John Daw, Respected Navajo Policeman

john daw the Navajos' 'Big Policeman' Legendary tracker and last U.S. Army scout was revered for his exploits

In the little town of Tonalea on the Navajo Indian Reser-vation, the wind blows so hard it gathers billows of fine red dust that dance across this giant landscape, shape-shifting like something out of a child's imagination. But for Lilly Daw Curley, who has lived all her life on the mesas outside Tuba City, there's nothing to fear in the monster wind. She knows it too well, and it knows her. It carries the story of her life. When the wind howls, Curley can shut her eyes and hear the traditional songs her grandfather sang to her and the stories he told of his family's misery during the Long Walk before he was born. She can hear the sound of his wagon bouncing along the dirt roads that crisscross the moonlike ter-rain and smell the corn that grew in his cornfield behind the trading post.

"Sometimes it's so real to me it seems like yesterday. But I know it was a long, long time ago," said Curley, 53, a fourth-grade teacher at Tonalea Day School. "I was just a little girl then, and my grandfather, he was such a powerful man. He was the authority here. Everyone came to him."

The name John Daw still echoes through Navajo country. He lived a remarkable life. In his time, he saw, lived and touched history like few others.

He died in 1965, at age 97, the last of the U.S. Army's Navajo scouts, having served in the 2nd Cavalry out of Fort Wingate, New Mexico Territory, from May 7, 1891, to December 5, 1894. He enlisted to help police the last Indian renegades still deviling portions of Arizona and New Mexico territories. Daw knew the great Navajo chief, Manuelito, who recruited the Navajos into military service at Wingate, and he later became a prominent medicine man known for his healing ceremonies, called "sings," often conducted in his hogan in Tonalea. Navajo military veterans especially, most from World War II and Korea, made tracks to Daw's door, seek-ing spiritual healing after terrible wartime experiences.

He was born near Cottonwood Pass, New Mexico, in the Chuska Mountains in 1868. Only months earlier, his parents, and some 8,000 other Navajos, had returned from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, and four years of exile. They had been marched away from their homeland in 1864, follow-ing military defeat by the U.S. government. The so-called Long Walk, with its staggering hardships and many deaths, proved a defining event for the tribe.

Daw spent a lifetime repeating stories of the Long Walk that his parents had told him. "He thought it was important that we know the suffering of the people," Curley said. "But he used a lot of humor. He believed it was part of healing."

Asked how the Navajos returned from their imprisonment, Daw answered, "They were so happy, they started out on a trot when they left Fort Sumner." Daw made that remark in testimony before the Indian Claims Commission in 1951 in an effort to properly define the original boundaries of Navajoland. He advocated for his people and made another presentation to the commission in 1960, explaining to federal inquisitors what every Navajo already knew their homeland fell within the four Sacred Mountains, and their chants and prayers held a deep, spiritual connection to those mountains.

"The line was set up by the Great Spirit," Daw testified, "and the line was made with corn pollen, and it is recognized to this day that the rainbow surrounds the whole area."

From these traditional roots, Daw became one of the first members of the reservation police, a cop whose skill at solving crimes was touted in a hard-boiled detective magazine, published in far-off New York City.

He befriended Will Rogers Jr., who attended a 1949 Memorial Day parade in Tuba City honoring Daw. And he was mentioned in the Ripley's Believe It Or Not newspaper column for never locking the jail in Tuba City.

But Daw dealt with some tough cases as a lawman and developed a reputation as an extraordinary tracker. Whenever the FBI ventured onto the Navajo reservation's northwest corner to investigate a murder, the first thing the agent did was stop in Tuba City and say, "Get me John Daw."

No one could miss him. Daw wore a tall white hat and a lot of turquoise. A late 1930s Associated Press dispatch noted, "No man on the reservation wears a bigger sombrero or carries a larger gun."

But Curley holds more personal memories. She spent summers as a girl working in her grandfather's cornfield.

"I'd get up early and for three hours just water the field," she recalled, her soft-spoken words coming in gentle rhythm.

"It was me and my brother, Jerry Lorenzo. Sometimes we'd mend fences and haul water. My grandfather had a big cornfield behind where the Red Lake store is now, and he had cattle, sheep, horses and four wagons. I guess he was wealthy."

Curley lives atop a mesa at the end of a brutal dirt road, 5 miles from the Red Lake store in Tonalea. When a truck pulled up bearing a visitor, dogs circled and howled, and many of John Daw's relatives emerged from their hogans to see about the commotion.

After a few moments of conversation outside, Curtie Daw, Curley's mother and John Daw's daughter-in-law, graciously invited the visitor into her hogan. She prepared a traditional dish-blue corn meal mush with tortillas and more relatives arrived. They included Daw's daughter, Betty Lee, and her son, Charles Henry Lee.

Like their father, neither spoke English. Curley translated.

"He [Daw] fought when he was very young and killed Apaches," Charles Henry said. The edge of excitement in his voice drew a laugh from Curley and others.

