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Basque Immigrants and Nevada's Sheep Industry: Geopolitics and the Making of an Agricultural Workforce, 1880-1954 (The Basque Series) - Hardcover
Synopsis
This book contributes to a wider understanding of the significance of the Basque immigration in the western sheep industry with a historically refreshed perspective. It contributes to the existing new historiography of the American West by looking more critically at the Basque immigrant experience in the open-range sheep industry of Nevada.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Iker Saitua is a Basque Government Postdocroral Fellow in History at the University of California, Riverside and the University of the Basque Country(UPV/EHU). As a native of the Basque Country and a historian of the Basque Country and United States, he specializes in the American West, the history of capitalism and commodities, environmental history, migration and labor history. He lives in Riverside, California.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
On June 20, 1937, the Oregonian published in its Sunday magazine a small photographic report about Basque immigrants in southeastern Oregon. The Basques were widely identified with the western open-range sheep industry, and the article explained how the Basque immigrant community was highly concentrated in both Malheur and Harney counties because their livelihoods depended on the sheep ranching economy in this corner of the Interior West. Moreover, in some places, according to the article, Basque immigrants outnumbered the native-born residents. For instance, the report estimated that in the little frontier town of Jordan Valley, Basque immigrants and their children represented about 66 percent of the total population.
The Basque were, according to this article, &;a friendly, hard-working race.&; The article continued: &;In northeastern Spain, from the Bay of Biscay back into the Pyrenees mountains, is the homeland of this unique race. Since prehistoric times this has been their native heath. An intensely proud and independent people, whose origin is cloaked in mystery, theirs is a race apart.1
The words constituted the typically positive view of Basque immigration in the United States as the narrative had developed during previous decades when race classifications abounded. The article praised the Basque immigrants for their alleged industriousness in sheep grazing, warmhearted hospitability, and sense of pride in their origins. It also asserted that Basque immigrants assimilated easily into the dominant American culture. Although Basques were not Anglo-Saxon immigrants, the article said, &;they are masters of English after but few years in this country,&; going on to describe their physical characteristics in ways that were meant to assert affinities with other dominant social and racial groups, and thus indicating how much by the late 1930s the Basques were well on their way to becoming an accepted, if not welcomed, ethnic group in the American West.2
But this accepted social status was not always the case for the Basques in the West, and their journey as an immigrant group in America?&;??particularly within the western open-range sheep industry that was at the heart of Basque immigration and economic involvement from the late nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century?&;??was never a straightforward one. Indeed, the history of Basque immigrants working in the American sheep industry reveals a rich and complex story of socioeconomic integration within changing American and international political and social contexts.
 
Basques in the American West were associated with the open-range sheep industry from the 1880s to the 1970s. Since its beginnings, in one way or another, Basque immigrants played a noted role in the development of the commercial sheep raising in the West as a primary labor force. In the 1890s, as sheep ranching expanded rapidly in the West, the Basque Country became an important source of pliable labor to work in the public rangelands. At the turn of the century, although other ethnic groups also entered this occupation, Basques had become a noticeable and visible group in sheep grazing, particularly in Nevada, which was a nexus for Basque immigrant work in this industry. Even though Basque immigrants also worked in other industries besides sheep grazing, their work in this industry in particular shaped and strengthened the broader Basque American community?&;??or &;Amerikanuak&; as they were called, a corruption of the word &;Americans&; that came to refer to &;Basque-Americans&;?&;??all around the West.3 This historical process, which is the main subject of this study, was a complex, multidimensional, and sometimes contradictory one.
After the prominent and continuous Basque presence in the current Southwest region of the United States during the Spanish colonization, Basque immigrants began appearing in North America in considerable force around the late nineteenth century.4 Basque immigration to the United States is largely considered to have begun around the time of the gold rush, when a number of Basques living in Latin America migrated north to California.
