The Last Basque Sheepherders of the American West
by Kat Fulwider with a documentary produced in collaboration with Ariana Brockman.
It is dawn on a crisp October morning in the high meadows of the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains. Steam rises to meet the freezing air as the sheepherder Francisco prepares his morning coffee. The crunch of the frosted grass underfoot is heard as the sheepdogs exit his trailer. Tonight it will snow.
Perched in the High Sierras in Monitor Pass, solitary except for a band of sheep and the dogs that become his coworkers and companions, Fransisco prepares for his day. This is a scene that has been played out time and again by his predecessors, the Basque sheepherders, who too came to America to do this job, and whose descendants now own the sheep to which he tends. This pastoral scene has played out over generations in the American West, but never at any point has it been closer to disappearing.
The high meadows of the Sierra Nevada were once home to hundreds of thousands of sheep and their Basque sheepherders. “Between 1890–1900 there were at least 500,000 sheep in Washoe County, Ormsby County, and Douglas County,” said Ted Borda, co-owner of Borda Land and Sheep. “Now between these three counties, I would be it. This is it. So we went from 500,000 sheep to 4,000; and over a hundred operators and now there’s one,” said Borda.
Ted Borda and his sisters Joyce Borda-Gavin, and Angie Borda-Page are third-generation Basque sheep ranchers in Carson City, Nevada. Every year their sheep roam the foothills of the Sierras in Carson City and Dayton following in the footsteps of their father and his before him, reducing wildfire risk along the way.
Generations ago countless young men and women came to this unfamiliar landscape in search of a better life from the Basque country, an ethnic region that is bisected between Spain and France. The Basques are known as the “indigenous people” of Europe, and their unique, non-Latin-based language of Euscara is still a mystery to modern-day linguistic anthropologists.
Although ancient, this language can still be heard in the bars of Rural Nevada that once served as boarding houses for the sheepherders. Spoken by retired sheepmen and their forefathers, it is also found in the landscape, if one knows where to look. It is carved in hidden Aspen groves where the sheepherders used to roam. These arborglyphs are living works of art that have grown for over a hundred years, marking the passage of time and tradition.
The Basques were known for their grit and strong work ethic. It was this pioneering spirit combined with the Gold Rush in California that led many young men and women to trade the Pyrenees mountains of the Basque Country for the ranges of the American West.
One such man was Raymond Borda, who came to the United States from the Basque country in search of a better life in 1912. Through a true immigrant’s story full of grit and determination he worked as a sheepherder in Dayton, and in 1921 he had saved enough to buy his own sheep and ranch, founding Borda Land and Sheep in 1921.
A full century and three generations later, his grandchildren Ted Borda, Joyce Borda-Gavin, and Angie Borda-Page are keeping this tradition alive as co-owners and operators of the business.
Borda Land and Sheep is one of the last large sheep operators in Western Nevada and is the last one of Basque heritage. They currently run 1200 lambs and ewes in the area around Carson City, Reno, and Dayton, making the sounds of bleats and baas synonymous with spring in the region.
Although the Bordas are passionate to keep this tradition alive, this is possibly the last generation of Basque sheep operators in the region, if not the entire Sierras. Sheep ranchers, such as the Bordas, are aging and can no longer carry out the physical demands required by the job, so they are passing the torch to a new group of people who like those before them, are searching for a better life.
Sheep are seen here at the annual Borda Sheep roundup with three older sheepman in the background. Ted Borda is seen on the far right. The other two men’s names are unknown. Pickle Meadows, California. Photo by Kat Fulwider
The Bordas hired Francisco Javier Sanchez and his brother Julio Cesar Sanchez to take up the role their grandfather was entrusted with over 100 years ago. The American West was built upon the backs of immigrants, and that still holds true today. The agriculture system of America is dependent upon immigrant labor, and just as Basque immigrants became sheepherders, today immigrants from Latin American countries are carrying on this tradition.
From Zacatecas, Mexico, Francisco and Julio Sanchez come here ten months out of the year to shepherd the newborn lambs and ewes through the Eastern foothills of the Sierras. Francisco left behind a dangerous and low paying job in the Mexican Military to follow his brother up here in this line of work. They return home to their families for two months out of the year in winter. He has a wife and daughter at home nearly 2,000 miles away. “The most difficult part of the job is the loneliness, but the mountains are beautiful and I enjoy this simple life,” said Francisco.
“Juan my camp tender tells this story,” said Borda. “When my dad picked him up in 1976 at the Greyhound depot brought him up here to wolf creek and dropped him off with the sheep, he said, ‘I’ll see you next week.’ There were no cell phones in 1976. Juan will tell you, ‘I cried myself to sleep every night.’ He was 17 or 18. So you know it’s tough,” said Borda.
The sheepherder and the sheepdogs are the flock’s only protection. They walk with them every step of the way, starting in Carson City in April, continuing to Dayton, then South through the Pinenut Range all the way to Pickle Meadows, west of Bridgeport where they conclude in the Eastern Sierras. This route navigates through rugged terrain through the high meadows of the Sierra Nevada.
On his journey, he lives alone in a nomadic trailer that is set up at different locations by Ted Borda. In especially rugged terrain, inaccessible by roads, pack mules are used to carry their food and gear into remote areas of the wilderness where he will camp in a tent. “We are very fortunate to have our herders,” said Borda.
