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