By the late 1880s, though their numbers were relatively few, a handful of Basque families, such as the Altubes, who had initially arrived via Argentina, had created an immigrant enclave in Nevada based largely on the open-range sheep industry.5 Taking advantage of the free and open range available in the state at that time, these Basque pioneers built up quickly thriving sheep operations, which opened a floodgate for further Basque immigration as the open-range sheep industry became an immigrant lure for the Basques. This resulted in an expanding process of chain migration, which channeled Basque newcomers into the bottom ranks of the sheep industry and promoted the development of kindred networks.6 Thereof, an occupational concentration process occurred with the arrival of more Basque immigrants who settled nearby and worked as sheepherders along with their countrymen in the American West.7
Despite their growing numbers in the sheep industry in Nevada, Basque immigrants who arrived in the late nineteenth century were newcomers to an already established grazing empire, one that was based largely on cattle. In the 1890s, when an increasing number of Basque immigrants arrived in the West to work as sheepherders, their presence in the public ranges began to disturb the economic interests of the older cattle ranchers. Moreover, the 1890s witnessed a remarkable boom in the sheep business of the Great Basin, especially after the disastrous winter of 1889&;1890, which wiped out huge percentages of livestock and vegetation. After such an extreme-weather event, which forced livestock operators to change their grazing practices (particularly secure provisions for winter feed), the economics of sheep grazing seemed to fare better than cattle. Consequently, the number of sheep outfits multiplied and rangelands became more fully stocked. Then, competition between cattle owners and sheep graziers for the forage resources intensified, oftentimes flaring into violence. Basque sheepherders&; frequent trespassings on private land or crossings on public-domain lands occupied by others, intentionally or unintentionally, resulted oftentimes in tragic consequences for many Basque immigrant sheepherders.
The issues facing the livestock industry and the Basque sheepherders in the West were not merely state or local issues, and increasingly, the livestock industry and land use became a focus of the federal government. By the end of the nineteenth century, Congress began withdrawing public-domain lands?&;??largely in the American West?&;??from private entry and acquisition for the purpose of protecting the country&;s natural resources, primarily water and timber. Consequently, the question of resource use became an important one. Congress would go on to authorize the use of resources, including grazing on these lands, in ways that eventually brought regulations that directly affected the itinerant sheep grazing?&;??in which the Basque were particularly involved?&;??on Nevada&;s open ranges. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, just as Congress and the president moved to establish forest reserves and eventually national forests, issues of rangeland governance made the question of the Basque itinerant sheepherders central to a political debate at the state and national levels over who could use public grazing lands.
Although Basque immigrants in the West working in the sheepherding industry had generally been well considered by the dominant social and economic classes during the nineteenth century, older cattlemen?&;??in the context of increased economic competition and social tension on Nevada&;s ranges?&;??began to scapegoat Basque sheepworkers for all the problems with grazing on public-domain lands. Along with the general nativist sentiment in the United States during this era, the years around World War I would bring with them discrimination and efforts to exclude Basques from the public-domain lands.
Indeed, during the first decades of the twentieth-century, just as Basques began to become settled in the Interior West with some of them building prosperous sheep-dealing businesses, an anti-Basque movement began by cattle ranchers, conservationists, and some politicians. Basque immigrant sheepherders, with their flocks coming onto public grazing lands, were perceived as a serious threat to the cattle economic interests, sustainable agricultural development, and public interest in general. They were blamed for a number of interrelated economic and environmental problems affecting the public grazing lands. The increasing presence of Basque sheepherders in the public rangelands drew derision amidst an American cowboy culture in the West.
This crusade against the sheepherders would ultimately create the most pernicious image of Basque immigrants in the West?&;??as the antithesis of the nationally venerated image of cowboys. While cowboys were viewed as the embodiment of the American frontier spirit of self-reliance by hardworking men who rode horses, sheepherders were denigrated as despicable and as laborers of an inferior class who walked long distances allowing sheep to roam at will across the wide-open range. The elevation of the venerable cowboy would seem, in some ways, to come at the expense and downgrading of the humble sheepherder. The social stigma that began to be carried by the sheepherding job would be enabled and compounded by racial prejudice and discrimination, something that the Basques could not escape.