This is a glimpse into life from a different time, one where dependence on and care for the land is paramount and equivalent to survival. It is an example of a tradition that is finding new ways to survive in the modern era. What once were wagons and tents, are now trailers, and previously what were open ranges for as far as the eye could see are now a patchwork of permitted and private land areas. The Bordas work hard to attain grazing permits through the BLM, Forest Service, Tribes, and private owners. This tradition is adapting to a modern world and changing climate.
“I am very lucky,” said Borda. “We work with a group of Forest Service people, I mean you couldn’t work with better people,” said Borda. “We got started with the sheep program in 2006 following the Waterfall Fire that happened in 2004,” said Lyndsey Boyer, the Open Spaces Manager of Carson City. “The Waterfall Fire was a super devastating wildfire for Carson City. It burnt nearly the whole West Side,” said Boyer. The blaze was ignited by an abandoned campfire and burned 8,700 acres, taking with it 18 homes and seriously injuring firefighters and news personnel who became trapped in the blaze.
“It was awful; very devastating for the community, and then in the Great Basin we know the first thing that comes back after a big wildfire is cheatgrass and other invasive plants,” said Boyer. “There aren’t really good ways to treat by hand those fine fuels without doing prescribed burns so [the sheep] are a really cost-effective, environmentally friendly way to reduce those fuels, ” said Boyer.
The sheep follow the same path year after year, focusing on the wildland/urban interface. The project was started 17 years ago and “It’s been really effective overall to reduce the amount of fuel that’s on the landscape,” said Boyer. “So the idea is not to stop a wildfire but if a wildfire were to come through there’s just less stuff for it to burn.”
This principle was put to the test when a fire broke out in 2017 in Carson City in an area where the sheep had grazed earlier in the season. “The portions where the sheep had grazed versus where they had not grazed historically, you could definitely see a difference,” said Boyer. “It just comes down to that lower fuel load. The fire was burning less hot and less intensely than on the other side where it had plenty of fuel to burn through. We really can see tangible differences in the landscape. We want to keep doing it every year,” said Boyer.
“The Great Basin, Tahoe, and this whole community used to be a place that had frequent fire,” said Boyer. “Those fires were part of the ecology. Fire would come through and clear out a lot of the undergrowth and that accumulation of fuels. This isn’t just the Waterfall Fire, this is the whole West. This is why the West burns so much because we as a society have done fire suppression,” said Boyer.
The summer of 2021 saw the devastating effects of the Caldor, Dixie, and Tamarack Fires, some of the largest blazes in the nation’s history, let alone in the Sierra Nevada. It is apparent now more than ever that integrated solutions are desperately needed to mitigate fire risk and restore the land.
The skies above South Lake Tahoe glowed orange as the Caldor Fire approached, and an American flag can be seen waving in the wind in front of a gas station. The sign in the bottom left reads “Day in Paradise” but the following hours were about to be anything but that. Photo by Kat Fulwider.
Implementing integrated land management practices that bring together animals and humans on the landscape is becoming more critical in the face of a changing climate. It requires a lot of collaboration though, and is increasingly complex in the age of land privatization and extreme drought.
“We are in a 25-year drought in this area,” said Joyce Gavin Borda, co-owner of Borda Land and Sheep Company. “You get a couple of winters where it’s pretty good and that’s very helpful but it’s a struggle to find places to keep your sheep, whether its BLM land, Forest Service land, or private land. So you have to always be searching for places,” said Joyce. Land privatization and development, combined with extreme weather has made it very hard on this disappearing practice.
For the Fire Fuels Reduction Project alone, the agencies involved are the town and county of Carson City, the Forest Service, Nevada Division of State Lands, the Carson Fire Department, Open Spaces Division, the Washoe Tribe, as well as private property owners. Many of the areas where the sheep used to graze have now become privatized and developed, making it increasingly difficult to patch together a grazing season.
“You know we may not be doing this next year,” said Borda. “You know it’s hard, it’s a struggle… It’s a year at a time for us. We said that twenty years ago and you know we are still doing it. So we’d like to continue it and we hope we can but there are no promises in this business that’s for sure.”
The drive to keep this tradition alive is rooted in family and great respect for the land. “I tell people probably the first steps I ever took were walking behind a band of sheep with my dad,” said Ted Borda. “This was a gift actually being born into this. Otherwise, how could you do it? Not many people get to experience this. It’s hard to let go of some of those smells; the smell of the wool. When it rains your wool will emit this certain smell, or the sagebrush when it rains. Those smells are…Hmm. You gotta be out there as a rancher to appreciate those things. The guy whose working at Google doesn’t know what that’s about. It’s awesome! And the peace; the peacefulness. When you’re up there on those mountains in the meadow, it’s just you and the sheep. You know you’re next to God up there,” said Borda.
In the face of a changing climate and an era when wildlands are in peril and generational knowledge is being lost at an unprecedented rate, the Borda family will continue to keep their family tradition of nomadic sheep herding alive for as long as they can. “We grew up family-oriented,” said Borda. “Everything was family first, people first. It’s a love for our heritage; a love for our family; a love for our mother and father; a love for our grandfather; and it’s our way to keep that story alive.”
