Boise’s Basque Museum

By Joe Berk

The Basque Museum is a small museum in downtown Boise.  It covers the history of the Basque people in Idaho as well as other parts of the United States.  We enjoyed our visit.

When I first moved to southern California in 1979, the Inland Empire (the area that stretches from Pomona to San Bernardino and maybe a little beyond) still had large wide open areas.  You could still see shepherds with their multicolored coats, shepherd crooks, and sheep out in the fields that are now covered by cookie-cutter tract homes and shopping malls.  Who are these people, I asked.  Oh, those are the Basque shepherds, my coworkers at General Dynamics told me.  You have to go with us to lunch at the Basque restaurant in Chino, they told me.  I still had no idea or sense of who the Basque really were.

What I’ve since learned (amplified greatly by our visit to the Basque Museum in Boise) is that the Basque region includes several provinces in northern Spain and southwest France.  The Basque have their own language (known as Euskera or Basque), and for a number of reasons (primarily related to economics, persecution, and politics), a large Basque diaspora created Basque communities in other parts of the world.  One such community is here in southern California, another is in the Boise area.  In fact, the Boise area has the largest concentration of Basque people in the United States.  The Basque country in Europe has a coastline, fertile areas for farming, and good grazing lands for sheep.  This led to a unique Basque food culture.

The Basque in Idaho also enjoyed a connection to Ernest Hemingway.  Hemingway became aware of the Basque in 1923 while he was a Toronto Star reporter writing about the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona (that’s the famed running of the bulls).  In his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway also wrote about the festival.  It was one of Hemingway’s earliest writings showing an appreciation for the Basque culture, which emerged in his later writings in Cuba and Idaho.

The Basque Museum is a worthwhile stop.  It’s located at 611 West Grove Street in Boise, and it’s open Tuesday through Saturday.

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