These derogatory stereotypes of Basques would not only infiltrate disputes among livestock operators and communities in the West; they would also be used by politicians and industry lobbyists seeking advantages among state and federal land policy, specifically for cattle ranchers. Indeed, racialized perspectives of Basque sheepherders, and thus of Basque immigrants more generally, would characterize industry lobbying and Basque immigration politics for decades.8 Nevertheless, it would not always be against the Basques. Even while being subjected to overt racial and ethnic discrimination among cattle ranchers, Basque immigrants would, at the same time, find themselves placed at the top of the racialized sheep agricultural labor hierarchy.
In the early twentieth century, there was a strong American public image of Basque immigrant workers as possessing certain racial/cultural advantages necessary for sheepherding that nobody else had. Basques had acquired a distinctive reputation for an expertise and pioneering skill in the sheep industry of Nevada. It was a perspective, which, along with the racialization of the Basques in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would greatly contribute to the acceleration of those immigrants&; integration process.
Through the Anglo-American lens, Basques were socially constructed as an ancient, unique, and mysterious race from Europe. The vagueness of the racial construction surrounding Basques gave them distinctiveness which was reflected in their sheepherder identity. The increased ubiquity of Basque immigrants in the sheep industry resulted in the construction of a cultural stereotype: the Basque was a qualified, dependable, and good sheepworker. Basques&; alleged racial difference set them off from some other ethnic groups involved in the sheep grazing occupation of the American West. Such constructed racial identity would be constantly reflected, reinforced, and reiterated in the various representations of Basque sheepherders in the West in newspapers, popular literature, and in the words of politicians and lobbyists throughout the twentieth century.
The largest influx of Basque immigrants from the 1890s to the 1920s coincided with the so-called &;new immigration&; of southern and eastern Europe.9 Like many other European immigrant communities, Basques were induced to immigrate to the American West in the context of the American industrial and agricultural expansion in the late nineteenth century. And like its non&;English speaking European immigrant counterparts, Basque immigration also was disrupted after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924.10
The restrictive legislation of the 1920s constrained Basque immigration to the American West. Particularly, the Immigration Act of 1924 established quotas as principal means of regulating immigration, which limited significantly immigration from southern and eastern European countries. Because the Basque Country is divided between Spain and France, the 1924 immigration law affected Basques differently depending on their country of origin. The annual immigration quota for Spain was much smaller than that of France. After 1924, then, Basques from Spain faced greater challenges and had fewer opportunities to enter the United States than those emigrating from France, something that eventually would have major consequences for the recruiting of Basque immigrant labor in the sheep industry.
During the interwar period, a major shortage of &;skilled&; sheepherders occurred due to the 1924 immigration law, which had greatly reduced opportunities for Basque immigration to the United States. As a result of this shortage, negative perceptions of Basque sheepherders that emerged previously when they were seen as threats to the cattle industry would give way to positive perceptions, and the issue of Basque immigration would become intertwined with important labor and political debates of the first half of the twentieth century. Nevada and western woolgrowers reproduced the stereotype of the good sheepherder; a conception they used to justify a dependable Basque immigrant labor force to tend their sheep and retain control over such labor. In that way, furthermore, they racialized the production relations in the industry to justify the necessity to bring more Basque immigrant workers to Nevada&;s sheep industry: their desirable immigrant labor.
With the outbreak of World War II, the rapid industrial development in Nevada and the West created new job opportunities on a large scale, which former Basque immigrants living in the United States found more attractive than tending sheep. Because of the longstanding belief among American sheep ranchers that only Basque workers could effectively handle their labor needs, a group of Nevada ranchers took their demands to import Basque immigrant workers to Congress. Senator Patrick McCarran of Nevada became a leading voice for allowing recruitment of increasing numbers of Basque immigrants from Spain. From 1942 until the time of his death in 1954, McCarran lobbied persistently to bring Basque immigrants to Nevada.
