Peter Sheridan

Peter Sheridan was born in Co. Cavan in 1792, according to the SILAS dictionary, which also says he died at Ranchos on 8 January 1844. Helen Kelly's study, as reported in the Irish Times, says he arrived in 1817 with almost nothing. The historian Patrick McKenna calls Sheridan, with his English partner Harrat, the largest employer of the Irish labourers of the early years.

He is remembered as a sheep pioneer, but the sources disagree on the detail. SILAS says he bought merino sheep imported from Rambouillet in 1824. Nally says he helped introduce merinos. A newspaper timeline, seen only in a search summary, says Sheridan and Harrat imported animals in 1825 at Bernardino Rivadavia's initiative, without naming a breed. Nothing opened for this site ties him by name to the Los Galpones stud that set off the 'merinomanía' of the 1830s, so we say only that he and Harrat were among the sheep pioneers of the 1820s. SILAS and Kelly agree that he owned about 40,000 sheep when he died.

Sheridan also shaped who came. McKenna records that he refused to sponsor emigration, on the grounds that within a year the immigrants became masters themselves, and Co. Cavan never became a sending area. The Irish presence was small in his lifetime: fewer than 500 people in 1824 by the British consul's count, and perhaps 3,500 by the early 1840s. The wealth that sheep brought a few men sat beside harder facts. McKenna argues that creole landowners financed immigrant shepherds on frontier land partly as a buffer against Indigenous groups, and Edmundo Murray estimates that only about one emigrant in ten ever became a landowner.