Owyhee Marginalia

30 August 2018

Hazel Danner Fretwell-Johnson:  Citizen Historian

        As I have come to learn more about the Owyhee and its people, I have been struck by the deep interest the region’s residents have in their own history.  Anyone whose family has lived in the area more than two or three generations (and they are numerous) is filled with stories about their ancestors, most of which they are quite ready to share.  This interest has led a number of people to write mostly self-published histories of the early settlers of the Owyhee.  Granted, these are more often than not collections of anecdotes about people and places that might strike the trained historian as amateurish.  But that in no way diminishes their value as aids to an understanding of the heritage, self image, pride and values of the people who now occupy the Owyhee and the ways in which those affect how they see their place in today’s society.  I can spend hours listening to one of them or in reading what they have written, published or not.  One of the better known of these writers is Hazel Danner Fretwell-Johnson, who has produced numerous articles and two books:  In Times Past–A History of the Lower Jordan Creek Communities, and The Best of Jordan Valley.

        It was during a three-week stay in Jordan Valley this past June that I unexpectedly met Hazel.  Her son Glenn, owner of the Oxbow Trailer Park where I had my travel trailer, introduced me.  At ninety-eight, she is still sharp and engaging.  I spent several afternoons asking (and answering) questions and listening.

 

Hazel Fretwell-Johnson

        Hazel was born in Jordan Valley in 1920 in the home of her paternal grandfather, John Henry Danner.  He would later establish the Danner post office several miles west of Jordan Valley.  Hazel and her parents lived first at Arock, not far from where her son Robert now ranches, and later moved to Danner, where they lived next door to her maternal grandparents.  Life was a pleasant.  Her folks never got up early, and the family ate breakfast together.  Her two brothers, Donald and Harold, did all the chores; her father believed she needn’t do anything.  But she described her parents as somewhat straitlaced and inclined to draw the line on many things. During the summer months a Protestant pastor might come and there would be occasional Sunday school for the children. One year her great grandfather, a missionary from the UK, came to visit.  She thought he was probably Anglican. 

            Because the Danners lived near the school, three of the Yturridobieta children, whose ranch was some distance, boarded with the Danners.  She recalled they spoke Basque among themselves and had their own idioms in English.  For example, when her grandmother would sic the dog on chickens that had gotten into her garden, one of the boys would yell, “Throw the dog at them Mrs. Robison.”         

        Many families wanted their kids to be educated.  There were those who had their children go through the 8th grade, the limit of the local school, and then “kept them at home and worked them to death.”  Hazel saw "no progress" in this.  A few sent their kids to Ontario, where there was a high school.  After completing the Arock school, Hazel did her Freshman year in Jordan Valley under the tutorship of the Ontario Educational District and then went to Ontario to complete high school.  At that time, she was one of only two local students who went all the way through.

        At the age of twenty, Hazel married Orville “Pete” Fretwell, whose father Carlton built all seven of the famed Owyhee waterwheels near Rome that were used to lift water from the river to irrigate the fields.  For eighteen years she was the clerk of School District 81, the Arock School district.  She hunted deer and for an old cannon, she said, that a woman claimed to have seen near Three Forks.  Though not an outdoor person, when her husband went hunting she “shouldered my rifle and away we went.” 

Glenn Fretwell at the Diversion Dam

        Especially fascinating was the tour she and son Glenn took me on of the Jordan Creek irrigation district with its diversion dam and the remnants of a bridge that had been built to move sheep across the creek.  Hazel has written about the Jordan Creek irrigation district and its diversion dam, which supply agriculture around Arock.  We headed out one overcast Sunday.  The trip offered a striking lesson in cartographical stubbornness.  Off the highway, we followed an improved gravel road until Glenn told me to stop.  He opened a stick and wire gate in a fence and motioned me through.  At the beginning I thought I could see a track, but it soon disappeared and for the next few miles he guided me through mature sage brush and around rock mounds.  I could have sworn there was no road and that he was making it up.  Yet my 4 Runner’s on-board navigation showed his directions perfectly following a mapped road!  Ultimately we made it to the site of the long-gone sheep bridge and then to an improved road that took us to the diversion dam.  Both were fascinating.  There have been other times when I have tried to follow a road that is indicated on a BLM or USGS map but which has in reality disappeared.  They usually can also be found on historical maps and sometimes are even designated with the names of the towns or forts they once connected.  Later cartographers have simply copied them onto newer maps, occasionally leading the BLM to argue their presence disqualifies that area from being considered for wilderness designation.  Some of this has been corrected by citizen inventories as well as the BLM’s own surveys.

