The Kayenta Mail Run

On the Navajo reservation in the 1950s,

The postman was expected to provide passenger bus service, get prescriptions filled, run errands, and deliver groceries. It was all part of the job on ...

Text by Francis Raymond Line Illustrations by Bill Ahrendt Lee Bradley, a Navajo Indian, was inconspicuous in the crowd of nearly a hundred Westerners who waited some 35 years ago outside the post office and trading post at Kayenta, Arizona, 20 miles south of the Utah line. Inconspicuous too was a sign in small print, with its incorrectly spelled word: United States Post Office Fourth Class This is the remotest post office in these United States. Most of those in the crowd mainly traders, Indians, missionaries, and uranium workers had come to pick up their mail, which Lee Bradley and his son Frank had just brought in by truck over 150 miles of cruel roads from Flagstaff.

It was a significant trip because Lee Bradley was closing out his career. After 25 years trucking mail to that exceedingly remote U.S. post office, he was turning the task over to his son. I was fortunate to be able to accompany him on that farewell journey.

By 9:30 A.M. that day in the mid-1950s, the Bradleys' truck was loaded at the Flagstaff post office dock. The large sacks of mail were piled high atop cases of milk, cartons of bread, and crates of canned goods with which the Bradleys already had partly filled the truck. Because their conveyance provided the only public transportation to the Kayenta area, we also had several Navajo passengers, who crawled in on top of the load to take reclining positions on the mail sacks.

With his father and me in the front seat beside him, Frank Bradley wheeled his cumbersome vehicle out onto U.S. Route 66 heading east. Six miles from town, U.S. 89 cut off to the north, with some 50 miles of good highway heading toward Cameron. For this portion, the Bradleys served simply as rural mail carriers.

The Sunset Crater mailbox marked the junction of the road leading four miles into that national monument. Wupatki National Monument took another large batch of mail. Soon, at the Blevens service station, a woman ran out to meet us. "Did you bring that medicine? I thought you'd never come."

Along with the mail, Frank Bradley handed over a drugstore bottle he had purchased in Flagstaff. "Keeps me busy in Flag, just running errands for people," he explained. "Auto parts. Radio repairs. The Navajo women even trust me to pick out their cloth and colored thread for them."

Dropping rapidly in elevation, the road left the pines, and, in less than an hour, we entered the Navajo Indian Reservation, through which the rest of the mail route extended, except for touching a corner of the Hopi reservation. We pulled into Cameron later that morning.

Off to the left, a road led west toward the entrance to Grand Canyon National Park. We headed north, bumped across a suspension bridge spanning the Little Colorado River, and then struck off to the northeast on a wicked trail of dirt and ruts and rocks that wound its way to Tuba City.

Ten large mail sacks, as well as various boxes and bundles, were unloaded at the Tuba Trading Post. Several of our Indian passengers disembarked, but many others got on, quickly adjusting to the crowded quarters within the vehicle.

Tuba City was an outpost. Beyond it, as our vehicle jolted northeastward over a dirt road that resembled a washboard, we entered isolation. "From here," Lee told me, "I've sometimes gone clear to Kayenta without seeing a car."

Barren landscape undulated in the sun-light as far as the eye could see.

"Looks flat, doesn't it?" Frank mused. "But you ought to try taking the census in that country. The canyons would slow you down quick."

I learned that Frank and his father and uncle had done the census tabulation of 1950 for much of the northwestern stretch of the Navajo reservation. They had started as interpreters for white census takers, but, before the job was finished, each was doing a section of the reservation on his own.

Lee Bradley had covered one of the wildest sections the area extending north to Lees Ferry and the Utah line. Hogans, the circular log and adobe dwellings of the Navajos, nestled every few miles through most of the land. The dwellings were not grouped; almost every one stood alone, sometimes requiring hours of searching by the census taker.

"I just struck out over the landscape in a four-wheel-drive truck," Lee Bradley told me, "and depended on the Indians for overnight shelter. But Washington didn't plan the count out here for the right time of year. It was spring. The Navajos were on the move from their winter hogans out to their summer shelters and corn patches. Sometimes I'd search half a day for a hogan I had heard about, only to find the occupants had moved to their summer quarters."

"So you just had to give that family up?" I asked, jumping to a natural conclusion.

"No," continued Lee. "Families drive their herds with them when they move. They leave tracks. I traced them down."

By now I began to understand why the white men who had started the census job in this area turned it over to the Bradleys. The requirements included not only a knowledge of the Navajo language and an ability to hike over some of the roughest land in America but also great skill in track ing. The knack of following the half-obliter ated marks of a sheep herd across sand dunes and through canyons for a dozen miles or more probably hadn't been includ ed in the regular civil service exams for cen sus takers.

Our mail truck swung into Tonalea, which consisted of a single trading post and a windmill.

