COAL CANYON

Today, Coal Canyon, or Coal Mine Canyon, as it is sometimes known, is not even noted on most road maps. With the paving of traveled Navajo Route 3 completed, however, the veil of its anonymity in some ways has been lifted. Largely obscured from view by a rise in land between it and the highway little more than fourteen miles southeast of Tuba City, the canyon is difficult to spot even when you are looking for it, and if you do succeed in locating it you have caught only the briefest vision of white and blue as you drive on. Unexpected colors, you think, for a canyon called Coal in a near treeless land, nature has provided a life-warming fuel in a setting of

Distinctive Beauty... Unique Interest COAL CANYON

To reach the famed Hopi villages on their finger-like extensions of Black Mesa, thousands of motorists each year travel Reservation Route 3 between Tuba City and Window Rock, yet they pass unknowingly by less than a mile one of Northern Arizona's loveliest and most unusual canyons. It is a spot of such distinctive beauty and unique interest that anywhere else in the nation outside the canyon-rich Southwest it would long ago have been celebrated and accorded its deserved status as a national monument; yet, strange as it may seem, many people who have lived all their lives within a hundred miles of the place know little or nothing about it and have never visited it. Such is Coal Canyon aside from the Navajos and the Hopis, among the few people aware of Coal Canyon's existence are the rockhounds, so it is not surprising that Julia Free and her nimble octogenarian uncle, Harry Epperson - the Sedona rock-hunters and explorers unexcelled with whom I later went to Blue Canyon should have mentioned Coal Canyon to me a number of times previously. They had spent days there combing the rim for fossils and other collectors' prizes. But I had listened to their rapturous accounts of these specialist matters with but half an ear. Now I suffered for my former indifference. At once, on my return to Sedona, I sought out Julia and Harry, contritely asked could we go to Coal Canyon together some day. Fortunately their enthusiasm for exploring canyons is as resilient as cactus. Indeed we could! And, added they, they knew a wonderful place to camp. We could stay as long as we liked. We went in October. That time of year you expect the weather to be fine, and so it was when we started. Upon our arrival, Julia and Harry, like bloodhounds hot on the scent, made straight for one of their favorite hunting sites, and it was late afternoon before we headed for camp. A word of caution here. You should have a jeep or a pickup to negotiate the Indian "roads" across the mesa, although you can reach the head of the canyon in an ordinary car. The canyon has several arms at a considerable distance from one another, so allow ample time for a visit. Walk where you cannot drive, if you want to see this place in its many extraordinary aspects. I was not overly startled, although a bit anxious, I confess, when I learned that we were to make our headquarters in a coal mine. For a thousand years and more Aside from the Navajos and the Hopis, among the few people aware of Coal Canyon's existence are the rockhounds, so it is not surprising that Julia Free and her nimble octogenarian uncle, Harry Epperson - the Sedona rock-hunters and explorers unexcelled with whom I later went to Blue Canyon should have mentioned Coal Canyon to me a number of times previously. They had spent days there combing the rim for fossils and other collectors' prizes. But I had listened to their rapturous accounts of these specialist matters with but half an ear. Now I suffered for my former indifference. At once, on my return to Sedona, I sought out Julia and Harry, contritely asked could we go to Coal Canyon together some day. Fortunately their enthusiasm for exploring canyons is as resilient as cactus. Indeed we could! And, added they, they knew a wonderful place to camp. We could stay as long as we liked. We went in October. That time of year you expect the weather to be fine, and so it was when we started. Upon our arrival, Julia and Harry, like bloodhounds hot on the scent, made straight for one of their favorite hunting sites, and it was late afternoon before we headed for camp. A word of caution here. You should have a jeep or a pickup to negotiate the Indian "roads" across the mesa, although you can reach the head of the canyon in an ordinary car. The canyon has several arms at a considerable distance from one another, so allow ample time for a visit. Walk where you cannot drive, if you want to see this place in its many extraordinary aspects. I was not overly startled, although a bit anxious, I confess, when I learned that we were to make our headquarters in a coal mine. For a thousand years and more

