Elko is gearing up for its annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering — the highlight of the year for the city. This is one of the biggest cultural festivals in the American West that celebrates its extensive ranching heritage. Festival visitors may partake in a series of events that feature cowboy poetry, storytelling, and western music.
This year’s theme pays tribute to the sheepherders of the West and particularly to the Basque immigrants who worked in the western sheep industry. In this way, Basque sheepherders will be getting recognition from the cowboy culture, many years after the end of the range wars between cattle and sheep interests that marked life in the West.
By the late 1880s, though their numbers were relatively few, a handful of Basque immigrant families, such as the Altubes, had created an ethnic economic niche based largely on the open-range sheep industry. Taking advantage of the free and open range, these Basque pioneers built up quickly thriving sheep operations which opened a floodgate for further Basque immigration. This resulted in an expanding process of chain migration, which channelled Basque newcomers into the bottom ranks of the sheep industry and promoted the development of kindred networks. Thereof, an occupational concentration process occurred with the arrival of more Basque immigrants who settled near and worked as sheepherders along with their countrymen in the American West.
But they came late to the party...
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3 comments:
In New Mexico, the Basques came and worked on the shares for the landowners. They did so well that many eventually bought their bosses out.
On another front, the NM Cattle Sanitary Board and Sheep Sanitary Board merged in the late 1960's, but in order to accomplish that, the Governor was asked to put people on the Boards and the resulting NM Livestock Board who were diplomatic and respected enough to succeed in the face of the residual hostility between cattlemen and sheepmen, even then. People like John Bigbee, Jack Huning, my dad, and others.
many Basques in rock springs Wyoming, still there, and have branched out into other businesses from sheep ranching
Great people! They brought the sheep out of Phoenix alfalfa fields and up the government driveways on their way to the Kiabab, Coconino and Sitgraves National Forests for summer grazing. They were the best camp cooks ever!
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