Atlas Obscura
October 3, 2017
SOME AMERICANS, TO LEARN ABOUT their ancestors, can dig through documents detailing when they passed through Ellis Island or flew in or got married, or where they lived at the time of a census. But for some Basque families in the United States, the only record they have of their immigrant ancestors is carved into trees in secluded aspen groves throughout the West. Names, dates, hometowns, and other messages and art scar the pale bark of aspens where Basque men watched over herds of hundreds of sheep from the 1850s to the 1930s.
Image: ACROTERION/CC BY-SA 3.0
kelsey kennedy 