rainbow colors and unique geological formations

the Northern Arizona Indians - Hopis first, later Navajos and Hopis have utilized the sub-bituminous B Dakota coal (the type at Coal Canyon) and the high volatile C bituminous Mesa Verde coal to be found on Black Mesa, and one of the thickest seams runs through Coal Canyon at the southwestern end of Black Mesa. You see the coal clearly when you are close enough to the rim. Occurring in the middle unit of the Dakota formation, it is the black band which separates the thin brown and grey rim-layers of Mancos shale and upper-unit Dakota sandstone from the deep lower-unit Dakota, white Cow Springs, and Entrada sandstones and the lowermost Carmel formation which is here inseparable from the Entrada. At Coal Canyon, the white of the San Rafael sequence, represented here by the Carmel formation and Entrada sandstone, is narrowly interrupted by reddish siltstone strata (the "braiding" on the "squaw skirts") and weathered in many places to delicate tones of light greenish or bluish grey, pale yellow, or dark red.

Soon after the Mormons settled Tuba City, in the 1870's, they discovered the canyon's coal and developed an underground mine which supplied all their needs of God-given fuel in this near-treeless country. Located near the end of the present access road, the old Mormon workings are no longer visible, but they connect by underground cross-cuts with the so-called "Tuba City No. 3," the modern mine which was operated from 1908 to 1950 to provide Tuba City and its Indian Service agency and school, as well as a number of other Northern Arizona communities, with fuel.

In the early days the road between the canyon and Tuba City was one of the worst in an area notorious for bad roads. The distance was not great, but the coal had to be hauled down a steep grade made even more hazardous by a long series of sand dunes, and only four-horse wagons driven by experienced Indians could negotiate it. Later, as the demand for coal increased, a better road over a different route was constructed. Trucks could then be used to do the job, but the trip was still not one for tenderfeet or greenhorns.

Although the mine is now closed as being uneconomic to operate (despite the fifty-years' reserve it is estimated still to contain), its airshaft stands black against the sky, a conspicuous Coal Mesa landmark; and if plans for the use of Black Mesa coal to produce electricity at a projected 350,000 kilowatt power plant in New Mexico materializes, if reports that the billions of tons of undeveloped Black Mesa coal could be converted into synthetic materials sufficient to supply the needs of all the world's women are only partially true, the mine's boarded up entryway may be opened once more in the not-toodistant future.

The mine we drove to was quite different from Tuba City No. 3. Perhaps fifty feet below the main mesa rim, it was a level-bottomed sandy pit edged at one side by the sharp drop-off of the canyon and backed at its opposite end by an eight-foot-high outcropping coal seam which glistened under the slanting rays of the late sun. With its sheer rock-and-coal walls on three sides, the pit promised good protection from the wind as well as perfect privacy. Harry set about pitching his tent while we fixed supper. Julia and I were to sleep in the back of the car. We had started our meal when we heard a strange rattling on the mesa above us. Something was approaching our hideout.

NAVAJO by James Tallon

A few minutes later there appeared at the head of the trail, dramatically framed by the intense blue sky, a high-wheeled Navajo wagon drawn by a team of tan mules. The wagon contained a woman, a young man, a small girl, and a very small dog. Confronted by us and jeep, the newcomers, including the mules, seemed startled. They waited at the rim for a moment, measuring us. Then the wagon clattered down the steep incline and came to a precipitous halt near our camp.

The family had come for coal. A pick, shovel, some coarse burlap sacks and a large galvanized washtub were tossed from the wagon. We walked over to watch and soon a conversation started.

"We were coming earlier," the woman said, "but the mules ran away.' Good mules! If they had behaved themselves we'd have missed meeting Sylvia Begay, Joe Hoskie, and little Eveline Brown.

NAVAJO GRANDMOTHER by Frank Jensen

Sylvia, so she told me, had been born on Coal Mesa and had lived there all her life except for the few terms she had attended school at Leupp. Eveline was her daughter. "More children at home. Some away at school." Joe was Sylvia's sister's son. "She live near us." The dog's name was Skippy. "He used to belong to white man, but he get lost and we find him."

