Basque Immigrants and Nevada's Sheep Industry: Geopolitics and the Making of an Agricultural Workforce, 1880-1954 - Hardcover

Iker Saitua is a Basque Country native and professor of economic history at the University of Basque Country in Leioa, Spain. 

On June 20, 1937, the Oregonian published in its Sunday magazine a small photographic report about Basque immigrants in southeastern Oregon. The Basques were widely identified with the western open-range sheep industry, and the article explained how the Basque immigrant community was highly concentrated in both Malheur and Harney counties because their livelihoods depended on the sheep ranching economy in this corner of the Interior West. Moreover, in some places, according to the article, Basque immigrants outnumbered the native-born residents. For instance, the report estimated that in the little frontier town of Jordan Valley, Basque immigrants and their children represented about 66 percent of the total population.

The Basque were, according to this article, &;a friendly, hard-working race.&; The article continued: &;In northeastern Spain, from the Bay of Biscay back into the Pyrenees mountains, is the homeland of this unique race. Since prehistoric times this has been their native heath. An intensely proud and independent people, whose origin is cloaked in mystery, theirs is a race apart.1

The words constituted the typically positive view of Basque immigration in the United States as the narrative had developed during previous decades when race classifications abounded. The article praised the Basque immigrants for their alleged industriousness in sheep grazing, warmhearted hospitability, and sense of pride in their origins. It also asserted that Basque immigrants assimilated easily into the dominant American culture. Although Basques were not Anglo-Saxon immigrants, the article said, &;they are masters of English after but few years in this country,&; going on to describe their physical characteristics in ways that were meant to assert affinities with other dominant social and racial groups, and thus indicating how much by the late 1930s the Basques were well on their way to becoming an accepted, if not welcomed, ethnic group in the American West.2

But this accepted social status was not always the case for the Basques in the West, and their journey as an immigrant group in America?&;??particularly within the western open-range sheep industry that was at the heart of Basque immigration and economic involvement from the late nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century?&;??was never a straightforward one. Indeed, the history of Basque immigrants working in the American sheep industry reveals a rich and complex story of socioeconomic integration within changing American and international political and social contexts.
 
Basques in the American West were associated with the open-range sheep industry from the 1880s to the 1970s. Since its beginnings, in one way or another, Basque immigrants played a noted role in the development of the commercial sheep raising in the West as a primary labor force. In the 1890s, as sheep ranching expanded rapidly in the West, the Basque Country became an important source of pliable labor to work in the public rangelands. At the turn of the century, although other ethnic groups also entered this occupation, Basques had become a noticeable and visible group in sheep grazing, particularly in Nevada, which was a nexus for Basque immigrant work in this industry. Even though Basque immigrants also worked in other industries besides sheep grazing, their work in this industry in particular shaped and strengthened the broader Basque American community?&;??or &;Amerikanuak&; as they were called, a corruption of the word &;Americans&; that came to refer to &;Basque-Americans&;?&;??all around the West.3 This historical process, which is the main subject of this study, was a complex, multidimensional, and sometimes contradictory one.

After the prominent and continuous Basque presence in the current Southwest region of the United States during the Spanish colonization, Basque immigrants began appearing in North America in considerable force around the late nineteenth century.4 Basque immigration to the United States is largely considered to have begun around the time of the gold rush, when a number of Basques living in Latin America migrated north to California.

By the late 1880s, though their numbers were relatively few, a handful of Basque families, such as the Altubes, who had initially arrived via Argentina, had created an immigrant enclave in Nevada based largely on the open-range sheep industry.5 Taking advantage of the free and open range available in the state at that time, these Basque pioneers built up quickly thriving sheep operations, which opened a floodgate for further Basque immigration as the open-range sheep industry became an immigrant lure for the Basques. This resulted in an expanding process of chain migration, which channeled Basque newcomers into the bottom ranks of the sheep industry and promoted the development of kindred networks.6 Thereof, an occupational concentration process occurred with the arrival of more Basque immigrants who settled nearby and worked as sheepherders along with their countrymen in the American West.7

Despite their growing numbers in the sheep industry in Nevada, Basque immigrants who arrived in the late nineteenth century were newcomers to an already established grazing empire, one that was based largely on cattle. In the 1890s, when an increasing number of Basque immigrants arrived in the West to work as sheepherders, their presence in the public ranges began to disturb the economic interests of the older cattle ranchers. Moreover, the 1890s witnessed a remarkable boom in the sheep business of the Great Basin, especially after the disastrous winter of 1889&;1890, which wiped out huge percentages of livestock and vegetation. After such an extreme-weather event, which forced livestock operators to change their grazing practices (particularly secure provisions for winter feed), the economics of sheep grazing seemed to fare better than cattle. Consequently, the number of sheep outfits multiplied and rangelands became more fully stocked. Then, competition between cattle owners and sheep graziers for the forage resources intensified, oftentimes flaring into violence. Basque sheepherders&; frequent trespassings on private land or crossings on public-domain lands occupied by others, intentionally or unintentionally, resulted oftentimes in tragic consequences for many Basque immigrant sheepherders.

The issues facing the livestock industry and the Basque sheepherders in the West were not merely state or local issues, and increasingly, the livestock industry and land use became a focus of the federal government. By the end of the nineteenth century, Congress began withdrawing public-domain lands?&;??largely in the American West?&;??from private entry and acquisition for the purpose of protecting the country&;s natural resources, primarily water and timber. Consequently, the question of resource use became an important one. Congress would go on to authorize the use of resources, including grazing on these lands, in ways that eventually brought regulations that directly affected the itinerant sheep grazing?&;??in which the Basque were particularly involved?&;??on Nevada&;s open ranges. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, just as Congress and the president moved to establish forest reserves and eventually national forests, issues of rangeland governance made the question of the Basque itinerant sheepherders central to a political debate at the state and national levels over who could use public grazing lands.

Although Basque immigrants in the West working in the sheepherding industry had generally been well considered by the dominant social and economic classes during the nineteenth century, older cattlemen?&;??in the context of...