TRADING POSTS, A VANISHING TRADITION

LAST OF THE OLD-TIME TRADERS

What I remembered most was a small oval face and a black thumbprint. Both belonged to an old Navajo woman who came into Bruce Burnham's trading post at Sanders just off the Navajo reservation in northeastern Arizona. The old lady had a wrinkled face the color of walnuts. Leaning on a black cane, she rocked her way to the counter and pushed a sealed envelope and a white slip of paper across to Burnham. A fourth-generation trader among the Indians, Burnham muttered something in Navajo and opened the envelope. He looked at the face amount and slid the check back to the old lady for a signature. Carefully she pressed her thumb onto an inked pad and "endorsed" the check with the spidery lines of her fingerprint. Even though this scene was played out a mere five years before the end of the 20th century, neither Burnham nor the old lady gave any hint that it might be an unusual practice. Burnham turned around and entered a small room where the walls were hung with hundreds of plastic bags holding silver and turquoise jewelry and large brown bags on the higher shelves containing Pendleton blankets and shawls, all items Navajos had brought to him in exchange for loans. He found the old lady's turquoise necklace and brought it out. She removed the necklace from the bag and carefully draped it around her neck, pressing it gently against her black velveteen blouse. Only then did her sober features betray any emotion. Her eyes brightened and a thousand wrinkles stretched into a smile that was clearly reserved for welcoming old friends back into her life. A few days later, I wandered into Bill Beaver's Sacred Mountain Trading Post near the western boundary of the Navajo reservation, some 20 miles north of Flagstaff. Two Navajo women were at the counter. The older woman wore

OLD-TIME TRADERS

an ankle-length lime-green skirt and a forest-green velveteen blouse, as well as a sky-blue waistpack. She leaned on two wooden canes and said something to the younger woman, who pushed two baskets and a buckskin pelt across the counter to Beaver. He bought the baskets immediately and then spread the ivory-colored pelt across a glass display case.

"Oh my God," he said, running his hand over the soft skin. "They shot it with a machine gun. Where's the ears? Where's the tail?" The women, who were not at home with English, said nothing. Still looking at the pelt, Beaver declared to no one in particular, "I think I'll pass on this one." But a few minutes later, he folded the pelt, took it into his back room, and came out with some money.

"I thought you said you were going to pass on that one," I said.

"Yeah, well, I don't know what I'm going to do with one in this condition, but I bought it anyway to help them out. We sell these pelts back to the Navajos. The medicine men use them in their ceremonies. When a patient comes into their hogan, they have him sit on the pelt-but they want it to have ears, tail, everything."

Nearly 200 miles away at the historic Hubbell Trading Post in Ganado, I asked Bill Malone about the demise of the trading post as an institution on the Navajo reservation and how it happened that some survived and others did not. I was thinking about the unusual transactions Bruce Burnham and Bill Beaver had made, transactions that had more to do with keeping Navajo people afloat than with making profits.

Like Burnham and Beaver, Malone had spent nearly all of his work-ing life either on or at the edge of the Navajo reservation and speaks Navajo fluently. Like Burnham and Beaver, Malone has been married many years to a Navajo woman. Unlike the other two, however, Malone does not own a trading post. Hubbell's is a National Historic Site run by the Southwest Parks and Monuments Association, which hired Malone, an experienced trader, to manage the place and its 18 Navajo employees. Before tak-ing the job at Hubbell's in 1980, Malone managed the isolated Piñon trading post for 20 years.

"The trading posts that survive," he said, "are like a lot of the old-time businesses were before they got so streamlined, and the profit margin and net profit played into things so heavy. Pretty soon a lot of those places became pretty cold. I don't think I could work in one of those cold situations."

Burnham, Beaver, and Malone jokingly refer to themselves as dinosaurs because they are, in the words of Jim Babbitt of Flagstaff, "the last of a dying or dead breed." Babbitt's family owns two trading posts on the reservation.

"Lots of people would like to believe the trad-ing posts are like they were 50 years ago," he said with some sadness. "It's terribly romantic, and I wish it were true, but it's really just a fantasy. Everything has changed.

"Around the mid-1950s, the Navajos and Hopis had access to automobiles; the various governments had improved highways, roads, and bridges. The Indians became mobile. From the '60s on, American enterprise produced places like K-Mart and Wal-Mart, and there was no way a trader could compete with selection or price. Hundreds of trading posts went out of business.

