Heritage on display
Basque community celebrates its culture preserved at the Kern County Museum
It looks simple — just four walls mounted on a wooden pallet affixed with wheels.
But that simple trailer offers residents a clear glimpse into Kern County’s rich history of Basque sheepherders making a grueling trek into Mojave and the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains for lambs to graze.
Scores of Basques gathered Sunday to celebrate the Kern County Museum’s newest exhibit honoring sheepherders and other monuments to local Basque culture. As time wears on, capturing and remembering that history proves even more important.
“I am so honored,” Julie Morosa Parsons said of having her family’s history documented and available for Kern residents to see.
The exhibit, donated by Jim and Julie Etcheverry and the Hay Brothers Sheep Company, shows how sheepherders lived and how they shaped Kern’s economy. Today, sheepherders’ descendants are successful lawyers and businessmen, though some still make that journey every year.
But decades ago, newly arrived Basque immigrants herded hundreds of sheep from Kern County up into mountains for months. They stayed at the Noriega Hotel freshly arrived from France or when on vacation, Jim Etcheverry said.
It’s a lifestyle Julie Etcheverry described as the true immigrant experience.
The trailer available for everyone to see at the Kern County Museum has been in Jim Etcheverry’s family since perhaps the early 20th century. Jim Etcheverry, too, was sheepherder too alongside his grandfather and father. He’s still involved in this business, but not as heavily as he used to be, Jim Etcheverry said.
“It is a hard life,” Jim Etcheverry said of sheepherding.
A herder traveled for months with two donkeys, dogs and hundreds of
sheep up into the mountains around springtime and came back around fall, Jim Etcheverry said. They munched on food that would keep such as salt pork, dry Monterey jack cheese and salted cod. Pay came once a year, he added.
“It took a special type of person that really loved their animals,” Jim Etcheverry added.
Especially grueling would be leaving behind the trailer and then living in a tent, climbing steep mountainsides as lambs began grazing.
“The method and the success of bringing that lamb and that wool to market … that was more important than his wages,” Jim Etcheverry said.
Jim Etcheverry also described sheepherders as very patriotic and proud to come to America.
“They didn’t didn’t expect to go back home,” he said. “They made a new home.”
Julie M. Parsons recalled how her father and uncle went to World War II and then trucked livestock after returning from battle. They hauled sheep and other cattle, but also gathered wool for it to be bagged and shipped.
Each Basque exhibit in Kern County shines a different light on the powerful impact this culture had on this community, whether through economics or people living here.
“It’s an honor to have them recognized and appreciated,” Morosa Parsons said.