Celebrating Togetherness at Sheepherders Ball : Idaho Basque Community Hails the Season at Biggest Social Event of the Year

“Gabon on bat eta urte Bari Asi” everyone shouted in the packed auditorium as Jim Jausoro’s Basque band struck up the first tune at the 48th annual Sheepherders Ball at Euzkaldun-Etxea, America’s largest Basque club.

Five hundred Basques were greeting one another with heartfelt “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year” in the ancient language of their forefathers, a language with no linguistic relatives, so old and so different from all others that its origins have been lost in antiquity.

For Boise’s 10,000 Basques, largest Basque community in America, the Sheepherders Ball held each Christmas week is the biggest social event of the year. Band leader Jausoro’s first song was “Ator Ator Mutil Etxera” (Come. Come. Son. Come Back Home.), a favorite Christmas carol. The song is about a mother and father calling their sheepherder son back home from America to the Basque country of Spain and France for the Christmas holidays.

Colorful banners from the four Spanish Basque provinces and the three French Basque provinces in the Pyrenees hung from the ceiling of Boise’s big Basque Center in the shadows of Idaho’s capitol.

A giant Basque flag, red field with green X and white cross, hung from a wall, a huge map showing the seven Basque provinces, Araba, Benabarra, Bizkatia, Caburdi, Gipuzkoa, Nafarroa and Zuberoa adorned another wall.

Basques had come to the Sheepherders Ball, as they do each year, from throughout Idaho, Nevada, Oregon and Utah, a few from as far away as California and Hawaii.

“Five of us drove over in a van from the Salt Lake area,” explained Jim Sangroniz, 26, an engineer from Midvale, Utah, son of a sheepherder. “We came for the good time, for the dancing, to see old friends we haven’t seen since the last Sheepherders Ball, to get together with other Basque ‘cousins’ we haven’t seen in years. There is nothing like this is Salt Lake City.”

Sangroniz and his friends drove 350 miles just to go to the ball. They arrived a few hours before the dance. They would leave the next morning to return to Utah.

It was the liveliest, noisiest, happiest, most free-spirited ball imaginable. First the widely acclaimed Boise Basque Oinkari dancers got everybody in the mood. The Oinkari dancers (meaning people who do something with their feet) have performed throughout America and in the Basque Country of France and Spain as well.

For a solid hour nonstop the 90-member troop in colorful costumes did a series of centuries-old Basque numbers accompanied by rousing cheers, claps, yells, whistles and shouts from the crowd in the auditorium.

“Ori. Ori, “ shouted the dancers and the spectators. “Ori. Ori” means “that’s the way to go.”

Dancers spun, kicked, clicked castanets as they leaped high off the ground. The haunting sound of the txistu, the ancient Basque flute, brought somber moments.

Next came the traditional auctioning of a lamb. The same animal was auctioned several times bringing $3,400 for the Basque Club’s charities in coming months.

“Proud people, aren’t they?” mused auctioneer Dick Davis, 48, of Emmett, Ida., one of the few non-Basques at the ball.

After that the sheepherders and ex-sheepherders and descendants of sheepherders danced with as much enthusiasm and exuberance as the Oinkari dancers, leaping, kicking, clapping, throwing their arms into the air to the spirited music.

It was the late Jon Ashabal, who had one of the biggest sheep outfits in the West, who came up with the idea to have a Christmas dance for Basque sheepherders. The year was 1928.

“When I was 8 years old I went to the first Sheepherders Ball and I haven’t missed but one or two since,” said Ramon Ysursa, 67, wearing a red txapella (Basque beret).

Ysursa manned a steaming chorizo pot, selling Basque sausages wrapped in hot dog rolls for the Basque Center benefit. Basque chorizo is a traditional snack at the Sheepherders Ball.

In 1928, recalled Ysursa, “99% of the Basque people in Boise worked with the sheep. The men were sheepherders out on the mountain and foothill ranges grazing the animals. Many of the women ran boardinghouses for the sheepherders when they came to town on occasional visits for a good Basque meal, for a day or two of rest.”

During the early years of the Sheepherders Ball the sheepherders were rounded up and driven into town for the big event with a few less fortunate sheepherders left tending the flocks.

“The sheepherders would shower and shave for the dance. At the ball they would get all the news from the old country, meet other sheepherders working that lonely, isolated existence,” explained Pete Cenarrusa, 69, Idaho’s secretary of state the past 20 years, speaker of the Idaho House of Representatives three terms before that and a member of the House 17 years.

Cenarrusa’s father came to Idaho from the Basque country in Spain in 1907 to be a sheepherder. The secretary of state and his brother still own and operate a flock of 6,000 sheep. The Cenarrusa family has had a sheep outfit in Idaho continuously for 79 years.

At the first sheepherders balls the daughters of Basque sheepherders who came to Idaho beginning in the 1890s were dance partners for the sheepherders.

Sheepherders who migrated from the Basque country in Europe in recent years and continue to tend the flocks were at this year’s Sheepherder Ball as they always have been in the past.

Felex Otazua, 50, a present-day sheepherder who cares for 2,000 sheep was the focus of a lot of attention throughout the evening. In a blizzard last January he became separated from his sheep and was lost three days without food or water. “I was hungry. You betcha. But I got back to the sheep and my camp,” Otazua recalled with a big grin.

The common thread of all 10,000 Basques in the Boise area and Basques in other Basque centers throughout the West, Nevada, California, Oregon and Utah, is sheep and the sheepherder.

The former sheepherders or descendants of sheepherders at the dance are now doctors, lawyers, accountants, businessmen and from various walks of life.

“All of us Basques in America trace our roots to a sheepherder like my father,” said Gloria Totorica, 25, currently doing postgraduate work in political science at Boise State University. Her father, Ted Totorica, 68, came here from Gernika, Spain, in 1952.

She told of plans by the Basque community in America to bring three sculptors from the Basque Country in Europe to erect a giant statue of a sheepherder in the Sierra Nevada between Reno and Lake Tahoe.

“The statue will rise above Interstate 80 and be seen by millions each year. It is to be a tribute and thanks to America from the Basques who first came here as sheepherders,” Totorica explained.

At midnight, two hours before the party ended, Esperanza Goitiandia, 54, whose husband was a sheepherder, started preparing Berakatz Sopa--strong garlic soup, the traditional nightcap for the Sheepherders Ball.

A final playing of the popular Dringilin Dron (We’re getting together and having a good time), then the celebrants said their goodbys, wished one another “Gabon on bat eta urte Bari Asi” and headed for their cars and pickup trucks parked along the icy, snow-blanketed Boise streets in the crisp 15-degree air.