Those that did survive were on a well-traveled route and able to develop a new clientele, namely tourists."

That's only partially accurate, say people like Burnham and Malone, whose customers include both tourists and Navajos.

"There are things that people will go to Wal-Mart for," Malone observed, "but there are some things you can't get at Wal-Mart, like buckskins, lamb nipples, sheep paint, used saddles, woolcards, shearing scissors, and treadle sewing machines. I still think trading posts are a little romantic and have their charm if they're run right and not by computers."

While not downplaying the fact that a trustworthy trader can make a decent living selling his wares on the reservation, Burnham added, "The trader is at once banker, friend, adviser, and general helper.

"In the old days, when most Navajos did not speak or read English, he would read their mail to them, and if they received any kind of form, he would fill it out for them. He also would keep track of those who were reaching 65 to let them know they could apply for social security. If they needed an extra quarter of earnings to be eligible for social security, he would hire them to sweep the trading post for a few months.

"But only the honest and ethical traders could survive because in these outlyingtrading posts your conscience was your only regulator as far as price goes.

OLD-TIME TRADERS

"Out here you're fixed in what would have been 1920s rural America. It's like a time warp. We're way behind civilization."

But not so far behind as a trader named McSparron who lived at Chinle many years ago. Barry Goldwater recalled that every New Year's Eve, McSparron - evidently feeling extremely isolated from the rest of the world - would shoot an arrow into the ceiling of his house so he could keep track of how many years he'd lived there.

Burnham has no trouble remembering his time on the reservation because he can trace it back to a specific smell, or combination of smells. When he was a child, he played around his father's trading post, and the peculiar odors of the place left an imprint on his brain. Years later, when he was discharged from the Army, Burnham didn't know what he was going to do with his life, so he got a job driving a soft drink delivery truck.

"The first stop on my route was Shiprock [New Mexico]," he recalled. "Almost all of those trading posts on the reservation had the same smell. The floors were wood, so everything that spilled on the floor got mixed together and stayed there. It was an odor of kerosene mixed with sheep pelts, raw wool, mutton, and mutton fat. I just thought, 'This smells so good!' I didn't want to leave. I walked right inside and applied for a job."

At one point during my long visit with Burnham, he launched into an animated speech on the demise of Navajo culture and on the importance of one word in particular. "When Navajo kids go to boarding school, they teach them etiquette, among other things. So they tell them to say 'please.' In order to do that," Burnham explained, "the teachers had to come up with a Navajo word for 'please,' but there is no such word in Navajo, so they translate 'please' as ahshol-dah [phonetic spelling]. And that's terrible because ahsholdah is a very important word.

"A Navajo once told me, 'Don't waste that word. It means my life is in your hands, you have to help me.' It's like begging in desperation. So in effect, what they're teaching these kids is that everything you want you have to beg for. You're not supposed to use that word unless you really need it. Ahshol-dah embodies the idea that everybody has some responsibility for someone else, which is a fundamental idea in Navajo life.

"So I think once they've been to boarding school, they lose a little bit of their cultural identity."

Part of the Navajos' cultural identity is wrapped up in their crafts, the production of artistic rugs and baskets, silver and turquoise jewelry, and pottery. Burnham, Malone, and Beaver helped some Navajos learn these crafts by purchasing their early imperfect work and offering them encouragement and the opportunity to improve. Burnham also was responsible for the introduction of the Newlands Outline Rug, the first new style in Navajo rugs to appear since the 1950s. It is a combination of designs derived from those made at Teec Nos Pos and Coal Mine Mesa and now made by Navajos who have moved into the new acreage annexed to the reservation near Sanders.

Beaver, who has a degree in anthropology, is well-known for encouraging and reviving Navajo interest in making pottery. "For a long time," Jim Babbitt observed, "he bought pots that were not very good at all just to encourage the people to keep working, and eventually many of them became very, very good."

With some reluctance, Beaver told of a Navajo woman who had been a very good potter but whose work had declined significantly as she became elderly. "The old people start slipping in their craft, but I still buy from them," he said. "What can you do? They're getting old and so am I. Nobody's the same. You can't just let them starve to death." Beaver's anecdote also is an allegory. It shows that some traders endured because they grew close to the Navajos and never waited for their customers to get so desperate that they had to come in and use the word "ahsholdah."