An 8.9-m composite section of lake sediment from Fish Lake, Steens Mountain, southeastern Oregon, has provided a high-resolution record of Holocene geomagnetic secular variation in western North America. The section is composed of overlapping core segments with stratigraphic control based on six tephra layers and other thin, distinct bands and with age control from 37 radiocarbon dates. The 455 paleomagnetic samples possess a strong and stable magnetic remanence which is carried by pseudo-single-domain magnetite. Paleomagnetic records for individual core segments show low scatter and high serial correlation, and where the segments overlap, there is excellent agreement between records. The aximuthal orientation of the composite section was recovered from the known direction of the geomagnetic field at the time of the climactic eruption of Mount Mazama tephra which is present in Fish Lake. Both internal and external evidence, including the correspondence with an archaeomagnetic record from the southwestern United States, support the conclusion that the Fish Lake record represents the history of geomagnetic field behavior during at least the last 10,000 years B.P. Analysis of that record reveals that the average geomagnetic direction can not be distinguished from that of a geocentric axial dipole field and that the overall circularity of the field was clockwise but the detailed behavior was quite complex. Angular standard deviations of both field directions and virtual geomagnetic poles differ significantly from the values predicted from theoretical models of secular variation but are consistent with those of other Holocence records. When the record from Fish Lake is compared to the proposed type curve for east central North America, there is excellent agreement for the past 6000 years, provided the curves are offset by about 400 years. This offset corresponds to a rate of westward drift of about 0.062¿/yr. Beyond about 6000 radiocarbon years ago, good agreement between the two curves occurs when there is no offset, suggesting that the field was standing rather than drifting during this time.