Mining coal, Indian fashion, is a relatively simple matter. Joe went to a section of the outcrop which Sylvia selected and chopped out huge chunks with his pick, then loaded them into the sacks and tub. The chunks looked like the cannel coal we used in a New York City fireplace. "It burns good," Sylvia said emphatically, and she handed us a sample "to try." Wood, which is sometimes brought to the family from Howell Mesa or from as far away as Gray Mountain, is expensive; but the coal, which they use both for heat and for cooking, is free for the cutting, and to get it they may make as many as thirty trips a year from the hogan, about a mile distant. Both Hopis and Navajos use this mine, Sylvia told us, and the ground beneath the seam was indeed piled high with a litter of black chips. Next morning we expected to search for Blue Canyon, some miles east of Coal Canyon. Before leaving, however, we took time to walk along the Coal Canyon rim to look for samples of those curious fused shale fragments which are a peculiar feature of this place. In certain areas here, it seems, the coal strata lying below the rim caught fire eons ago, ignited perhaps by lightning, perhaps by spontaneous combustion in the heaps of weathered coal chips lying alongside the exposed seams. The coal burned with an unimaginable fierceness and generated generate such heat that it actually baked the overlying shale. Those patches of bright-red rock seen on the rim today bear vivid testimony to this long-ago holocaust. In some places there were natural chimneys in the rock, and the flames there concentrated grew so hot that some of the shale melted. In this molten form it flowed into cracks in the heated but unfused shale below. Later, when the heat had abated, the melted shale crystalized into a material which resembles volcanic basalt. This material is much harder than the surrounding unaltered shale, which eventually weathers out, leaving the fragments of holo-crystalline slag as perfect castings of the cracks in the original rock.

Microscopic examinations of these fragments undertaken some years ago by L. F. Brady, the Museum of Northern Arizona's Curator of Paleontology, disclosed that the slag contains minute fossilized mollusk shells. Elsewhere near the rim are whole beds of larger shells, among them those of prehistoric oysters, some of which go by the intriguing names of Ostrea lugubris and O. prudentia, while in other areas fossilized leaves and twigs, including those of an ancient variety of sequoia tree, may be found. Today this is high desert country, but in the Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic area, perhaps one hundred million years ago, it was a shallow lagoonal sea bordered by muddy shallows, sandy beaches, and coastal swamps. On one of our later trips to the canyon, Sylvia handed me one of the shells, smiled as she said, "My people call this Red Mother's toenail."

We told Joe we hoped to find Blue Canyon. He gave us some vague directions, and we started out on an adventure which has been described in another issue of this magazine. On our return, we had said, we would stop at the hogan. But we came back in a cloudburst and the rain promised to continue for days (it did), so we headed straight for Tuba City. There, at the trading post, by rare good fortune we met our new friends again, and arranged to return for another visit when the weather turned fine the following spring.

In June we arrived at the hogan to find Sylvia seated on the dirt floor of the summer house spinning white wool. She was surrounded by children. Eveline was there, but the others we had not met before. There was Vera, a pretty tousle-headed two-year-old who all that day clung to her mother like a persistent little burr. There was Atman, seven years old, a laughing boy in a cowboy shirt who seemed to have a special affinity for the family's two tiny kittens. Next in line was Benny, eleven, an intelligent, interesting lad who had just returned from attending a Mormon school in Salt Lake City. He spoke perfect English and was fascinated by the camera. When I asked him what he was going to do when he grew up, he replied with one uncompromising, eloquent word, "Work."

An older sister, Lillie Marie, fourteen, had also been away at school the previous year, at Chemawa, a nonreservation boarding school of the Indian Service at Salem, Oregon. It had been her first season away from home, and thinking how different moist, temperate Oregon is from arid sunny Arizona and its lonely mesas I could not help wondering how she had felt about it. I'll not soon forget her answer.

She had liked Oregon very much, and its differences had indeed impressed her. "There's lots of grass and trees. And no sun! No snow, too. And there's lots of trains. Sometimes we went to the ocean. That's lots of water, I never saw so much!"

Water, I recalled, is a serious problem for her family on the mesa. When the spring below the canyon rim ceases even to trickle, as it had that June, and the small open reservoir on the mesa is reduced to a basin of cracked dry mud, it is necessary to drive a long way in the wagon to fetch a small supply. It was a measure of Sylvia's courtesy and hospitality that she offered us each a cupful.

