For one morning each October, the cars give way and Cedar City's Main Street belongs to the sheep. Roughly a thousand head come down off the Cedar Mountain pastures, funneled between the curbs from 200 South to 400 North while herders, stock dogs, horses, wagons, antique tractors and bagpipe bands follow along behind. Spectators line the sidewalks, and the festival's own instructions to them are blunt: leave the dogs at home, stay to the edge of the street, and do not get in front of the sheep.
That parade is the centerpiece of the Cedar Livestock and Heritage Festival. The three-day run, Oct. 23-25, is mostly staged at the Cross Hollows Events Center — the Iron Rangers outdoor arena and the Diamond Z indoor arena at 11 North Cross Hollows Drive — and, according to the festival, nearly everything on the schedule is free. The sheep take Main Street on Saturday, Oct. 24, at 10 a.m.
The parade is not a piece of theater invented for tourists. It is a re-enactment of something that actually happened here, annually, for more than a century. Cedar City was settled in 1851, and livestock was the backbone of the local economy — meat, milk, butter, cheese, hides and wool. By the late 1860s, with the fear of Indian attacks and wild animals having subsided, residents had taken up homesteads in the nearby mountains. Dairying came first: women and children moved up to the high country for the summer while the men and older boys stayed in the valley to farm. A granddaughter of the McConnell family, who ran one of the first mountain dairies in 1869, described the top of the mountain as "a sylvan paradise," with grass and wild barley waist-high and wildflowers carpeting the meadows.
Sheep arrived around 1890, when a group of prominent Cedar City cattlemen bought a herd from Colorado and went into the business. They quickly discovered that sheep were better suited to the southern Utah ranges than cattle were, particularly the mountain summer pastures where larkspur grew thick — a plant highly toxic to cows but tolerated, and even valued, by sheep. Beginning in 1870, according to Utah Humanities' Beehive Archive, shepherds guided the community's combined herds down from Cedar Mountain, through town, and west into Cedar Valley for the winter. The seasonal trailing became a fixture of the local calendar.
As Cedar City grew, the herds became a problem. In the 1990s the city built a mile-long concrete tunnel beneath town, intended to move sheep between the mountain pastures and the desert valley without disrupting traffic or business. The sheep tunnel didn't take. It now sits abandoned, a hangout for adventurous kids and graffiti artists, and a reminder of the difficulty of balancing a growing population's needs against a rural past. The parade is, in effect, the compromise that replaced it: one day a year when Main Street is officially a livestock trail again. The Salt Lake Tribune noted in 2010 that the route is one of the few recognized livestock trails in the country that bisects a city for a single day.
The modern festival owes its existence to a phone call from Idaho. Chad Reid, who chaired the festival committee, told the Tribune that the event was in its fifth year in 2010 and had been modeled on a similar parade held each year in Ketchum, Idaho. An official with the Ketchum parade encouraged Cedar City to preserve its own version. "She said, 'You have a story to tell,'" Reid recalled. That Idaho event, the Trailing of the Sheep Festival, had grown out of a 1996 effort by the Peavey family to walk with the sheep and explain the trailing tradition to cyclists and other users of a bike path, in hopes of reducing conflicts; a chamber of commerce and a volunteer committee turned it into a multi-day festival the following year. Cedar City borrowed the idea and pointed it at its own history.
What surrounds the parade is a fairly complete inventory of the rural West. The antique tractor pull runs at the Iron Rangers Arena; draft horse teams give demonstrations; there is a ranch rodeo, plus a junior ranch rodeo and stick horse rodeo for kids. Cowboy poetry and music fills an afternoon. The Cedar Chest Quilters mount a quilt show at the Heritage Center lobby downtown, and there is an art and photo contest, a vintage car display, a Dutch oven contest, western vendors and agricultural displays, and hands-on activities inside the new addition to the Diamond Z Arena. A wagon train arrives on the south side of the Iron Rangers Arena sometime Friday afternoon, and stock dog demonstrations show off the working dogs that made all of this possible. After the parade, the tractors and sheep camps stay on display at Cross Hollows for the rest of the day.
Each year the festival also names a grand marshal — someone who has made a significant impact on the livestock and agricultural community in Iron County, nominated by the public and chosen by the festival committee.
There is a practical reason the festival lands in late October. Fall is when the crops come in and the livestock trail down from the high ranges to the desert for winter — the yearly rhythm the whole event is built around. The festival's own framing is less about spectacle than about memory: that we never forget the people, animals and resources that built the community.
For anyone planning to go, the essentials are simple. The sheep parade is Saturday at 10 a.m. on Main Street; the rest of the schedule runs Friday through Sunday at Cross Hollows, with the quilt show at the Heritage Center at 105 N. 100 E. The festival cautions that construction may shift some locations from previous years and advises checking the schedule before heading out. And if you bring a dog to the parade, you'll be the only one.