Basque immigration raised issues of policy implications for both the United States and Spain, which became particularly relevant during and after World War II. Although the disastrous consequences of the Spanish Civil War (1936&;39) had left many Basques eager to leave Spain, the quota system in the United States reduced opportunities for emigration to the United States, despite the labor shortage in the sheepherding industry in the American Far West which had traditionally employed many Basque immigrants. Furthermore, the unfriendly relations between the United States and Francisco Franco&;s Spain during World War II and the early Cold War impeded any agreement that would have sponsored the importation of Basque immigrant laborers in the United States.
The recruiting process of Basque agricultural labor would ultimately unfold in the context of the foreign relations between the United States and Francisco Franco&;s dictatorship from the Second World War to the Pact of Madrid of 1953. Even though the United States government postponed the signing of an official agreement with Franco&;s regime until 1953, the ongoing lobbying by Nevada&;s sheep ranchers and Senator McCarran&;s influence in Congress enabled the issue of the recruitment of Basque immigrants to become integrated within broader informal bilateral trade and commercial negotiations including the recruitment of Basque immigrants. The Pact of Madrid normalized diplomatic relations with Franco&;s regime, which in turn served to strengthen other commercial relations including the recruitment of Basque immigrant laborers.
The major era of Basque involvement in sheepherding in the American West took place over a long period of time, from the 1870s to the 1950s. For much of that history, particularly in the early twentieth century, Basques were frequently perceived as having traditions as experienced sheepherders in their home country, an idea that was perpetuated and interestingly utilized for years. But this idea was not true. When Basque immigrants came to the American West to work in the sheep industry, they entered an unfamiliar occupation, in an unfamiliar geographical context, and adapted as they could. In the large, complex, and diverse geography of the American West, the varied locations and circumstances made Basque sheep workers vulnerable to many social, economic, legal, and environmental challenges, something which can be seen throughout the history of their involvement in the industry.
I have used the term &;sagebrush laborers&; to refer to the Basque immigrant sheepherders. This term recognizes Basque immigrant sheepherders as workers who produced an important commodity as part of the capitalist agricultural industry of Nevada, while rejecting the romanticized image of the good Basque sheepworker who?&;??in contradistinction to most low-paid workers in agriculture?&;??conformed so closely to an idealized vision of the good &;white American.&; Sagebrush prevailed throughout much of the grazing grounds of Nevada&;s open rangelands where the Basque worked. Both Basque and sagebrush were ubiquitous in the sheepherding environment, and together they rendered to the Nevada ranges a particular identity. The Basque laborer and the open ranges of Nevada where this sagebrush grew made the sheep industry viable. The one provided cheap labor from a faraway land, and the ranges provided virtually free grazing. The labor was marginal as well as the land. These two parts of an economic equation of scale made possible the rise of Nevada&;s sheep industry from the 1890s onward.
 
The Basque were, according to this article, &;a friendly, hard-working race.&; The article continued: &;In northeastern Spain, from the Bay of Biscay back into the Pyrenees mountains, is the homeland of this unique race. Since prehistoric times this has been their native heath. An intensely proud and independent people, whose origin is cloaked in mystery, theirs is a race apart.1
The words constituted the typically positive view of Basque immigration in the United States as the narrative had developed during previous decades when race classifications abounded. The article praised the Basque immigrants for their alleged industriousness in sheep grazing, warmhearted hospitability, and sense of pride in their origins. It also asserted that Basque immigrants assimilated easily into the dominant American culture. Although Basques were not Anglo-Saxon immigrants, the article said, &;they are masters of English after but few years in this country,&; going on to describe their physical characteristics in ways that were meant to assert affinities with other dominant social and racial groups, and thus indicating how much by the late 1930s the Basques were well on their way to becoming an accepted, if not welcomed, ethnic group in the American West.2
But this accepted social status was not always the case for the Basques in the West, and their journey as an immigrant group in America?&;??particularly within the western open-range sheep industry that was at the heart of Basque immigration and economic involvement from the late nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century?&;??was never a straightforward one. Indeed, the history of Basque immigrants working in the American sheep industry reveals a rich and complex story of socioeconomic integration within changing American and international political and social contexts.
