Along the Trading Post Trail

DISTANT years are those back around 1863-64 when Arizona's first trading posts swapped white man's merchandise for Indian blankets and the trading post was the link between older settled lands and the new frontiers. Kit Carson was campaigning in the Indian Country for the subsequent establishment of the Indian reservations and the Navajo domain was circumvented by travelers as being practically enemy territory. In those days the Mormons from the north (Utah) were perhaps the first colonizers of this great territory and they sent their missionaries among the Hopi and Navajos to combine, in their shrewd but zealous way, a little trade as well as religion. The Mormon policy of avoiding bloodshed and war-like acts enabled them to go peacefully among the Indians at a time when the Indians were at war with everyone else; they were accepted by the Indians and their friendships flourished resulting in the establishment of a station at Lee's Ferry on the Colorado River in 1874. Here, at the only crossing of the Colorado the Indians using their blankets as a recognized medium of exchange. So while not a trading post in scope of the posts of today, the station at Lee's Ferry was perhaps the forerunner of all modern posts in that here Indian goods were exchanged for American merchandise and here was laid the foundation for the trade that was to grow in later years. At some of the early forts in Arizona and New Mexico such as Fort Defiance and Fort Wingate, trade was also carried on in the same manner as at Lee's Ferry, but those were military establishments and the post at Lee's Ferry could be called the precursor of all the later posts up to our day. When Hubert Richardson and his brother arrived at Cameron 26 years ago to establish their trading post, nothing stood at that spot in the desert except the steel bridge, built in 1911, spanning the Little Colorado and Fred Harvey's road to Desert View was not in the making. With the paving of the highways north to Utah, south to Flagstaff and west to Grand Canyon, Cameron at the crossroads became a center of tourist traffic and the most widely visited trading post of all. Before the war hundreds of cars from every state in the union rolled in and out of the post grounds daily and the post incorporates, besides coffee shop, garage, and curio store, accommodations for seventy-five guests. Here in this desert out-post you take your last tile-bathroom bath; enjoy your last ice cream soda, for from there on, the Indian country and the remoter posts offer no such luxuries but then-luxuries are pleasant just because they are good to get away from and good to get back to! Klo-A-Chee-Kin, meaning "Painted Desert Inn" is the sign above the door of the Richardson hotel. On one occasion an old negro servant was showing some visitors through the Richardson home and when they came to the living rooms they admired and examined the walls, the stone of which had been quarried out of prehistoric mud beds. The mud had hardened leaving implanted in it the marks of water ripples, shells and the prehistoric prints of a mammoth five-toed lizard. When the visitors wondered at the marks of the five-toed lizard the old negro said, "Well, they say these tracks is 10 million yeahs old and that they is from some big old lizard but folks ah know better; ah say they is the prints right off of old Adam's hand!"

Notwithstanding the advent of the large tourist trade at Cameron, the Indians still regard it as their own post and many of the same Indians that came twenty years ago are still bringing their wool, hides, jewelry and blankets to trade.

Red Lake Trading Post at Tonalea is a lively center of Indian trade.

Cameron is a modern oasis of green in a desert of red vastness; the good-bye point to nowhere for here is where the traveler takes off for Navajoland.

Twenty-five miles northeast of Cameron is the first of the out-posts, The Tuba Trading Post at Tuba City, established in 1870. Mr. Joe Lee still stands behind the counter at the Tuba post and, having been brought by his parents to Tuba City some sixty-eight years ago, he can tell the visitor more facts and fancies than there are types of hard candies in the Tuba candy case. For, speaking of hard candy, it is the Indian's soft spot, and the posts all have bins and boxes full of what might be called manufacturer's ends; Easter eggs and Christmas candies jostling each other in a sea of jaw breakers, all day suckers and ossified gum-drops. And speaking of facts; Joe Lee gave a two year old heifer for a one half acre of land containing a spring which even today provides all the spring water for Tuba City. In those early days the Indians used brown sugar in place of candy; supplies and goods were freighted in over the old Mormon trail from Salt Lake and common cotton cloth brought over this route retailed for $1.00 a yard. The squaws at that time made sleeves and pants of the cotton as it was pliable but the main body of their costumes was the native blanket.

