Boyhood Among the Woolies: Growing Up on a Basque Sheep Ranch by Richard W. Etulain (review)

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• Boyhood Among the Woolies: Growing Up on a Basque Sheep Ranch by Richard W. Etulain
• Frank Bergon

Richard W. Etulain, Boyhood Among the Woolies: Growing Up on a Basque Sheep Ranch. Pullman: Washington State UP, 2023. 151 pp. Paper, $19.95.

Over fifteen years ago in this journal Cheryll Glotfelty noted how "one ethnic group continuing to elude sustained critical attention" in the multicultural "study of western American literature" are the Basques (Western American Literature, vol. 43, no. 3, 2008, p. 329). That ongoing absence isn't due to the effort of Richard W. Etulain, a rarity as president of both the Western Literature Association and the Western History Association, who has written about Basques as an essayist and the author or editor of more than sixty books on the literature and history of the American West. Now in Boyhood Among the Woolies: Growing Up on a Basque Sheep Ranch we encounter his memories of the sprawling grasslands and scab rocks of the eastern Washington plateau where he experienced the rural magic and harshness of what he calls "The Ranch."

Etulain says he was inspired to write about The Ranch while preparing Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature and learning of Stegner's belief that our richest memories are formed between the ages of six and eleven. Actual writing didn't begin until after Etulain's retirement when he was asked to head up a library writing group and he came to biweekly meetings with his own five pages about The Ranch, a project that evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic into a book of short chapters with titles like "Herders and Hired Men," "Lambing Season," "Off to School," "Going to Church," and "The Sheepshearers Are Coming," less a conventional memoir than thematic blocks of remarkable source material that destroy myths and stereotypes about Basque American rural experience.

In a chapter about Etulain's parents, "A Faraway Basque Dad and a Saintly Mom," the myth crumbles that open-range sheep ranchers in the US West primarily sought Basque Country immigrants as the best herders because of their experience with sheep in the Pyrenees. In 1921 eighteen-year-old Sebastian Etulain, son of a Navarrese Basque stonemason and charcoal burner, arrived in Yakima, Washington, from the mountain town of Eugi, north of Pamplona. He had worked on a Basque farm with cattle but no sheep and found [End Page 189] himself isolated and depressed, without money, able to speak only Euskara and Spanish, sometimes in tears, with dogs as sole companions, trying to herd two thousand sheep in the rugged scablands of the Columbia Plateau. But he stuck with it, taking his pay in ewes. Seventeen years later when young Dickey, as the author was called, was born as the third son into the Etulain family, his father with hard work and luck had become a stockman grazing 7,000 sheep on 10,000 acres of deeded and leased rangeland, later to include a thousand head of Angus and Hereford cows. Contrary to popular culture's depiction of inevitable enmity between cattlemen and sheepmen, we learn how, along with other Basques, "Dad never believed the wrongheaded idea that cattle and sheep could not coexist on the same ranch" (111–12).

Etulain's mother, Mary Lou Gillard Foster, was a cook at a neigh-boring sheep camp, divorced with a son from a teen marriage, when she met "a demanding, hard-headed Basco" with penny-pinching tightness and a never-stop work ethic (25). She came from a sod-buster family of land-renting farmers, never owners, always moving west from Minnesota to the Dakotas and finally to the new state of Washington. Etulain probes the imperative that drove these ranchers and farmers to persevere as did Hamlin Garland in his classic A Son of the Middle Border (1917). As with Garland and Stegner, it was Etulain's mother who introduced her three sons to books and education as their Holy Grail and succeeded in impelling them from a one-room schoolhouse to earn, in order, an engineering degree, a doctorate in education, and a doctorate in history.

Etulain joined his mother, who came from a family...