The creation of Basque American culture was furthered by the establishment, in 1967, of a Basque studies program at the University of Nevada, Reno. Its Basque Book Series, published through the University of Nevada Press, provided additional substance to Basque American identity. The program sponsored summer and year-long study courses in the Basque country, attended by many Basque Americans who returned to assume leadership roles within their local Basque club or dance group. In 1972 several clubs formed North American Basque Organizations, Inc. (NABO), an overarching structure that facilitates contacts both among its members and with Europe. Under NABO’s auspices, Basque Americans hold periodic summer music camps where children are taught to play the traditional txistu (flute). NABO sponsors national mus (a card game) and pelota (handball) tournaments and sends its representative to international competitions. NABO has also facilitated the North American tours of European Basque performing artists (dance groups, singers and bertsolariak, or versifiers). NABO has twenty-six member clubs, located mainly in California, Nevada, and Idaho. At the closing of the 20th century, then, there are many manifestations of Basque American culture. The Basque hotels, some of which evolved into dinner rather than boarding houses, are popular eating places for Basque Americans and non-Basques alike. They, in turn, have made Basque cuisine famous throughout the region (as well as an alcoholic beverage called the Picon Punch). Associational life among Basque Americans has never been more robust. The annual festival cycle attracts thousands of participants and considerable media coverage, and it has converted the Basques (somewhat ironically) into one of the region’s highest-profiled ethnic groups. Sporadically, there are even more impressive happenings such as the jai Aldi cultural festival sponsored in 1990 by Boise Basques. It included several days of film, lectures, and performances (including some by European artists) and attracted about ten thousand participants. At the same time, as with all immigrant cultures, questions cloud the future prospects of the Basque American éxperience. In August 1989, on a hillside near Reno, Nevada, 2,500 people gathered to dedicate the National Monument to the Basque Sheepherder. The sculpture itself is an abstract, rather than figurative, rendering of a herder carrying a lamb. The instant controversy that it engendered among Basque Americans is itself evidence of the dilemma facing the group. Continued Basque immigration from Europe has been all but interdicted, the sheep industry is faltering, as is the occupational association of Basques with it, and fewer Basque Americans retain their ancestral tongue or seek Basque marriage partners. Thus, the survival of the group is at issue as well as the real substance of the response of the 47,956 persons who self-identified as Basque ethnics in the 1990 U.S. Census. And what were the tangible marks left upon the physical and cultural landscapes of the American West by the presence of the Basque sheepherder? Not surprisingly, the traces are faint. Given the lack of fully formed family units in the Basque immigrant experience, which would have provided mature repositories and carriers of Old World Basque culture, it is scarcely surprising that the descendants of those who departed Europe as single young males or females have esserttially had to create Basque American cultural reality in the New World context. Consequendy, the attempts to collect among Basque Americans folksongs, stories, sayings, medicinal practices, religious beliefs, and the like have turned up fragmentary evidence at best—and then largely from Old World-born informants. Similarly, Basques have left practically no architectural evidence, whether domestic or religious, of their presence. Rather, visible display of ethnic identity is essentially restricted to the family escutcheon, a wood carving of an Old World motif and a few books on Basque topics displayed in one’s living room. Perhaps fittingly, the real evidence of the region’s Basque presence is to be found in the mountains. There the herders built ovens for their bread making and erected stone cairns, harri-mutillak, or “stone boys” in their language, both to wile away the boredomfilled hours and to humanize an unremittingly natural landscape. It is also there that the herders converted groves of aspens into veritable living galleries and mes-sage banks of images and statements. Referred to technically as dendroglyphs, the tree carvings document the inner thoughts of men thrust into a situation of near total social isolation in a foreign land. Thus, there are the nostalgic images of the farmhouse or village church back home, the pining verse dedicated to the girl left behind, or the patriotic statement regarding one’s region Viva Navarra or Basque nationalism Gora Euskadi. There are the complaints about one’s boss or the neighboring herder over the hill. There are the pornographic images of nubile women and crise de coeur of sexual frustration. Finally, there is the simple record of a man’s name and the date, which convey his presence to future herders. Such were the graphic means employed by the Basque herder to countermand the human fear of total anonymity. William A.Douglass References Baker, Sarah. 1972. Basque American Folklore in Eastern Oregon. M.A. thesis, University of California, Berkeley. Douglass, William A., and Jon Bilbao. 1975. Amerikanuak: Basques in the New World. Reno: University of Nevada Press. ——, and Richard H.Lane. 1985. Basque Sheepherders of the American West: A Photographic Documentary. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Laxalt, Robert. [1957] 1984. The Basque Hotel. Reno: University of Nevada Press. ——. 1957. Sweet Promised Land. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Mallea, Jose. 1992. History That Grows on Trees: Basque Aspen Carving in Nevada. Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 35:21–39. Paris, Beltran, and William A.Douglass. 1979. Beltran: Basque Sheepman of the American West. Reno: University of Nevada Press.