 

 Onboard Navigation Bushwhacking through the High Desert

 

       I was pleased to find that Hazel knew something about my godparents Stacia and Conley Davis and especially about Conley’s father, Frank.  She added to Frank’s reputation as a rustler and horse thief, noting there had been a spot not far from her parents’ home called the “calf pasture” where Frank kept rustled stock.  The family went out frequently for buggy rides and apparently one time went somewhere they weren’t supposed to be seeing things.  The following day a man dropped off a quarter of beef from Frank on their porch.  Hazel’s parents weren’t aware they’d seen anything untoward.  Hazel noted that Frank would come to pick up his mail after dark so no one would see him.  Still, Hazel’s judgment was that Frank “was quite a man.”

        Hazel observed that although people often tend to think of Jordan Valley as a center of Basque settlement, in the beginning that was not the case.  The earliest settlers were a mixture of nationalities, including a large body of Irish, which explains the claim of one early settler, Bill Ross, that St. Patrick’s Day was the biggest dance of the year.  Hazel’s “own people” were English, but other settlers hailed from the Isle of Man, Scotland and Germany.  There were even Chinese who supplied the cooks for the hotel her family ran.  The Basques arrived later, and though they became a dominant presence, they didn’t “make the foundation” of Jordan Valley.  There were other families that I thought to be descended from early settlers but whom Hazel considered latecomers, despite their having been there four or five generations.  She’s proud of Jordan Valley’s mixed heritage.  She pointed out, however, that contrary to what one might expect, no Mexican families had settled in the Jordan Valley region.  The first would be that of her son Robert’s new hired man

 

Remnant Stone Work from the Old Sheep Bridge

        As Hazel described the disparate origins of the people who settled the Jordan Valley, one could understand why she has thought it important to record the history of the region.  For those living outside the area, it is easy to think of the residents simply as “westerners” or ranch people.  If any thought is given to the ethnic origins of the settlers, it is usually to the Basques.  Moreover, when I asked Hazel how she thought outsiders viewed the residents of Jordan Valley, she replied, “Hill-Billyish.  A little behind the times, I don’t know.  But Jordan Valley residents didn’t come from Hill Billy country.  They’re a type of people all their own.  People now are different from previous generations.  Previous generations have passed on and left a residue. Now very few of the old Jordan Valley folks remain.  Most just moved in.  That includes Mike Hanley.”  Hazel’s statement is revealing.  Mike’s family has been in Jordan Valley more than four generations, and there is no one more concerned in preserving the history of the place than he.

 

Still Available through the I.O.N. Heritage Museum in Jordan Valley or Amazon.com

        For Hazel, the history she has written and shared is important for future generations to think of their own families and where they came from.  The mixture of peoples who settled here adds significance to that knowledge.  A number of studies have been written on the Basque settlers of Jordan Valley.  (More could be done.)  But I’ve seen nothing about the others other aside from an occasional note about where a person’s ancestors hailed from.  Behind the sometimes strident comments about environmentalists and recreationists from some corners of the ranching community, one can sense a general frustration with the absence of empathy and understanding among outsiders.  Those like Hazel and Mike Hanley see history as the way to nurture a needed understanding.  The challenge is getting the right people to read it and respect it.

 

 

30 October 2017:

Lekeitio and the Owyhee Basques

        Crossing the border into Northern Spain, I had the sense that this is where the French Basques are hoping to be.  We found ourselves in a part of Spain with a majority Basque population but it felt as though we’d entered a Basque nation harboring a sizable Spanish minority.  Whereas in France directional signs might be in Basque as well as French, single-language signs were always in French.  The opposite was true with Spanish in Spain.  Even policemen wear the flag of the Basque Autonomous Community on their shoulders where in other countries one would see the national flag.  People we talked with all exhibited pride in being Basque, even though they were not descended from Basques but simply (!) spoke the language.  The Basque flag is widely displayed, and it is difficult to believe that Francisco Franco had decreed  suppression of their culture and language for nearly forty years.  (Not unlike that other feckless fascist Chiang Kai-shek’s suppression of Taiwanese language and culture.  Appropriately the two reprobates died in the same year, 1975.)