 
Basques in the American West were associated with the open-range sheep industry from the 1880s to the 1970s. Since its beginnings, in one way or another, Basque immigrants played a noted role in the development of the commercial sheep raising in the West as a primary labor force. In the 1890s, as sheep ranching expanded rapidly in the West, the Basque Country became an important source of pliable labor to work in the public rangelands. At the turn of the century, although other ethnic groups also entered this occupation, Basques had become a noticeable and visible group in sheep grazing, particularly in Nevada, which was a nexus for Basque immigrant work in this industry. Even though Basque immigrants also worked in other industries besides sheep grazing, their work in this industry in particular shaped and strengthened the broader Basque American community?&;??or &;Amerikanuak&; as they were called, a corruption of the word &;Americans&; that came to refer to &;Basque-Americans&;?&;??all around the West.3 This historical process, which is the main subject of this study, was a complex, multidimensional, and sometimes contradictory one.
After the prominent and continuous Basque presence in the current Southwest region of the United States during the Spanish colonization, Basque immigrants began appearing in North America in considerable force around the late nineteenth century.4 Basque immigration to the United States is largely considered to have begun around the time of the gold rush, when a number of Basques living in Latin America migrated north to California.
By the late 1880s, though their numbers were relatively few, a handful of Basque families, such as the Altubes, who had initially arrived via Argentina, had created an immigrant enclave in Nevada based largely on the open-range sheep industry.5 Taking advantage of the free and open range available in the state at that time, these Basque pioneers built up quickly thriving sheep operations, which opened a floodgate for further Basque immigration as the open-range sheep industry became an immigrant lure for the Basques. This resulted in an expanding process of chain migration, which channeled Basque newcomers into the bottom ranks of the sheep industry and promoted the development of kindred networks.6 Thereof, an occupational concentration process occurred with the arrival of more Basque immigrants who settled nearby and worked as sheepherders along with their countrymen in the American West.7
Despite their growing numbers in the sheep industry in Nevada, Basque immigrants who arrived in the late nineteenth century were newcomers to an already established grazing empire, one that was based largely on cattle. In the 1890s, when an increasing number of Basque immigrants arrived in the West to work as sheepherders, their presence in the public ranges began to disturb the economic interests of the older cattle ranchers. Moreover, the 1890s witnessed a remarkable boom in the sheep business of the Great Basin, especially after the disastrous winter of 1889&;1890, which wiped out huge percentages of livestock and vegetation. After such an extreme-weather event, which forced livestock operators to change their grazing practices (particularly secure provisions for winter feed), the economics of sheep grazing seemed to fare better than cattle. Consequently, the number of sheep outfits multiplied and rangelands became more fully stocked. Then, competition between cattle owners and sheep graziers for the forage resources intensified, oftentimes flaring into violence. Basque sheepherders&; frequent trespassings on private land or crossings on public-domain lands occupied by others, intentionally or unintentionally, resulted oftentimes in tragic consequences for many Basque immigrant sheepherders.
The issues facing the livestock industry and the Basque sheepherders in the West were not merely state or local issues, and increasingly, the livestock industry and land use became a focus of the federal government. By the end of the nineteenth century, Congress began withdrawing public-domain lands?&;??largely in the American West?&;??from private entry and acquisition for the purpose of protecting the country&;s natural resources, primarily water and timber. Consequently, the question of resource use became an important one. Congress would go on to authorize the use of resources, including grazing on these lands, in ways that eventually brought regulations that directly affected the itinerant sheep grazing?&;??in which the Basque were particularly involved?&;??on Nevada&;s open ranges. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, just as Congress and the president moved to establish forest reserves and eventually national forests, issues of rangeland governance made the question of the Basque itinerant sheepherders central to a political debate at the state and national levels over who could use public grazing lands.
Although Basque immigrants in the West working in the sheepherding industry had generally been well considered by the dominant social and economic classes during the nineteenth century, older cattlemen?&;??in the context of increased economic competition and social tension on Nevada&;s ranges?&;??began to scapegoat Basque sheepworkers for all the problems with grazing on public-domain lands. Along with the general nativist sentiment in the United States during this era, the years around World War I would bring with them discrimination and efforts to exclude Basques from the public-domain lands.
