The Strangely Mythic History of Basque Sheep Herders in the American West

Basque shepherds were a real thing in America. The first Basques came to California in the Gold Rush era to pan for nuggets. Some of these folks came, not directly from the Basque country, but from South America, where they had already been living as ranch hands. In California, some of them quickly slid from mining into food production.  Companies, some of them Basque-owned, hired Basque men with herding experience to work on ranches. At first this was mostly cattle, but the droughts and a surging demand for wool caused many ranchers to shift to sheep in the Civil War era. In the 1870 to 1900 period Basques seem to have dominated sheep ranching in the Great Basin and were known throughout the west.

Herding sheep across the vast spaces of the dry west was difficult and often lonely, but it did not require education or knowledge of English, and the most and ambitious men could earn good money. Basque herders developed an interesting culture. Their social lives were often rooted in certain Basque-owned boarding houses in towns near to the sheep ranges, such as Boise, Idaho. They liked to carve on trees, usually initials and dates like the example above (from Yosemite National Park), but also directional signs indicating routes and watering places. They also marked their trails with cairns, spawning a still-raging debate among archaeologists over which cairns are Basque and whether this matters. They had a unique way of organizing ranching companies, with new hands signed to two- or three-year contracts that were largely paid in animals, allowing these hands start their own herds after only a couple of contracts.

But Basques were not the only shepherds in the west, nor were they the majority. A lot more were mestizos. Some of these Spanish-speaking folks had lived in the southwest since it was part of Mexico, but they were reinforced by a steady stream of migrants beginning in the late 1800s. Indians such as Navajo and Apache also went big into sheepherding.

In many ways, though, the Basques dominate our imagination of sheep ranching in that time. This myth was most powerful just as actual Basque immigration was tailing off, after 1920. Consider that the 1924 immigration act restricted entry from Spain but made a special exception for Basque herders, because of their "exceptional skill." This unique status was maintained in subsequent immigration laws, including the 1952 Omnibus Immigration Bill, which exempted then from the quotas on the Spanish and the French. These laws were based on a theory that Basques  had some kind of cultural or even racial knowledge that made them great herders.. In fact some of the Basques who came to the US under this exemption were sailors or factory workers who had never been near a sheep.

Basques were considered whiter than other Spaniards, and certainly much whiter than Mexicans. This, the theory went, made them harder working, more reliable, and so on. Some folks who believed in Basque superiority connected this to the ancient history of their people and their strange language, which somehow made them even more European than the British or the French.

One reason Basque descendants are not more prominent in the US today is that many of these men returned home. Sheepherding made it difficult to marry or form families, so many saved their money (either as gold or livestock) and eventually sold up and went back to Europe.