Basque Culture Dots Landscape of Modern West

The old Basco sat at the end of the bar, drinking his usual--a powerful punch of picon liquor, club soda, grenadine and brandy. When he spoke, which wasn’t much, it was the language of his homeland, a complex vernacular few understand in America.

In a room trimmed with video poker machines and businessmen swilling beer, Juan Juaristi was an oddity, a throwback to a time long past--when men who shared his drink and his native tongue packed the bar stools at the Star Hotel, playing cards and chatting about the herd and the hills.

At 75, his gray hair thinning, the lines in his face deepening, only Juaristi and a few buddies remain. They are among the last living links to a history that helped shape the cultural landscape of the West.

Juaristi was a shepherd, one of thousands of men from the Basque region of France and Spain who migrated to the United States in the 1900s seeking prosperity on the range of the American West.

They recruited their brothers and cousins and nephews, who soon brought their girlfriends and wives and children. Boardinghouses, such as the Star, sprung up to cater to the Basque workers. Restaurants, serving traditional food and drink, opened within the hotels.

In the unlikeliest of places, an entire subculture took root and blossomed. A people born of the seaports and lush hills of the Pyrenees found a fresh start amid the deserts and prairies of the New World.

Today, some 50,000 Basques live in the United States, 40,000 in the West. Few work in the industry that first lured them here; today’s shepherds are Mexican and Peruvian. Some of the old hotels have long been shuttered or are operated now by non-Basques.

But the legacy of the Basques lives on, in restaurants that still flourish, run now by the children of immigrants; in the annual festivals that feature the old foods and games and dancing; in the Basques of today: politicians, writers, lawyers and hoteliers, who operate casinos instead of boardinghouses.

The story of the Western Basques is an immigrant story like and unlike any other. They came to America and took jobs no one else wanted, persevered and prospered, planted roots and built legacies--and left an everlasting mark on a strange land that became their home.

Thought to be among Europe’s most ancient people, the Basques hail from a region about the size of Rhode Island along the Pyrenees Mountains of southern France and northern Spain. Known for their distinctive language, which scholars have been unable to trace to any other dialect, they refer to themselves as “Euskaldunak”--the speakers of Basque.

The Basques first headed to the United States during the Gold Rush. Back home they lived in relative poverty, surviving on what they raised on small family farms. An inheritance system that left the land to the eldest son alone forced many to leave in search of a living.

In America, when they failed to strike it rich in the mines, they turned to the prairies--and sheep held the promise of good money.

The job wasn’t glamorous. It required months roaming the mountains of the West with only your flock and your thoughts. Human contact was scarce, via a camp tender who visited once every week or so to deliver food and move on.

“I can’t fathom the courage that it would take for a young man to leave his home, never to see his brothers and sisters or his parents again, can’t speak a word of English, land in New York . . . and then come to this barren country,” says Roger Trounday, whose father, Jean, immigrated from Basse Navarre, France, to Reno in 1920 to work the sheep. “Some of the guys just absolutely broke down and cried.”

For Jess Lopategui, determination far outweighed fear.

In 1957, America was the last thing on Lopategui’s mind. He was 19 years old, and had a decent job at a silverware factory in Bizkaia, Spain. He made only $1 a day but fared better than many who survived only off the family farm.

Then a letter arrived from his uncle in Nevada. A ranch had an opening for a shepherd, with a starting salary of $8 a day. Unable to utter a word of English, Lopategui got on a plane bound for Elko, a ranching and mining town on the old Western Pacific rail line.

His goal was simple: Make enough money to return home and buy a place of his own.

On a cold day in January 1958, Lopategui headed for the hills of Nevada with his first herd of sheep, retracing the journey so many of his countrymen had made before.

“It was pretty lonely,” admits Lopategui, who recalls fishing, reading and etching tree carvings to pass the time. “Some of us, we came to town maybe once a year. Some, not even that often.”

Though they had little education, the Basques had business smarts and often took their wages in sheep. Soon, with few restrictions on grazing on public lands, the Basques were running their own sheep operations and recruiting their fellow countrymen to come share in the wealth.

In 1900, there were an estimated 1,000 Basques living in California, Nevada, Idaho and Wyoming. By 1910, the number had swelled to 8,400, according to “Home Away From Home,” a chronicle of Basque boardinghouses.