Indeed, during the first decades of the twentieth-century, just as Basques began to become settled in the Interior West with some of them building prosperous sheep-dealing businesses, an anti-Basque movement began by cattle ranchers, conservationists, and some politicians. Basque immigrant sheepherders, with their flocks coming onto public grazing lands, were perceived as a serious threat to the cattle economic interests, sustainable agricultural development, and public interest in general. They were blamed for a number of interrelated economic and environmental problems affecting the public grazing lands. The increasing presence of Basque sheepherders in the public rangelands drew derision amidst an American cowboy culture in the West.
This crusade against the sheepherders would ultimately create the most pernicious image of Basque immigrants in the West?&;??as the antithesis of the nationally venerated image of cowboys. While cowboys were viewed as the embodiment of the American frontier spirit of self-reliance by hardworking men who rode horses, sheepherders were denigrated as despicable and as laborers of an inferior class who walked long distances allowing sheep to roam at will across the wide-open range. The elevation of the venerable cowboy would seem, in some ways, to come at the expense and downgrading of the humble sheepherder. The social stigma that began to be carried by the sheepherding job would be enabled and compounded by racial prejudice and discrimination, something that the Basques could not escape.
These derogatory stereotypes of Basques would not only infiltrate disputes among livestock operators and communities in the West; they would also be used by politicians and industry lobbyists seeking advantages among state and federal land policy, specifically for cattle ranchers. Indeed, racialized perspectives of Basque sheepherders, and thus of Basque immigrants more generally, would characterize industry lobbying and Basque immigration politics for decades.8 Nevertheless, it would not always be against the Basques. Even while being subjected to overt racial and ethnic discrimination among cattle ranchers, Basque immigrants would, at the same time, find themselves placed at the top of the racialized sheep agricultural labor hierarchy.
In the early twentieth century, there was a strong American public image of Basque immigrant workers as possessing certain racial/cultural advantages necessary for sheepherding that nobody else had. Basques had acquired a distinctive reputation for an expertise and pioneering skill in the sheep industry of Nevada. It was a perspective, which, along with the racialization of the Basques in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, would greatly contribute to the acceleration of those immigrants&; integration process.
Through the Anglo-American lens, Basques were socially constructed as an ancient, unique, and mysterious race from Europe. The vagueness of the racial construction surrounding Basques gave them distinctiveness which was reflected in their sheepherder identity. The increased ubiquity of Basque immigrants in the sheep industry resulted in the construction of a cultural stereotype: the Basque was a qualified, dependable, and good sheepworker. Basques&; alleged racial difference set them off from some other ethnic groups involved in the sheep grazing occupation of the American West. Such constructed racial identity would be constantly reflected, reinforced, and reiterated in the various representations of Basque sheepherders in the West in newspapers, popular literature, and in the words of politicians and lobbyists throughout the twentieth century.
The largest influx of Basque immigrants from the 1890s to the 1920s coincided with the so-called &;new immigration&; of southern and eastern Europe.9 Like many other European immigrant communities, Basques were induced to immigrate to the American West in the context of the American industrial and agricultural expansion in the late nineteenth century. And like its non&;English speaking European immigrant counterparts, Basque immigration also was disrupted after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924.10
The restrictive legislation of the 1920s constrained Basque immigration to the American West. Particularly, the Immigration Act of 1924 established quotas as principal means of regulating immigration, which limited significantly immigration from southern and eastern European countries. Because the Basque Country is divided between Spain and France, the 1924 immigration law affected Basques differently depending on their country of origin. The annual immigration quota for Spain was much smaller than that of France. After 1924, then, Basques from Spain faced greater challenges and had fewer opportunities to enter the United States than those emigrating from France, something that eventually would have major consequences for the recruiting of Basque immigrant labor in the sheep industry.
