The Basque Boardinghouses, Sheepherders and Their Strange Banquets

Sometime in the eighteen-eighties, a young man from the Basque Country of northern Spain or southern France arrived in Nevada carrying a contract to herd sheep. He spoke no English. He knew almost no one. What he knew was how to read terrain, how to move a large flock across high desert pasture, and how to be alone for months at a time in conditions that would defeat most people. He joined a community that would, over the next seventy years, shape the culture and landscape of the entire American West.

The Basque people came to Nevada in waves beginning in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, initially drawn by the California Gold Rush, then redirected toward the open-range sheep industry that proved far more durable than gold mining as an employer. By the eighteen-eighties and nineties, Nevada was a major center of western sheepherding, and Basque herders were the dominant labor force. They worked alone or in pairs for months at a time on federal grazing lands, earning wages that they saved with discipline and often eventually used to buy their own flocks.

In Reno, Elko, Winnemucca, and other northern Nevada towns, Basque boardinghouses served as community anchors. A herder who came off the range in autumn could find a room, a bed, meals at a long communal table, a Basque newspaper, and the sound of Euskara, the Basque language, one of the oldest and most grammatically unusual in the world, spoken freely. The boardinghouses served massive family-style meals: soup, salad, meat, beans, wine, bread, dessert, all at once, all at a fixed price. The format survives in several northern Nevada restaurants to this day.

Nevada Senator Pat McCarran championed what became known as the Sheepherder Laws after World War Two, special legislation that created immigration pathways for Basque workers. Thousands of additional Basques came under these provisions through the nineteen fifties. Louis' Basque Corner in downtown Reno, open since nineteen sixty-seven, is one of the direct inheritors of that world: a communal table, family-style portions, and a language on the menu board that belongs to no other language family on earth.