The Sheepherder's Bread: A Basque Tradition in the High Desert

The round, heavy loaf behind the counter at Erick Schat's Bakkery in Bishop has a specific history that goes back further than the bakery itself.

The Basque people began arriving in the Eastern Sierra as sheepherders in the eighteen eighties, following routes that took their flocks through the Owens Valley and up into the summer pastures of the Sierra Nevada and the White Mountains to the east. During the months of summer grazing, the herders were camped in the backcountry for weeks at a time, and they baked their own bread in cast-iron pots over open fires. The loaf they developed, round and crusty, with a dense crumb that could survive days of field conditions, is called the Sheepherder loaf.

The bakery on Main Street in Bishop has been producing this bread continuously since nineteen oh three. The ownership has changed; the bread has not.

The Basque community in the Eastern Sierra is one of the most persistent immigrant communities in this corridor. Their cultural imprint is visible in the place names of the high country, in the historic Basque hotels in Bridgeport, and in the aspen groves of the backcountry, where generations of Basque herders carved their names, their hometowns in the Basque country of Spain and France, and sometimes small drawings, into the smooth bark of the trees. Some of those carvings date to the early nineteen hundreds. They are, in the most literal sense, a record carved into living wood.