The Boise Basque Block: The Largest Community Outside Spain

The Basque people are from the western Pyrenees, a mountain country straddling the border of Spain and France, and they speak Euskara, a language with no known relatives anywhere in the world. Beginning in the eighteen eighties, Basque men began arriving in Idaho recruited for work that most other immigrants would not take: itinerant sheepherding. The job required living alone on the open range for six to eight months at a stretch, following the sheep through Idaho's high mountain pastures, with no other humans nearby, no English, and no company beyond the flock and the dogs.

The boarding houses of downtown Boise were where these men came back to in the winter. The Cyrus Jacobs-Uberuaga House, built in eighteen sixty-four and operated as a Basque boarding house from nineteen ten onward, was one of several establishments on what became the Basque Block. The boarding houses provided more than rooms. They held mail from home, offered credit between seasons, cooked Basque food, and maintained the social fabric that allowed men who had spent months in silence to reconnect with their language, their religion, and their community.

Today the Boise area has somewhere between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand residents of Basque descent, more than any city outside the Basque Country itself. The Basque Block in downtown Boise includes the Basque Museum and Cultural Center, the Cyrus Jacobs-Uberuaga House, a fronton court where jai alai is still played, and a Basque restaurant. It is one of the most intact ethnic cultural blocks in the American West.

The sheepherders who built this community worked one of the most isolated jobs in frontier America. Many of them spent their working lives more alone than most people will ever be, and they built something durable.