During the interwar period, a major shortage of &;skilled&; sheepherders occurred due to the 1924 immigration law, which had greatly reduced opportunities for Basque immigration to the United States. As a result of this shortage, negative perceptions of Basque sheepherders that emerged previously when they were seen as threats to the cattle industry would give way to positive perceptions, and the issue of Basque immigration would become intertwined with important labor and political debates of the first half of the twentieth century. Nevada and western woolgrowers reproduced the stereotype of the good sheepherder; a conception they used to justify a dependable Basque immigrant labor force to tend their sheep and retain control over such labor. In that way, furthermore, they racialized the production relations in the industry to justify the necessity to bring more Basque immigrant workers to Nevada&;s sheep industry: their desirable immigrant labor.
With the outbreak of World War II, the rapid industrial development in Nevada and the West created new job opportunities on a large scale, which former Basque immigrants living in the United States found more attractive than tending sheep. Because of the longstanding belief among American sheep ranchers that only Basque workers could effectively handle their labor needs, a group of Nevada ranchers took their demands to import Basque immigrant workers to Congress. Senator Patrick McCarran of Nevada became a leading voice for allowing recruitment of increasing numbers of Basque immigrants from Spain. From 1942 until the time of his death in 1954, McCarran lobbied persistently to bring Basque immigrants to Nevada.
Basque immigration raised issues of policy implications for both the United States and Spain, which became particularly relevant during and after World War II. Although the disastrous consequences of the Spanish Civil War (1936&;39) had left many Basques eager to leave Spain, the quota system in the United States reduced opportunities for emigration to the United States, despite the labor shortage in the sheepherding industry in the American Far West which had traditionally employed many Basque immigrants. Furthermore, the unfriendly relations between the United States and Francisco Franco&;s Spain during World War II and the early Cold War impeded any agreement that would have sponsored the importation of Basque immigrant laborers in the United States.
The recruiting process of Basque agricultural labor would ultimately unfold in the context of the foreign relations between the United States and Francisco Franco&;s dictatorship from the Second World War to the Pact of Madrid of 1953. Even though the United States government postponed the signing of an official agreement with Franco&;s regime until 1953, the ongoing lobbying by Nevada&;s sheep ranchers and Senator McCarran&;s influence in Congress enabled the issue of the recruitment of Basque immigrants to become integrated within broader informal bilateral trade and commercial negotiations including the recruitment of Basque immigrants. The Pact of Madrid normalized diplomatic relations with Franco&;s regime, which in turn served to strengthen other commercial relations including the recruitment of Basque immigrant laborers.
The major era of Basque involvement in sheepherding in the American West took place over a long period of time, from the 1870s to the 1950s. For much of that history, particularly in the early twentieth century, Basques were frequently perceived as having traditions as experienced sheepherders in their home country, an idea that was perpetuated and interestingly utilized for years. But this idea was not true. When Basque immigrants came to the American West to work in the sheep industry, they entered an unfamiliar occupation, in an unfamiliar geographical context, and adapted as they could. In the large, complex, and diverse geography of the American West, the varied locations and circumstances made Basque sheep workers vulnerable to many social, economic, legal, and environmental challenges, something which can be seen throughout the history of their involvement in the industry.
I have used the term &;sagebrush laborers&; to refer to the Basque immigrant sheepherders. This term recognizes Basque immigrant sheepherders as workers who produced an important commodity as part of the capitalist agricultural industry of Nevada, while rejecting the romanticized image of the good Basque sheepworker who?&;??in contradistinction to most low-paid workers in agriculture?&;??conformed so closely to an idealized vision of the good &;white American.&; Sagebrush prevailed throughout much of the grazing grounds of Nevada&;s open rangelands where the Basque worked. Both Basque and sagebrush were ubiquitous in the sheepherding environment, and together they rendered to the Nevada ranges a particular identity. The Basque laborer and the open ranges of Nevada where this sagebrush grew made the sheep industry viable. The one provided cheap labor from a faraway land, and the ranges provided virtually free grazing. The labor was marginal as well as the land. These two parts of an economic equation of scale made possible the rise of Nevada&;s sheep industry from the 1890s onward.
 
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