        Many here express low regard for the Madrid government and its leaders and they chafe under its regulations.  But at the same time one has to be careful about lumping them together with the Catalonian independenistas.  I asked some what effect the Catalonian unilateral declaration of independence might have on the Basques.  Would they be encouraged to take similar action?   The answer was a firm “No.”  In Donostia (San Sebastian), one woman said Basque business people were concerned about stability and were moving business operations out of Catalonia.  Further west, another woman declared that the Catalonians had “messed things up. They’re crazy!”  In Lekeitio a Basque man said they would not do anything like that.  “Basques are more practical.”  Such person-on-the-street samples are of course unreliable, and one could see signs of support for the independence effort such as Catalonian flags hanging from second story windows. There is a range of views in the community.  As for the Basque political leadership, while having to support Catalan autonomy, they do not approve of the universal declaration of independence and worked to forestall it.  They have been making steady progress in expanding Basque autonomy and do not want it jeopardized. 

Entrance to a Lekeitio Hotel

        Aside from the overwhelming beauty of Donostia, its people and its food, the brightest highlight (given my fondness with old things) was the San Telmo Museum, which could be considered a sort of education center for those Basques whose ethnic learning had been stunted by Franco’s benighted policies.  Rooted in the Basque pride at being an isolate people completely unrelated to other Europeans and speaking a language said to predate Indo-European, the museum’s exhibits work their way up from prehistory into the pop culture and politics of the ‘50s, 60s and ‘70s.  But I found no mention of Juan Sebastián Elcano, the mariner of Basque descent who completed Magellan’s voyage around the world after Magellan was killed.  Talk about something to be proud of! 

        I was disappointed to find nothing at the museum about Basque emigration.  This was a bit surprising given the large numbers of Basques–particularly men–who migrated to the western United States at the end of the 19th century.  They were driven by social and economic change, including enclosure of common pastures that deprived them of grazing land and the unsettled situation resulting from the defeat of the Carlists, whom the Basques had supported.  At the same time they were drawn by the gold rushes of the time, particularly in Nevada but also including the Owyhee region.  Stopping by the Donostia tourism office, I enquired where I might find information on the subject.  The young woman behind the desk turned to that fount of knowledge that had guided us all the way from the center of Paris to her desk–Google Search.  On the Spanish version she found a stunning blog with pages about Basque emigration from Vizcaya in general and Leikitio in particular to the Owyhee–AMERIKANUAK Historias de la emigración vasca en América. Once my horizons were lifted beyond English I began to discover more had been done on the Owyhee Basques than I realized.

        The blog was in Spanish, but I was becoming proficient with my dictionary, and my cerebral memory banks were beginning to recover some of what Mr. Trigueiro had input there decades ago.  I sent the link off to Elias Eiguren in Arock, Oregon and to Tim Davis of the Friends of the Owyhee.  I was sure I’d found the José Eiguren who was Elias' ancestor and could hardly wait for his response.  In the meantime, I mucked about the website in growing frustration as I tried to figure out how to contact one Koldo San Sebastian, whose picture and name were on the site but whose contact information was not.  When the response came back from Arock the result was one familiar from researching my own family’s history–right name, wrong person.  Ultimately further effort would find the correct José Eiguren on another page.  It was a beginning. 

Lekeitio, Bizkaia

        Three nights in Donostia and we moved on to Lekeitio, a beautiful fishing port built around a Gothic Basilica de la Asuncion de Santa Maria dating from the 15th century and blessed with some lovely beaches that draw scores of vacationers in the summer.  It is not, however, one of the major tourist destinations for Americans, and I wouldn’t have come here had my friend not brought it to my attention as an important source of the Basque emigrants to the Owyhee country.

        Once in Lekeitio, I began with the municipal library where I found a wonderfully helpful librarian, Marcel Lopez, who spoke no English but who enlisted a patron, Aitor Aretxaga, to interpret.  When I mentioned the Paiute Indians in describing the Sheep Ranch Fort at Arock (See 11/06/2016 post) to the interpreter, Marcel broke into an animated discourse explaining to Aitor who the Paiute were and what their connection with the Basque settlers was.  Clearly there were people in Lekeitio familiar with the Basque settlement in ION country.  Marcel claimed to have no relevant materials but did give me a book in Basque for Elias.  Aitor cautioned that ION Basques might have difficulty with it if they still used the dialect their ancestors had brought with them since it was in “unified Basque,” the result of standardizing the various dialects.   Marcel suggested I talk with the town archivist and placed a call.  She wasn’t in, so I took a seat at a table to use the library’s Wifi and to explore the stacks.

        It was on the stacks that I discovered that Marcel had been too modest about his collection.  There I found the Diccionario Enciclopedico Vasco, which ran to over fifty large volumes and contained a lengthy article about Basque settlement in the American West that mentioned “Jourdan Walley.”  I photographed it to send to Elias and Tim.  There were other books that would probably be useful for my purposes, but they were in Spanish.