Northern Nevada became a significant Basque center, with boardinghouses in Reno, Winnemucca and Elko that catered to shepherds. The Ostatuak, as they were called in Basque, were the thread connecting the immigrants to their homeland.

Basque was spoken almost exclusively at the hotels, where tenants ate traditional family-style dinners of stew, beans, chorizo and dried cod. On weekends, Basques could be found playing mus, a traditional card game, or handball on “pelota” courts built next door.

Migration slowed in the 1920s when the federal government limited the number of Spanish nationals allowed into the country. Then in 1934, at the behest of U.S. ranchers upset over their Basque competitors, Congress restricted grazing on public lands to American citizens who owned land.

The tide turned again in the 1950s due to a labor shortage in the sheep industry. A U.S. senator from Nevada who had been a sheepman himself sponsored legislation to increase the quotas for Spanish immigrants, and a new wave of shepherds--including Lopategui--made the voyage to America.

Lopategui’s plans to return to the Basque country faded not long after his arrival.

“I liked it here,” he says. “I liked the freedom.”

For five years he herded sheep, then worked another two as a camp tender. He eventually moved to San Francisco to attend school and learn English. He returned to Elko in 1966 and now runs the Elko Blacksmith Shop with the son of another Basque immigrant.

Today, only a few thousand sheep roam the mountains of Nevada, accompanied no longer by Basques. When the economy picked up in the Basque country in the 1960s, migration fell. Those who did come found jobs in construction or landscaping, while the children of earlier immigrants chose professional fields such as law and education.

“We have dwindled,” Lopategui, 62, says of the original Basque immigrants--the shepherds who speak the old language and remember the ways of the old country.

“We’re dying out,” he says, but the culture itself is “hanging on.”

At places like the Star Hotel, among the few Nevada establishments continuously owned and operated by Basques, the patrons nowadays are more likely to be tourists and non-Basque businessmen than boarders. Many of the old hotels have closed, while others have fallen out of Basque hands.

“When I was a kid, most of the motels were owned by Basque people. Now they’re Best Westerns,” says 72-year-old Julian Jayo of Elko, the son of a Spanish Basque immigrant.

Some of the older Basque Americans who grew up speaking Basque have lost their native tongue, and it’s rare that children pick up on the language.

But the culture remains. At the Elko City Park, a pelota court is center stage for handball tournaments during the annual Basque Festival, held every July. Silver Street is lined with three Basque restaurants, the Nevada and Biltoki dinner houses and the Star Hotel.

The Basque-owned Elko General Merchandise sells berets, Basque flags and leather wine botas. Lopategui’s shop, when not producing mine equipment, makes weights for Basque competitions at the yearly picnics.

The culture has morphed and been molded by a new generation of Basque Americans.

At the University of Nevada in Reno, the Center for Basque Studies sponsors an annual study-abroad program to the Basque country. Students also participate in a Basque dance group.

Basque festivals are held annually in Reno, Elko and surrounding communities, where young children in traditional costume perform dances and eat the old foods.

And several Basque bars and restaurants are run now by the children of Basque immigrants--among them J.B. Lekumberry, who owns J.T. Basque Bar and Dining Room in Gardnerville, south of Reno.

Lekumberry’s dad, a French Basque shepherd, bought the place in 1960. Lekumberry grew up among the boarders, his crib sharing space with the bar. When his father died in 1993, he and his sister took over. Now 37, the former electrician runs the kitchen and oversees maintenance at the restaurant.

“I had to do it,” Lekumberry says of continuing the family business. “This was the home. That other place we slept at, that was the house.”

That philosophy still permeates many of the old Basque establishments.

At the Star, Juan Juaristi is among six elderly shepherds who still call the hotel home. For nearly 50 years he has lived upstairs in a room that holds little more than a bed. For nearly 50 years, he’s sipped picon punches downstairs at the bar.

On a recent day as he sat drinking his picon, Juaristi didn’t really want to talk. His had been a life of solitude and that, at least, had changed little.

But in a back room of the hotel, a photograph spoke for his silence.

There he stood in black-and-white--his hair thicker, his eyes brighter--surrounded by hundreds of sheep. He was grinning, a young man full of hope and adventure.