"Half-hour stop," announced Frank, and we piled out. By now 14 Indians crouched or lay atop the mail sacks as passengers, and they too alighted. Seven of them, including a young mother in brightly col ored skirts with her baby bound tightly to its cradleboard, lived somewhere in this area, and they struck off across the red baked landscape toward home.

This Tonalea Trading Post in some respects resembled the general store of small villages all across early-day America. The smell of leather came strong to my senses. Suspended from the low ceiling were new brown leather horse collars, straps, and black leather bridles, as well as desert water bags, lanterns, and oilcans. Kerosene lamps were displayed on the shelves along with groceries, canned goods, and bolts of brilliantly colored fabrics the material for Navajo women's clothing. The post was filled with Indians who had come to get their mail.

Leaving Tonalea, the road to Kayenta in spots became as rough as a logging trail. His memories stirred by the rough road, Lee Bradley reminisced about the hazards he and his son had encountered during their years carrying the Kayenta mail.

On an occasion when rocks and ruts resulted in a broken rear axle, Lee had strapped the first-class pouches to his back and walked with them eight miles into the next station at Cow Springs.

In the early 1930s, unusually severe snows came, turning the wilderness into an impassable desert of white. Drifts piled high, and the road, where a car or so a day was a novelty, was deserted completely. But the mail had to go through. By good fortune, there were Navajo passen gers aboard the first time the snow bogged the truck down, and they helped push it out of the drifts. But when winter conditions worsened, Lee hired 35 of his fellow Indians to shovel a way through. There is nothing for miles to stop the sweep of the wind. The drifts closed for mation behind the truck and, on the next trip, the road was gone again from sight. Lee borrowed a Navajo pony and deliv ered as much of the first-class mail as he could by horseback. That year, he lost money on his mail contract.

Heavy winter snows are spasmodic, but summer downpours and flash floods are the rule rather than the exception. In 1930, when Lee Bradley started the mail run, there were no bridges of any kind. The road dipped into every wash and ravine. Cloudbursts would often erase complete sections of the so-called highway.

In 1936 a single mail run from Tuba City to Kayenta required eight days. It was a case of getting stuck and getting out, slid ing off the road and getting on again, mir ing in one wash after another. Indians came from nearby hogans with their buck boards to help pull the truck out of mires.

At night, Bradley would walk to hogans for food and sleep, then return to his truck the next day to start fighting it through once more. In one wash, a flash flood immersed cab, truck body, and motor in roaring muddy water and sand. That trip finally ended the worst in 25 years of Bradley contracts but the truck was useless. Lee Bradley had to sell it. He also lost money that year.

As the father was telling me these things, and we were jog gling pleasantly on toward the approach to Marsh Pass, we suddenly heard a tremendous barking of dogs. Frank brought his vehicle to a jerky stop.

"They belong to Sleepy," he explained. "This is his stop."

Sleepy had gotten into the truck at Tuba City. He was a Navajo hermit, a widower. He lived with his dogs in a hogan quite close to the road.

Weighed down with packages, Sleepy climbed out of the truck into a violent roaring of love-crazed canines. They knocked the packages from his arms and overpowered him. But Sleepy's face was alight with smiles. The dogs loved him and, amid their leapings and caresses, he walked away with his bundles, beaming.

It was nearly 4:00 P.M. when we bumped down from Marsh Pass into Kayenta, past the knoll containing the graves of the Wetherills. They were traders who had pioneered this land and opened the overland treks to Rainbow Natural Bridge.

"Didn't Theodore Roosevelt make the trip in there once?" I asked.

"Yes," Lee Bradley replied. "I was the camp cook for his party. The president liked my cooking."

Kayenta was not much. About 20 houses, half a dozen trailers, and several Indian hogans were sprinkled about a mission and government school on the winding road leading into uranium country, Monument Valley, and the northern extremes of the Navajo reservation. The truck wheeled through the powdery dust of the town's single main street and pulled up to the Warren Trading Post.

Frank Bradley and his father waved to their friends. Only about 20 families lived in Kayenta proper, yet several dozen people clustered about the post awaiting the truck. This was Monday. Mondays and Fridays were mail days in Kayenta.

Harry Goulding, pioneer trader from up by the Utah line, 20 miles north, was there. And so was his wife, Mike. Harry and Mike were the "king and queen" of Monument Valley. A missionary had bumped down across the alkaline wastes from Oljeto, just over the Utah line, and a trader had come in on the jeep road from Dinnehotso, 25 miles northeast, to take back mail and supplies for the families there. As befits close neighbors who dwell only 50 driving miles apart, Harry Goulding and the Dinnehotsotrader were gossiping amiably at the center of a loose knot of listeners made up of workers from Uranium Mine Number Two, Marvin Walter from the mission clinic in Monument Valley, and a few others.

As the Bradleys and several volunteers began unloading the mail, I thought of the inscription I had once seen on the main post office in New York: "Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.

For 25 years, this Navajo father and son team had adapted that big-city slogan to one of the most remote post offices in the United States.