        The following Monday I visited the Municipal Archives and found the archivist in and most willing to help.  Unfortunately she didn’t have the sorts of resources I could find at county records offices back home researching my family’s history.  She knew of a book online, however, and called it up.  When I looked at it, I found it to be the very material I’d been deciphering on the AMERIKANUAK website!   I told her this and explained that I’d been trying to get in touch with the author.  “I know him,” she said and grabbed the phone to ring him up.  After trying to explain who I was and what I wanted, she handed me the phone, and we agreed to meet that afternoon at a quayside bar.

With Koldo San Sebastian in Lekeitio

        Koldo San Sebastian turned out to be a very pleasant individual who, fortunately for me, spoke English.  A retired journalist, for some years he has been researching the Basques who settled in the ION region and their descendants.  He has visited Jordan Valley and the surrounding area researching the Basque families there, and he has done two documentaries based on the interviews he conducted there.  He presented me with a 100 page booklet he’d written about the Basques from Lekeitio who had migrated to the American West entitled “Kalipornian Dauko Barrija: Lekeitio Se Va al Oeste.”   I was pleased to find a substantial section on Jordan Valley as well as Elko, Nevada and other parts of the ION country.  A few days later he e-mailed another, shorter article, “La puerta de Idaho: Los Vascos de Owyhee [1889-1930]” about the Basques who settled in Owyhee county, Idaho.  On the phone, I had specifically enquired about José Eiguren.  Koldo knew his story well.  “He’s the patriarch of many of the Eigurens,” he related and offered to show me the palacio where José had lived, worked and raised eleven children.  It was more than I had hoped for, and we immediately headed off to see the palacio, which is now a tourist hotel.  While its new purpose has ensured the building has been preserved, its function is a seasonal one and I had arrived too late in the year to get past locked entry to the estate.  The best I’ve been able to send back is a picture of the front gate, but Koldo said he would send some pictures of the interior later.  In the meantime, we agreed to stay in touch and he said he’d be happy to hear from my friends.

        In the years since retiring I have spent a fair amount of my time traveling about the US in search of my own ancestors–uncovering their names and where they lived in county records, reading of their daily activities in small town newspapers, tracking their migration Westward through US census records, collecting baptism and confirmation dates, and of course births, deaths, graduations, marriages and divorces, as well as an incarceration or two.  Military service records have been extremely helpful in learning the full story of my mother’s brother’s amicide during the invasion of Sicily July 13,1943 and tracking down my father, whom I had never met.  In the course of my searches I have uncovered unknown relations, including two half sisters and a second cousin.  The feeling of accomplishment and more importantly the sense that one has given a missing ancestor a helping hand toward immortality borders on the ineffable.    In the case of one’s own family, I consider this an obligation to give recognition to our antecedants and a duty to provide a meaningful past to our children and those who come after them.  To be able do this for an unrelated friend or an acquaintance is perhaps even more rewarding

19 October 2017

In Search of the Roots of the I.O.N. Basques

        The past week we have been in Bayonne, capital of Pays Basque, the French share of the Basque country.  As a child living in Boise, Idaho I was aware of the Basques because a fair number had migrated to the Idaho/Oregon/Nevada region at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.  There were students at school with Basque surnames whose jet black hair and onyx eyes made them stand out.  In the fourth grade Danny Aligazabo (not sure about the spelling) joined our school a grade ahead of me.  He was noted for his singing voice and his version of “A Little White Duck” that he was called upon to perform.  At North Junior High there were several more Basque children (they of course were “Basque” in the same sense Danny Riley was “Irish.”) with names like Allegeria and Harmochia (again, spellings are approximate).  There was (and still is) a Basque Cultural Center in Boise, and once a year or so young Basques would dress in white with red scarves and berets and dance at a Basque festival.  After the eighth grade I moved to Weiser, Idaho where there were no Basques, though I had a several classmates of Japanese descent and a few of Hispanic origin.  Interesting how diverse a rural school could be at that time.

        Though there were no Basques in Weiser, we knew that many had settled near Jordan Valley in farthest southeast Oregon and that if you happened to be traveling down Highway 97 to Winnemucca, Nevada you should stop at the Basque Inn for some great food.  We also knew that many of the sheepherders watching over large bands on the surrounding rangelands had been brought from Spain to do a lonely job that few locals cared to do.  My junior year in high school the Weiser Signal-American front page reported that the feds had broken a racket that was paying local women to marry Basques so they could be brought over from Spain to herd.  Once they became legal residents, they were divorced; once they’d saved enough money, they returned home.  One of the women was a waitress at the local Chinese restaurant, and people (including my mother) would whisper that “she” was one of those the article was talking about.  It all blew over before long, and she married (and soon divorced) a man who’d take me hunting.  By the time I left Idaho to go out into the world, about the only other thing I knew about the Basques came from a Jeff Chandler/Susan Hayward/Jacques Bergerac movie “Thunder in the Sun.”  I watched it again recently; fortunately none of it had stuck with me.  I had a sufficient supply of stereotypes and misinformation already.