Christmas candies jostling each other in a sea of jaw breakers, all day suckers and ossified gum-drops. And speaking of facts; Joe Lee gave a two year old heifer for a one half acre of land containing a spring which even today provides all the spring water for Tuba City. In those early days the Indians used brown sugar in place of candy; supplies and goods were freighted in over the old Mormon trail from Salt Lake and common cotton cloth brought over this route retailed for $1.00 a yard. The squaws at that time made sleeves and pants of the cotton as it was pliable but the main body of their costumes was the native blanket.

In spring, after shearing, the Indians bring in quantities of wool to the posts; in the early fall they bring in quite a number of lambs to sell. Then there is always a year around trade in sheep and goat pelts suitable for suede jackets and other articles. In the last few years large mail order houses have bought stocks of Navajo saddle blankets providing the Indian with a ready market for this type of handicraft, but the wool from the improved Merino herds now owned by the Indians, does not, strangely enough, make as good a blanket as the wool that came from the old Navajo herds. Sometimes when the Indians sell too many sheep and find they don't have enough left for wool, the squaws will return to the post and buy their wool back again. Wool is sacked at the post in large sacks weighing from 275 to 330 pounds and shipped to market when the market price is the most favorable.

All traders have learned that to hurry the Indian is like trying to hurry the journey of the sun; it is said that Joshua stopped the sun but there has never been any mention of anyone ever hastening either the sun or an Indian. The Kerley Trading Post at Tuba City, although not as old and historic as the Tuba Post, is a popular meeting place for the Indians and is to them, what the general store was to the early rural American; a place to meet friends, pass the time of day, sit on a cracker barrel and hang on the counter; whether you bought, sold or traded was incidental; the conviviality of the arriving, departing and assembling humanity was the main interest. Often a squaw will approach the counter like any housewife with a grocery list made out, collect the groceries and leave in short order but in many cases there may be no list of purchases but a scrutiny of all dress

Kaibito Trading Post under the inevitable cottonwoods of Navajo Canyons.

Goods; a feeling, pinching and pulling of the material; a hefting of cabbage heads at the vegetable bin, long and loving looks at the colored candy with the whole procedure ending in the purchase of a five cent bottle of soda pop! The soda pop bottle has, you might say, conquered the Indian. Whether it is his unquenchable thirst or his love of color could not be determined. We think it is his love of color because, whether acid or syrupy, whether bubbles are as dormant as seep-water or as violent as bullets; whether warm or warmer; (it is never cool as ice on the reservation is too precious a commodity to waste on icing soda pop) the color of soda pop is without question something to see!

Twenty-two miles north out of Tuba City the road turns west twenty-two miles to Kaibito Trading post founded about thirty years ago by Hubert Richardson. The road to Kaibito passes within a few miles of White Mesa, a formation of white sandstone on the order of that found in Zion National Park; wind-whipped and sand-blasted into buttes, promontory points, natural arches. The White Mesa extends over an area that appears to be about five miles running east and west by about ten miles running north and south and from a distance there may be seen many green canyons and coves. In prehistoric times the canyons and ledges of the White Mesa were inhabited by the cliff-dwelling Indians, probably contemporary with those inhabitants of Keet Seel and Betatakin but no road leads over to the mesa and unexplored are the many canyons in its serrated sides. The country is rough but to one who would be interested, a camping and hiking trip to the White Mesa would probably be filled with interest and discovery. After passing White Mesa, Navajo Mountain looms to the north and while Kaibito is only some forty miles crow-line from the mountain, the air is so clear that it looks to be within walking distance.

