Thousands of wooden tree carvings in the American West preserve the memory of Basque immigrants who worked as sheep herders between the 19th and 20th centuries. (Autor: Mireia Ochoa)
In the mountains and valleys of the western United States, from the Pacific coast to Wyoming, thousands of trees bear a striking cultural imprint: messages carved in Basque by Basque shepherds who migrated to the region between the 19th and 20th centuries. These carvings, known as arborglyphs, appear primarily on aspen trees and serve as small archives of the lives of those immigrants who found in sheep farming a way to survive in their new country.
Researcher Iñaki Arrieta Baro, head of the Jon Bilbao Basque Library at the University of Nevada, Reno, has documented many of these carvings. On one occasion, he accompanied a Basque-American family to a remote forest in northern Nevada to locate the tree where their grandfather had carved his name decades earlier. The discovery was deeply moving: they were in the very place where the shepherd had spent part of his life in solitude.
Many Basques came to the American West initially drawn by the 19th-century Gold Rush and ended up working as shepherds in regions of California, Nevada, and Idaho. Although most had no prior experience with large flocks, they accepted the work because it required little English. Amaya Herrera, curator at the Basque Museum and Cultural Center and one of an estimated 16,000 Basque-Americans living in Boise, Idaho, descends from one such family. “My great-grandparents immigrated in the late 1890s. They worked in ranching and then later ran a boarding house in Northern Nevada,” she says. Communities and guesthouses such as Boise’s Basque Block, also sprang up around this activity, serving as meeting points for the newcomers and helping to maintain cultural ties.
Trees became an unexpected medium of expression. Names, dates, drawings, poems, portraits, and political messages in Basque appear on their bark. Basque is a language spoken today by some 900,000 people and is considered the oldest in Europe still in use. Some carvings even depict Basque houses or landscapes that evoke homesickness for their homeland, while others record the shepherds’ repeated visits to the same place year after year.
Since the 1960s, researchers and descendants of immigrants have documented more than 25,000 of these carvings using photographs, tracings, and three-dimensional digital techniques. However, many are disappearing. Poplar trees rarely live more than a century, and phenomena such as drought, disease, and wildfires are rapidly destroying these historical relics.
Even so, these arborglifos continue to offer a unique window into the lives of those shepherds who spent long periods isolated in the mountains, following the transhumance of their flocks. Far from their families, they carved their thoughts, their identity, and their longing into the trees, leaving an unexpected imprint of memory in Basque on the landscape of the American West.
You can read the full report of the BBC article.
Credit: Richard Lane, Jon Bilbao Basque Library, University of Nevada, Reno Libraries