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A World Eclipsed: Economic Changes Cause an Identity Crisis for Basque Americans
| Article
# : |
10306 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1993 |
3,531 Words |
| Author
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William A. Douglass
William A. Douglass is coordinator of the Basque Studies
Program at the University of Nevada, Reno, and is the author
of several books on Basque culture. |
Motorists on the byways of the American West often found their path blocked by a thousand bleating sheep heading down from their summer range in the high country. A canopied sheepwagon, reminiscent of a prairie schooner, would trail the caravan of sheep, dogs, and horses. This was the mobile castle of the region's most nomadic resident, the sheepherder.
The sheepherder seemed irritated as he scurried about to clear a path for the travelers. After negotiating the sea of white fleeces, the motorists' shouted goodbyes were likely met with a wooden wave or slight nod of acknowledgment easily interpreted as aloofness. Actually, it marked shyness stemming from the cultural reality that the herder was a Basque from the Pyrenees of southwestern France or north-central Spain, a man who, given the extreme social isolation inherent in his occupation, was ignorant of English and therefore too proud to engage in even simple conversation.
The sheepherding heritage
For nearly a century and a half, beginning with the California gold rush, Basques have entered the American West in search of fortune. Many of the first arrivals came not from Europe but from Latin America. By the first half of the nineteenth century, Basques were heavily involved in the sheep industry as a part of European settlement of the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay. When news of the discovery of gold in California reached the world, southern South America was better positioned than either Europe or the eastern United States for the race to El Dorado.
As the initial gold fever subsided, several of the Basque argonauts recognized in the vast ranges of southern and central California an opportunity to replay the South American scenario. By the late 1850s, Basque-owned sheep bands were proliferating either on land leases given by the California dons or at the margins of white settlement. Typically, the entrepreneurial sheepman sent back to Europe for kinsmen or fellow villagers to herd bands within an expanding outfit. The new herder might take his wages in ewes, run them alongside those of his employer and then hive off in search of unclaimed range once his own band was sufficiently large to be self-supporting. By the 1870s most of the available California rangeland had been occupied. Nomadic Basque sheepmen began to reverse the westward movement, expanding across Arizona and New Mexico and into the Great Basin in their relentless pursuit of new opportunity.
At the turn of the
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