When the First Navajo Came to Arizona

JULY, 1933 ARIZONA HIGHWAYS 9 When the First Navajo Came to Arizona Being the Story of Gil-Elf-Jal and His Home and Fort at Ganado

HE WAS the first Navajo in Arizona, a man of giant stature, force and distinction, and he had many wives. His name was Gil-Elf-Jal, which in the English tongue means TheBig-Man-Who-Carried-a-Club.

A wanderer by instinct, this nomad of the hills and valleys and sand dunes was paradoxically the possessor of much worldly goods, for he gathered as he went. And he wasn't so very particular where or how he gathered, not being averse upon occasion even to taking along a few Zuni as slaves to perform the tasks which to him were lowly or abhorrent, such for instance as building houses and tilling maize fields.

That was a hundred and seventy-five years ago or thereabouts, and his physical properties have melted into foundation stones and ruins near what is now the trading post of Ganado and atop a narrow point of mesa looking over the wide valley of the Pueblo Colorado Wash, but his fame still lives in the legends of his tribesmen. We have his story, as interpreted by Roman Hubbell, Indian trader, on the authority of Na-aTine, "an old blind man," who lives in Steamboat Canyon, and that of a neighbor who in the white man's language is known as Old Left Hand.

Gil-Elf-Jal, according to Navajo tradition, tiring of a peaceful life among the tribesmen of his homeland, which is now the country adjacent to Aztec, New Mexico, assembled his flocks and his wives, and emigrated through the Zuni country to Kin Teel, or Wide Ruins, twenty-four miles south of Ganado, and then into the freedom of the open country to the northward, taking care to provide himself en route with sufficient Zuni artesans to build his home. For he was "a strong and powerful man who always succeeded in his undertakings." And the Navajo, ever an aristocrat of the mountains and plains, was never a builder. When it was skilled mechanics or laborers he wanted, he went out and took them.

And the Zuni architects and masons did their task with thoroughness and excellence.

On the homestead of the late Don Lorenzo Hubbell, earliest of the traders on the Navajo reservation, and only a few hundred yards south of Ganado, may still be seen the ruins of the house the Zuni built for Gil-Elf-Jal. It was an imposing edifice. Its foundations which sink several feet below the surface of the soil and are of finely matched masonry some two feet in thickness, measure two hundred feet in length and seventy-five in breadth. The superstructure has all fallen away, but evidently was of the same masonry as that used in the footings, and the remains give indication that the building was a single story in height.The various rooms and chambers, the(Continued on Page 26)