Contract with loneliness.

• Author: Werner, Louis
• Position: Sheepherders' solitary existence in Nevada's Great Basin - Includes related article on documentary film about contract sheepherders

A SOLITARY HERDSMAN tops a rolling hill at the head of his flock and approaches under an open sky. The treeless landscape stretches nearly out of sight where snowy peaks rim the horizon. Tufts of dry grass blow in the cold wind and bow to the animals' hungry mouths. Felipe Trigo tugs at his chuyo's ear flap and talks gently to his two dogs. He tells them how fine his flock looks today and how warm the winter wool fleeces must be. He speaks in Spanish mixed with Quechua, but the dogs seem to understand every word.

Felipe is Peruvian, although he is not herding llamas and he is not in the Cordillera Central near his home in Junin province. Felipe in fact is more than four thousand miles from the stark altiplano, but only a few hours drive from the neon canyon lands of Las Vegas, Nevada, the casino capitol of the United States. He is as far from his homeland as he could ever have imagined he might one day be.

Felipe is a contract sheepherder who has come to live and work on the open range in Nevada's high desert, a region known as the Great Basin. He has come to fill a job that no U.S. citizen knows or wants to learn. For the next three years Felipe will have to live alone with his dogs, his horse, and his sheep. Although this is more or less the same work he left behind in Peru, it is decidedly not the life that most new immigrants expect to lead.

In the western United States, the sheepherding traditions that were established late in the last century are now carried on by Latin Americans. Where Spanish Basques once grazed their own sheep on unclaimed desert, now one finds Peruvians, Chileans, and Mexicans working under contract for settled ranchers, many of whom descended from those very same Basques. But the work is much the same. Good sheep dogs and riding horses are as indispensable as ever on the still largely unfenced open range.

Basques were first lued to the United States by the California Gold Rush, coming directly from the old country or via the pampas of Argentina and Uruguay. However, many disliked the uncertainty of mining and soon reverted to the sheepherding work they knew best. The late nineteenth century was a period of rapid settlement in the barren western states with many opportunities for herders to start up and expand their own flocks, known as "bands."

While range wars between cattlemen and sheepmen occasionally broke out, with each accusing the other of ruining pasture and water holes, sheepherders found their niche on marginal grazing land unfit for cattle and stayed constantly on the move. By the 1940s, however, the number of itinerant "tramp bands" had declined due to overgrazing, drought, the consolidation of public range land, and tightened immigration restrictions for Spanish nationals.

The era of big time sheep ranching had come and, with it, a growing demand for skilled herders willing to work on a contract basis. No longer would a herder have the chance to strike out on his own. To surmount the labor shortage caused by these setbacks for small operators, the U.S. Congress passed a series of special "sheepherder" laws authorizing ranchers to import Spanish herders on three year contracts.

Thus the Basque herder, wearing a blue beret and with a wine bota slung over his shoulder, came to a land previously known for its cowboy hats and redeye whiskey. In fact, this image of the sheepherder remained accurate until the late 1960s, when employment opportunities at home improved so much that Spanish Basques no longer needed to emigrate to find good work.

With the decreasing availability of Basque herders, Latin Americans took their place--the beret gave way to the chuyo and the sombrero. Today there are some 1,150 contract herders in the U.S., over half of them Felipe's countrymen from Peru, about three hundred Mexicans mainly from the state of Guadalajara, a smaller number...