipping troughs, the herders and their collies, a bear Donald shoots alone outside his tent one moonlit night, a flock stampeding toward the rimrock, and the April shearing at Glen City. Back in Massachusetts, father and son follow the clip into the Monitor Mills, past sorting, scouring, dyeing, carding, spinning, and the looms.