In the summer of 1980 the Idaho State Journal in Pocatello gave part of a page to an Arbon Valley cattleman who would not stop roping. Betty Hale, writing as a correspondent, built her Monday, June 23, piece around Sherm Swim, 56, who had won the Old Timers roping at the Bannock County Fairgrounds on the Fourth of July in 1979 and intended to rope in the same contest again. His photograph ran with a caption saying he had not retired yet.
The roper
Fifty was the age that put a man in the old-timers' class, Swim explained to Hale, and the gap between generations was obvious whenever a roper landed in the dirt and had to get up again. By Swim's account, a cowboy could count on a roping near home nearly every weekend of the year, winter included, when Fort Hall, Rupert, Preston and Ogden held theirs indoors; doctors and lawyers were among those who signed up. A national association for older rodeo hands was in its first stages, with finals in Las Vegas for ropers who earned a place at the local level, and Swim told Hale he intended to make that trip. Arizona was on his list as well, for a winter of roping someday.
The article was as much about the ranch as the rodeo. The Swims ran Herefords, wintering them in a feed lot and keeping them on the Arbon Valley range from spring until the fall roundup, with Sherm and his son Kirk riding out to look them over through the summer. Both the grass hay and the alfalfa the herd ate were grown on the ranch, and so were the horses the family rode; in that broken country, Swim said, nothing counted for more than a good horse. A native of the valley, he told Hale he could not remember a time before he rode and roped. He gave the credit at home to his wife, Rhea, whom he called "the real backbone of the outfit"; she and Kirk, he said, managed the ranch. Age had not kept his mother off a horse either: Mrs. R. H. Swim of American Falls, at 80, went riding during her visits to the ranch. The couple's family also included a daughter and a younger son, the latter operating a dry farm in Arbon Valley.
Who he was
The articles call him only Sherm Swim, but the details fit closely with the Swim family of this site, and he was almost certainly Sherman Hale Swim, born in 1923, the son of Robert Hale "Bob" Swim and Nell Roper Swim, whose Roper family lived at Pauline. Bob Swim died in 1971 and Nell was born in 1900, so the Mrs. R. H. Swim who was 80 in 1980 was very probably Nell, though the paper does not give her first name. Bob came out from Kansas about 1922, years after his brother Frank had homesteaded on upper Bannock Creek south of Pauline in 1908. From the early 1930s Bob rented a ranch on Bannock Creek at the reservation line, where Sherm was a stockman by 1950.
The Journal had noticed Sherm before. In May 1978 he was one of the non-Indian ranchers whose cattle stood to be displaced when part of the Caribou National Forest was opened to Shoshone-Bannock cattle under the Tribes' treaty grazing right. Called as a witness in federal court, he testified that 58 head on his permit would be displaced, that he would rather sell them than truck them to range east of Henry, and that he ran 300 to 400 cattle in all. That June the paper printed a photograph of him roping calves at a neighbors' branding in the valley.
The calf and the coyotes
The Journal turned to the Swims again the next March. On the afternoon of Thursday, March 12, 1981, father and son saw coyotes maul a four-day-old calf, tearing up its hind end, while the two of them were feeding the herd and looking over their cows. The next day the Journal ran Doug Lindley's photograph of Sherm and Kirk holding the calf under the headline "Calf Survives Coyote Attack." Coyotes were known mostly as a threat to sheep and lambs, the caption noted, and cattle were less often their target; the paper gave the calf uncertain odds of living.
What is not known
The pages read for this post do not say how Swim did at the 1980 Fourth of July rodeo, whether he made the trip to Las Vegas, or whether the calf survived; the site's Swim family page does record that in 1981 he and Sod Williams roped together at the national old-timers' rodeo in Vernal, Utah. The 1980 and 1981 papers place the ranch only in Arbon Valley, and the 1978 court report in the Bannock Creek area. The family's later ranch was on Crystal Creek in the Rattlesnake drainage, but when the move was made is not known.
On this site: the Swim family from the 1908 homesteads onward; Sherm Swim's death in 2011 and the celebration in his memory; his roping neighbor in the Williams family in the arena; a 2010 post on branding in the valley; and Pauline and West Fork, the north end of the valley where the Swims first settled.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, June 23, 1980, page 8 (section B, page 2). The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Correspondent Betty Hale's Journal profile of Sherm Swim, 56, an Arbon Valley rancher, found him getting ready to rope again at the Bannock County Fairgrounds' Fourth of July celebration, where he had taken the Old Timers event the year before.
Winning still thrilled Swim, by his own account. Younger ropers usually got the better of him these days, he admitted, so victories were scarcer, and he valued each one the more for it. Spending time among those younger competitors, he said, was good for him and took years off how he felt.
Swim noted that a man became eligible for old-timer contests at 50. Watch a roper hit the ground, he said, and his age was plain from how fast he got up and out of the way. Nearly every weekend brought a roping within driving distance, according to Swim, and the season carried on through the winter in indoor arenas at Fort Hall, Rupert, Preston and Ogden, where doctors and lawyers turned up in the field along with everyone else. He had his sights on Las Vegas, where a National Old Timers Rodeo Association, then just forming, would hold finals for ropers who qualified closer to home. Arizona's ropings tempted him too, and he hoped to spend a winter there someday.
When not competing, Swim spent every day on horseback, running a Hereford ranch in Arbon Valley with his son Kirk. Their cattle wintered in the feed lot and went to the range in spring, and the two men looked after them there until the fall roundup brought them back in. Besides cattle, the ranch produced grass hay, alfalfa and the family's own horses. Swim said the roping and branding were the part of ranch work he liked best, and that in country as rough as theirs a good horse was essential.
Swim credited his wife, Rhea, who he said ran the ranch together with Kirk. Hale's article also mentioned the couple's two other children: a daughter, and a son younger than Kirk who ran a dry farm in the valley. Horseback riding was still part of the ranch visits made by Swim's mother, Mrs. R. H. Swim of American Falls, at the age of 80.
Having grown up in Arbon Valley and roped for as long as he could remember, Swim expected to keep at it for the rest of his life, and said fishing would wait until he was too old to ride. "I've been trying to retire but it's no use," he said.