Winnemucca: Basque Country on the Humboldt

Winnemucca is named for a Northern Paiute leader, but the town's most lasting cultural mark comes from a different migration: Basque sheepherders who arrived from the Pyrenees in the eighteen eighties and found the high desert rangeland familiar enough to stay. Winnemucca became a center of Basque ranching culture in central Nevada. The Winnemucca Hotel on Bridge Street, which dates to the nineteenth century, fed sheepherders family-style at long communal tables, a tradition that carries on at Ormachea's restaurant nearby. Winnemucca hosts the Basque Festival each June.

The town sits at the intersection of Interstate Eighty and US Ninety-Five, where the Humboldt River approaches from the east. Emigrants on the California Trail in the eighteen forties and fifty followed the Humboldt west through here. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid allegedly robbed the First National Bank of Winnemucca in nineteen hundred, though historians debate the claim. The city remains the Humboldt County seat with a population of around eight thousand.