All of the Navajo Indian Reservation is rather high plateau-like land ranging in elevation from 2,000 to 6,000 feet. The soil is mostly red, the same layer of red sandstone that is visible in great depth at Grand Canyon, Zion, Bryce, and Cedar Breaks in Utah, Oak Creek Canyon and Monument Valley in Arizona. The red vastness is covered with rabbit bush, sage, and other semi-desert shrubs and the knolls and canyons are crested with knobby piñon pine. With the incredibly blue sky it is a land of brilliant red and green; when the rabbit bush blooms, a land of red, green, and yellow. It is not desert country, being too high and cold for cactus and amply covered with a vegetation peculiar to its locale; it is not mountain country either as the piñon pines grow considerably below mountain elevations and yet in the higher places there are enormous pines and some lumbering activity. It is not lush valley country reminiscent of the verdant valleys of the red country in Utah and yet there are valleys all through the reservation where Indian crops bloom with a particular ferocity of green. It is grazing country inhabited by the nomadic Navajo and yet prehistorically it was peopled by agrarians who farmed the valleys and built homes in the cliffs and small cultivated patches of land are still to be found wherever there is, and often Where there isn't, sufficient water. Extreme summer heat is unknown because of the high elevation yet the sky is cloudless for weeks on end and the sun blazes as on the desert. In winter there may be from inches to feet of snow but again the warm sun prevents anything like a real winter season from setting in, except in the very highest elevations. So the traveler to the Indian country would be hard put to describing just what kind of a land it is; it is neither this nor that but something entirely its own.

Approaching Kaibito through a stretch of high land covered with piñon, you drop suddenly down into a shallow canyon and there, under the green poplars, are the Indian horses tethered to the hitching rail, always an indication of the activities within the post. The elevation here is 6,400 feet so that Kaibito does a brisk trade during the summer when the Indians have their herds grazing in the higher land but less business in the winter when the herders push south about thirty miles. Kaibito is entirely off the road to or from any other point and therefore has no trade other than the Indian.

Backtracking, we return past White Mesa to the main road from which we turned left for Kaibito. Going north a mile, the road becomes quite sandy and it is necessary to hold a fast steady pace in second to keep from getting stuck in the sand. Mounting the brow of a sand-swept hill you see at the foot a little red lake surrounded by green grass-covered flats; midway between hill and lake is Red Lake Trading Post looking like a small group of toy buildings resting precariously amid the rolling billows of a sandy counterpane.

Red Lake Post at Tonalea was established about sixty years ago and is today an extremely lively center for Indian trade and gatherings. Besides the post itself, there is a string of about six cabins for the traveling motorist; cabins which are rustic but comfortable and mighty welcome in the lonely stretches of the Tonalea sand hills. The wind always blows there, coming down one hill and up another, turning around between the buildings and repeating. To be trite but honest the sand blows as the driven snow but fortunately it sifts out of your belongings as easily as it sifts in. The Red Lake tank at the foot of the hill is the watering place for herds of Indian sheep and an annual Navajo squaw dance is held a few miles across the valley and within sight of the post. Indians are constantly passing Ton-alea en route from the northern part of the reservation to the southern so that the Red Lake Post is probably one of the most colorful and active on the reservation.