        Aside from news stories about terrorist acts by the Basque separatist group the ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), I really didn’t think much about them.  Then following retirement, I became interested in the history Owyhee Canyon where my godparents once had a ranch.  In the late 19th and early 20th centuries a number of Basques left northern Spain and emigrated to what is known now as I.O.N. (Idaho/Oregon/Nevada).  Though many began as laborers or herders, they contributed importantly to the development of the area.  One cannot but be impressed by the way that within one or two generations they could go from being a shepherd to owning a ranch or a business.  And late 19th and early 20th century school records suggest they gave great attention to education.

        Despite the role that they played, comparatively little has been written about the I.O.N. Basques.  There is a 1944 USC doctoral dissertation by Joseph Harold Gaiser that I find frustrating.  Gaiser spent some time in the Jordan Valley area conducting interviews, but he identifies few of his informants and he is no longer alive.  Many of the interviews offer interesting glimpses of Basque life, and some of the informants or certainly their immediate descendants would still be alive.  But without knowing who they are, it is difficult to follow up.

        Gaiser’s dissertation does explain, however, a point that has piqued my curiosity as I have gone through the 1980 BLM interviews with early residents of the Owyhee Canyon.  None of those interviewed was of Basque descent, and although the interviewees often referred to their neighbors, few said very much about the Basques, whom they referred to as “Baskos.”  Gaiser’s explanation is “enclavement”–the tendency of a people to keep to themselves, maintain their cultural norms, and use their own language.  He refers to cases of Basques–women especially–who lived many years in the Jordan Valley but never interacted with those they referred to as “Americans.”  That naturally changed with the following generation who went to local schools.  The phenomenon of course is common among immigrant groups.

        My curiosity piqued, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity presented by a trip through southern France and northern Spain to see what I might learn about the places where the Owyhee Basques originated.  We have just spent a week in Bayonne, the capital of Pays Basque in southwestern France.  True to my expectations, I didn’t find much about Basque emigration in the French portion of Basque country.   The museums focus mostly on Basque culture–dance, food, architecture–economy and the language, and I really haven’t had the opportunity to talk with anyone who might know.  I have encountered a few people who’ve told me they have a “cousin in Reno.”  (There’s a Basque Studies Center there I really ought to visit; one at Boise State University too.)  Although I haven’t yet uncovered anything that pertains to Basques in the Owyhee, who mainly originated in the fishing villages of  northern Spain, I have come across some other interesting developments.

        Like most Americans, I imagine, I have thought of Basque nationalism (i.e., the desire for a Basque state) only in terms of the Basques in Spain.  And it’s not just Americans.  The British author of our guide book to the Basque country in France and Spain (published in 2015),  wrote, “In terms of politics specific to the French Basques, there is precious little support north of the border for the idea of an independent, seven province Basque state.”  During Mitterrand’s tenure (1981-95) there was talk of official recognition of the Basque language and the creation of a French Pays Basque department from the three former French Basque provinces.  Neither became a reality.  But in recent years this seems to have been changing.

        The impression one gets traveling around Bayonne is that there is deep pride in Basque culture and language.  The Basque flag is found everywhere, and signs–often including road signs–are in Euskara as well as French.  Driving through the countryside we saw billboards advertising Euskara language courses.  And in Bayonne itself the importance of the language has gained recognition with the creation of an Office Public de la Langue Basque about a decade ago and a plan of actions for 2017-2020.  These include offering services in Euskara, especially for the students of Bayonne, such as extracurricular activities, proposals for cultural programming in Basque, and increased use of Basque in municipal communications.  Bayonne has also signed an agreement with the Association Euskal Moneta for extending the use of the eusko, a Basque currency, in municipal services.  I was surprised to learn of this currency, which came into existence in 2013 and is modeled on the euro.  It seems that such developments would reflect a nascent desire for increased autonomy if not independence.  It will be interesting to see what influence developments across the border in Catalonia will have and what the response of the Basque diaspora might be.  Interesting, but there is too much here I don’t know, and two weeks in Basque Country (Spain as well as France) will hardly cure my ignorance.  We'll see what I learn in Spain.