Stories of Sheep People: Herders & Carvers
"Though we talked about going home — and some did go — underneath, most of us realized the opportunity was here. It was a raw new land, and we were helping to build it. There wasn’t anything a man couldn’t do in this western country with work and luck ..."
— Dominique Laxalt, in Robert Laxalt. "Basque Sheepherders: Lonely Sentinels of the American West." National Geographic, June 1966, p. 882.
Literally thousands of sheepherders have lived and worked in Nevada during the last 120 years. Most of them were not visited by census takers, but many of them left their names on aspen trees. Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe's database of carvings on Peavine Mountain documents some of the names. The records of the Western Range Association and other immigration groups also include names of some (but not all) of the herders they sponsored. Writers, filmmakers and researchers have interviewed some of the sheepherders and arborglyph carvers who, in telling their own stories, are telling the stories of many other unknown sheepherders who passed through Northern Nevada. Most of those who were interviewed, however, were those who stayed. We would like to include the stories of those who returned to the Basque Country, and we encourage those who returned as well as those who stayed to send us your stories so we can include them in the exhibit.
- Vicente Bilbao
- Born in 1887 in Bizkaia in the Basque Country, he joined his brother in the U.S. as a young man. He worked for several sheep outfits in Nevada. An oral history provides details of the life of this sheepherder in the 1920s and 1930s (includes photographs).
- Dominique Laxalt
- His son Robert immortalized him in his book Sweet Promised Land. Without the book, he would have been known primarily as the patriarch of Nevada's most famous Basque family, as the father of Paul Laxalt, a governor and senator, and Robert Laxalt, author, professor, and founder of the University of Nevada Press. Robert also talks about his father's sheepherding experiences in an oral history interview.
- Eugenio Sarratea
- Video interview
- Antonio Sarratea
- Video interview
- Jean Leukenbery
- Video interview
- Etienne Maizzcorena
- Arborglyph artist
- More ... coming soon