The Navajos in the Red Lake district were once so quarrelsome and war-like that it was necessary to attach a higher bar to the outside of the counters in the post store to keep the argumentative Indian from jumping over the counter and carrying home his conversation to the trader more forcefully. Now, the same Indians are among the most modern on the reservation, that is, although dressing in the traditional manner, they are buying and using many modern articles, among them being kodaks and films a recent and unusual departure from Indian custom as the Indians are notoriously camera-shy and such items as suit cases and keys, aspirin and ear-drops, chiffon velvet and toothbrushes, shoe polish, Cole-man lamps and sewing machines. Another sign of the changing times is reflected in the purchase of stockings; the squaws always used to buy black cotton stockings they still buy either cotton or rayon but black will not do at all anymore; they demand the latest sun tan shades. Since the war the Navajo is receiving such a good price for his wool and hides that for the time the traditional blankets and rugs are not being made in large numbers; the Indiancan make more money selling the raw wool than by weaving it into a rug. Due to this added prosperity the Indian is able to dress better than ever before and while, because of their innate love of color and sense of beauty, they always were and will be a colorful people, today they are making their shirts and dresses out of Skinner satins and chiffon vel-vets a far cry from the sateen and velveteen of other years. A squaw dress will contain eight to twelve yards of transparent velvet, at $3.95 per yard, even at $2.95 per yard, this is no cheap item on the clothing bill. Add to this the Navajo's usual store of silver jewel-ry: several necklaces of silver squash blossoms studded with turquoise, several strings of plain turquoise beads intertwined with coral, ear drops of strands of turquoise beads and collars, cuffs, sleeves, bodices, yokes and boots edged in dimes and quarters sewed on as buttons but used as trim. This plus a girdle of silver conchos each concho as big as the top of a water glass, a ring of silver and turquoise on at least four if not all fingers of each hand, innumerable bracelets on each wrist and you have a picture of the present day Navajo Indian.

Squaws often bring their new babies to the post asking the wife of the trader to give thema name which she does. Most Navajos today do have very American first names regardless of what their family Indian name might be. Speaking of names: on glancing through the census roster at the Red Lake post, the following names were noted: Bert and Nellie Dirty whiskers, Wilder Canyon, Manson Chizzie Yazzie, Sam White Hair and Roland Whiter Hair, Yellow Left-hand, Felix Many Mules and Percy Shootinglady! And speaking of the census:During the last census when the census taker was inquiring into the assets of a certain Indian, he asked how many chickens there were and how many eggs. The Indian replied that there were three chickens and one egg. The census taker then said, "With three chick-ens you ought to be getting more than one egg" and the Indian replied, "No, because two of the chickens is husbands!"

The memory of every trader is replete with anecdotes and episodes; events and the years have brought so many in fact, that the many are harder to remember than a few would have been and the investigator finds that getting information on the little things is as hard as shaking water out of a full canteen-there is so much there it won't come out!

Ten miles up the road from Tonalea is the Cow Springs Trading Post and we arrived there at the moment the trader was writing a letter for a family of Navajos to their son in the army. Being unable to write, they dictated their message to the trader and affixed their thumb print to the letter which went something like this: "Horse well, corn well, cattle well, dog well, family well etc." Not a desturned into a chasm carved deeper by turbu-lent water from flash rains. A story is told about an Indian who always said he wished the lakes would overflow and sweep the valley thus watering the Indian corn fields. One day he went hunting up in the canyon and while there a cloudburst did indeed fill the lakes to where they broke their banks and coursed in the valley. Not only did they flood the corn irreparably but as lakes and reservoirs in the future they were doomed. When the Indian returned. his people, blaming him for the disaster, tied him to four wild horses and dragged him to death.

On coming into Kayenta, several volcanic cones may be seen jutting from the horizon. The volcanic activity throughout the northern parts of the reservation was comparatively slight and manifested itself in isolated cones that are the more unique because they sometimes occur at distances of forty miles or more apart. The cones are black with greenish gray deposits along the sides and, rising from the red plains of the Indian country, offer a striking contrast to the red buttes that were formed in the opposite manner. The cones were thrust up but the softer land surrounding the red buttes was worn away thus leaving the buttes to stand alone.

When the Wetherill-Colville Trading Post was established at Kayenta in 1906 their nearest neighboring posts were the Red Lake, fifty miles south, Teec Nos Pos, fifty miles north east, and Chinle, fifty miles southeast. Even today the miles between the points in Navajo-land mean a good deal; the roads are slow when dry and impassable in sections, when wet, and there are never any intermediate stopping off places. In Navajoland there is nothing between two points but the proverbial straight line and that isn't there unless you are traveling by air! For the roads follow old Indian trails which in turn follow contours and natural depressions, and nature, somehow, is never very direct although she gets there in the end. In 1906 when travel was by horse alone, the absolute isolation of these early posts became acutely apparent and as far as communication possibilities went, they might as well have been oceans apart as the usual fifty miles.