From the kitchen, Curtie, 79, held up her right hand. "He said he was fighting and the Apaches shot off the top of his finger," she said. "He liked to ride his horse and tell war stories. When he got old, he rode in his wagon."

Curtie said Daw used to ride to Flagstaff to buy supplies. The 100-mile wagon trip took a week. He sat high on the seat with his whip.

Daw could be a hard man. He did things his way, and no one challenged him. "When my grandfather said, 'Stay in the wagon,' you were supposed to stay in the wagon," Curley explained. "If you didn't, he might take the whip to you. But I learned from him. And I learned a lot from my grandmother, Jane Daw. Everyone called her Tall Lady. She was so gentle. She taught us manners. We were raised in the old Navajo way."

Lunch continued with Curtie's hogan full of much chatter and good food. Several times the visitor heard the Navajo words silao tsoh, and asked what they meant. Translation: "big policeman." Everyone on the reservation called John Curtie's hogan on the big mesa, she remembered something else. "Do you know what I think about a lot?" she asked. "Jerry Lorenzo, my brother, died in Vietnam on June 10; John Daw died on June 10; and my birthday is June 10."

The last picture that history gives of Daw remains a poignant one. It comes from a report by a Veterans Administration caseworker who visited his hogan in Tonalea in December 1964. John and Jane Daw were living on his veteran's pension of $109.59 a month and a civil service annuity of $68 a month. Their hogan contained no modern furnishings except a sheetmetal stove in the center, its pipe extending through the roof, and a small cot. Around the walls, shelves held family possessions. The dirt floor was hard-packed from much use.

"There were no windows," noted the caseworker. "The interior was dark with the door closed, which was the condition during the visit, as there were intermittent snow squalls on the outside."

In good weather Daw would sometimes venture outside, usually riding to the trading post in his buckboard with Tall Lady at the reins. But he was no longer able to sit on the seat. Instead, he lay in the flatbed to avoid falling out.

Daw sat on a sheepskin spread out on the floor of his hogan as he talked to the caseworker. It provided his only padding and served as his bed.

He had on a new shirt, a string of beads around his neck, bracelets on his wrists and a blue handkerchief around his neck, As reported in the February 1939 issue of True Detective magazine, under the headline, 'Saga of An Indian Tracker,' every one of Daw's deductions in the case proved true.

Daw Silao Tsoh. The so-called yellow horse murder of 1937 became one of his most prominent cases.

A prospector was found dead, shot in the back of the neck. The shoeless corpse was dragged to a hiding place near the Tonalea-Kaibito Road. A witness had seen the vic-tim being trailed by an Indian on a yellow horse.

When the FBI summoned Daw, he knew immediately the killer was not a full-blooded Navajo. The body had been dragged a good distance, something no Navajo would do, given the cultural prohibition against handling corpses. He also believed a Navajo would never wear a dead man's shoes, as tracks indicated the killer did.

He eventually tracked his suspect on horseback to the base of Black Mountain. From a promontory, killer Howard Balli watched 70-year-old Daw riding relentlessly toward him. Balli knew of his pursuer's reputation and, realizing capture was imminent, gave up.

But he had no idea Daw had fingered him as the prospector's killer. One of Balli's two wives had filed abuse charges against him, and Balli thought that explained the manhunt.

As reported in the February 1939 issue of True Detective magazine, under the headline, "Saga of An Indian Tracker," every one of Daw's deductions in the case proved true, including Balli's heritagehe was part Paiute. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder in August 1938.

Curley remembered that famous case. But as the Daw family began to leave for their homes, and the wind shook his head. On the chest of his shirt he wore the medal awarded to him when he was mustered out of the Army. Jane wore a brown velvet dress with silver buttons.

Daw could hear questions only if they were shouted. Old friend Johnny Alfred, a veteran Navajo Code Talker from World War II, interpreted.

Asked about his present activities, Daw boasted that he "could still chase jackrabbits, ride a horse, and see the front sight of a gun."

Then he delivered a personal statement recalling his scouting days. In spite of his inability to remember even the identity of his foes, the Apaches, his remarks possess an elegance and simple dignity that speak of a long life well lived: "And so we went to war and fought. Who our enemies were I do not know. We killed them and left them lying around. We piled up the guns and set fire to it and started to come back. We come (sic) back to Fort Wingate and we were all discharged as soon as we come back. Then I went to Durango, Colorado, where I stayed. I came back and got married to my present wife who still cooks for me.

"So that's it. My life has been pleasant, and I have settled here. I haven't been to any more places. I am old and can do no more. I just stay home. Even then, I am still useful as a medicine man when people ask for my help."

Six months after delivering that statement, John Daw died. He was buried under a piñon tree near the Tonalea Trading Post.

But, as Lilly Daw Curley knows, his stories and songs still dance on the wind. All During the 1970s, Leo W. Banks taught school in Shiprock, New Mexico, on the Navajo Indian Reservation. He now lives in Tucson.