The wagon, she told us, was broken down just now. The mules had run off again, and there was no one to fix the wagon. Joe had moved, and Sylvia's husband was working off the reservation. Her sister had a wagon and Benny could drive it when they caught the mules. But now she looked down at her spindle. There was something she needed if she were to prepare the white wool properly (she was going to weave a rug to sell at the Flagstaff Pow Wow in July), and maybe... she glanced briefly at the jeep, then continued. Away off on the mesa was the "white sand" (she called it Klezh-la-kah', if I understood her correctly) which for generations the women hereabouts had used to whiten wool. "See, it's sort of yellow now," she said, pointing. "For this rug I want it white, white."

Of course we'd be glad to take her to the white sand. But first we should have to go to the coal mine and unload the jeep, which was full to the gunwales. Sylvia got in front with Julia and Harry. The youngsters and I piled in the back on top of tent, stove, water cans, food boxes, and other gear. It was like riding a beachcomber.

While we were unloading at Coal Mine Camp, Sylvia and her children busied themselves looking for something they called chi, "red sand," which crumbles readily under light pressure and is abundant, apparently, at this particular spot. "We use it for sunburn," they explained.

I was mildly astonished to learn that Indians should be troubled by sunburn, but it is so. The Blue Canyon Navajos employed a similar remedy, and for generations the Havasupai have traded to the Hopis and other Indians a red mineral from Cataract Canyon for use as a protec-

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELIZABETH RIGBY

tion against the sun. The Cataract Canyon mineral is said to be greasy in texture and to spread easily on the skin.

Lillie pointed to Eveline's relatively fair-skinned cheek. "She got a burn here the other day. We put grease on the burn and then the red sand on top of that."

They had brought along an old coffee can in which to collect this valued substance. Later I sent a sample to Leonard B. Riley, Denver Coordinator of the U. S. Geo logical Survey, to be analyzed. He wrote of it: "The red stone is a very fine-grained sandstone with an abundance of small gypsum crystals. The sand grains are held together with montmorillonite, one of the clay min erals. There was nothing noted that suggested any thera peutic value in the sandstone itself. However, I believe montmorillonite is a constituent of the so-called Denver mud,' a popular remedy some years ago. This easily pulver ized rock would act as a carrier for the fats."

Mr. Riley was equally helpful in regard to the "white sand."Analysis of this substance, he wrote, showed it to be: "... white Cow Springs standstone . . . also a fine-grained sandstone with a weak bonding from contained clay. However, the clay mineral in this case is kaolinite. Certain types of clay have the property of absorbing oils and these are collectively known as fuller's earths, from their ancient use in 'fulling' cloth. Many fuller's earths have a high kaolin content.

Supplementing this, H. W. Pierce, Assistant Mineralogist at the Arizona Bureau of Mines, Tucson, has written: "I have seen several small deposits on the Navajo reservation that were used on white wool in rugs. It is my opinion that these fine, white sediments are applied wet to white wool and that the finer fraction (clay-like) infiltrates the available openings and covers grease, etc., thus giving the impression of whiteness. I think that the action is in the main part a physical covering instead of a chemical bleaching. Since clays absorb or adsorb oils this action may play some part in the whitening process."

The late Gladys Reichard, in her book Navajo Shepherd and Weaver, described the use of a similar material by the weavers near Ganado. There, however, the effective clay material is apparently montmorillonite. Sylvia explained that she prepares the white sand for use by pulverizing it and adding it to the wash water, which then becomes somewhat turbid.

After a huge sackful of the white sand had been gathered (using Julia's rock pick, Benny chipped the soft stone from the sides of a much-used open pit beside the road), we drove our friends back to their hogan. We had planned to spend the rest of the afternoon exploring and photographing, but even before we left the quarry a storm was threatening. Now it was blowing a gale.

The windmill turned like the flywheel of a gyroscope, and clouds of sand-colored dust were whirling towards the mesa from the southeast.

Nothing to do but get out of there. Somehow we managed and made camp again up on the open mesa.

There was a magnificent if somewhat ominous sun set. Then the heavens fell upon us. It poured. Said Sylvia, "Every time you come, you bring rain."