In the early days the Wetherills freighted their supplies from Gallup, New Mexico and Mancos, Colorado, a long haul either way with freight rates at 5c per pound. It is still more than one hundred miles to the nearest railroad in any direction so that even now the traveler to the reservation in search of the primative can escape the confines of the diminishing world of today and return to a land of age-old conception of space and time. In thirty-six years of trading, the Wetherills have seen many famous personalities pass their threshold. Teddy Roosevelt, after lion hunting at the north rim of the Grand Canyon and visiting the snake dance held at Rainbow bridge that year, stayed several weeks at Kayenta visiting Monument Valley some thirty-five miles to the north. Harold Bell Wright, Zane Grey, Irving S. Cobb and many others came in time to visit, to know and to love the Navajo country.

Round Rock Trading Post.

Mrs. Wetherill tells about an Indian who was suspected of horse stealing by the other Indians and one night rode off with a certain horse that played out some miles distance and had to be abandoned. When the real owner found the horse the next day he came to Mrs. Wetherill and said, over and over again, "I'm going to shoot that man; I'm going to shoot him for sure, I am, I am." Mrs. Wetherill remonstrated with him for some time telling him he could report the theft but that he must not take the law into his own hands and do

Ready for the trip home.

any shooting or he might be in more trouble than if he had lost the horse in the first place. To which the Indian replied, "No, I'm going to shoot that fellow; I already did."

Leaving Kayenta, the road turns northeast, skirting the north side of Black Mesa and crossing a dead level valley bounded on the north by Comb Ridge, a peculiar uplift formation wherein the strata was raised to a 35 degree angle, the opposite side eroded, thus leaving a slab of strata slanting into the air at a top-heavy angle. To the right or south of the road, lies a red standstone mesa, the outer edges of which have eroded into pinnacles and spires on the order of a small Bryce Canyon. As erosion takes place, nobs, like heads, are formed at the top of the pinnacles and when the neck wears through thin enough, the head or top of the rock falls off. The ground around is literally strewn with these fallen heads and the Indians call this formation the Dead Baby Rocks saying a baby dies whenever a rock falls.

As the road leaves the Dead Baby Rocks and the Comb Ridge, the valley widens out and small Indian farms are sprinkled along the banks of Laguna creek. Strictly speaking, these semi-desert creeks have no banks if the land is fairly flat; they simply spread out and wash down. So the Indian farms along La-guna at this point are as much in the river bed as on its bank. Speaking of farms, a Navajo farm is a mud hogan, a tethered horse and a few acres of sparse corn-the corn planted in the peculiar Indian fashion of four of five stalks in a clump, then a three of four foot space before the next clump of stalks. When asked about this method of planting one Indian said, "We plant two or three seeds for the crows, two three seeds for the winds, two three seeds for the sun and the rest for the Indians."

guna at this point are as much in the river bed as on its bank. Speaking of farms, a Navajo farm is a mud hogan, a tethered horse and a few acres of sparse corn-the corn planted in the peculiar Indian fashion of four of five stalks in a clump, then a three of four foot space before the next clump of stalks. When asked about this method of planting one Indian said, "We plant two or three seeds for the crows, two three seeds for the winds, two three seeds for the sun and the rest for the Indians."

When corn is planted in this manner the yield per acre is not more than thirty bushels and while one government farm expert in the Indian service will tell you he could double the yield if planted according to our methods another government man in the same service will say the Indians have wrested their living in this manner for a good many generations and, year in and year out, it is the method best suited to the exigencies of soil and climate on the Navajo reservation.

The word Dinnehotso means "Place where the valley widens out" and Dinnehotso Trading Post established in 1916, is nothing more than a spot in the widening valley. The Indians in this region seem poor and less colorful than farther south, their clothing well worn and (Continued on Page Forty-one)