The Basque Block: Sheepherders, Boarding Houses, and the Oldest Language in Europe
Near Boise, Idaho
The block of Grove Street between Sixth and Eighth downtown has a name that requires a little explaining to anyone who didn't grow up in Boise. It's called the Basque Block, and it belongs to one of the most unlikely immigrant communities in the American West.
Boise has more Basques per capita than almost any city outside the Basque homeland itself, a mountainous region on the border of France and Spain. They speak Euskara, the oldest living language in Europe, with no known relation to any other tongue on earth. Linguists have puzzled over its origins for centuries.
The first Basques arrived in Idaho in the late eighteen hundreds, following word that there was work herding sheep in the high desert country. It was solitary, grueling work that most American-born workers didn't want, out on the open range for months at a stretch. But the Basques had been shepherds in the Pyrenees for generations. The landscape felt familiar even when the continent did not.
When the grazing season ended and the sheepherders came to town, they needed somewhere to go. Boarding houses on Grove Street became that somewhere, the Cyrus Jacobs-Uberuaga House, the oldest surviving brick building in Boise, was converted into a Basque boarding house in nineteen ten. The Anduiza family built a larger hotel-style boarding house in nineteen fourteen, with a fronton court inside for the traditional Basque handball game called jai alai.
Through the nineteen twenties and thirties, the community deepened. Mutual aid societies formed. A cultural center opened in nineteen forty-nine. Restaurants carried Basque food. The language kept being spoken at kitchen tables and in back rooms.
Today, around sixteen thousand Basque Americans live in and around Boise. The Block is still there: restaurants, a museum, a bar, a cultural center. On festival days, the fronton still echoes.
