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Virginia Burnham: Well, basically we moved around a lot. My mother had a lot of sheep and cattle and so wherever there was a lot of feed, that's where we went. We didn't really have.... Well, she did have a hogan, which was kind of central, around in the middle of the grazing area, so we lived there in the wintertime. The rest of the time, it was like wherever there was water and more feed, that's where we went with the sheep and the cattle, and it was basically just my mother and us children. �. And out there on the reservation, we didn't have any close neighbors...mainly my aunts and uncles and my grandmother lived at least two to five miles from each other. It was just basically our family. My husband always said, "Why did those young kids always hide when we go visit them, or go see a hogan out there that you want to visit?" I guess we did the same thing... I did. We used to hide every time we'd see a vehicle or someone coming. That's because we never had visitors, and we were all shy, I guess. We didn't want to.... It was just strangers-we didn't see strangers. And after a while, the person comes in, and then you start peekin' around the side to see who it is. Sometimes if it's a relative, then my mother would call us in and introduce us. We just were very quiet. I guess that's why a lot of the Navajo people are very quiet, because they just kind of... You know, we were in remote areas. Most of the time that I remember, it was just like camping out. We'd go take our provisions and the few necessities-our bedding, some dishes and stuff. We'd take that along, and wherever we settled, it was usually-we'd pick a place, my mother picks an area maybe under a tree, and that's where we'll stay for a few days-I don't know, maybe a month or so-and then move on to another area. We didn't have permanent homes in those areas, except for the winter home. Cole: Did your mother weave, too? Burnham: Yeah, she did. The kids learned at a young
age to help her prepare wool. We learned how to shear when we were
young, learned how to clean, card wool, and spin. And then she did
the weaving.�I think my mother just-to her it was peaceful when she
was weaving, because whenever she went to weaving, she'd always tell us
not to bother her or talk to her. It was just that kind of a peace
with the rug. We just stayed away from her, and every once in a
while she'd say, "Now I'm going to teach you how to weave, how to do this."
And we'd just watch her. She didn't really say, "Now, do it like
this." We would watch her do her warping, or start weaving.�And
she did most of her weaving just for trading with other people.
She would do her weaving, save it up, and take it to the Gallup Ceremonial
or to the Window Rock Fair. At the time, the Flagstaff Powwow was
really big. That's where she would save all her weavings to trade
with the other people-the Zunis and Santa Domingos. She loved
jewelry, so she would trade for things that she liked. *** Jim Babbitt: I remember driving up on Highway 89, a day or two before the Powwow, up towards Cameron, and of course in those days it was just a two--lane highway, and seeing this almost unbroken stream of the old green wagons--by then with rubber tires instead of wood-spoked wheels--but just this unbroken stream of horse-drawn green wagons coming down that highway to Flagstaff. Of course for Flagstaff, the great encampment, what we called City Park--today it's Thorpe Park. But [during the Powwow] they would just have this huge encampment in the forest up behind City Park. It got to be overwhelming for the city--lack of basic kind of sanitation and so forth eventually forced the Powwow to have to shut down. But it was a wonderful event. Every day around the Fourth of July
there would be a big parade all through the downtown that would go on
for hours, with again, wagons and horse-mounted Navajos and so forth,
and tribal bands from Gallup and Window Rock and all over the place.
Then in the evenings, in the old arena there at Thorpe Park, they would
have the ceremonial dances and light big bonfires and have all kinds of
dances--Apache dances, and Navajo dances--just a lot of different tribes.
Even tribes from Mexico and Central and South America would come.
It was really a wonderful event. *** The Lee�s- Jack, Evelyn, Snick: Snick: Babbitts' was a wholesale company that sold to the trading posts, and they were like an automobile franchise with Studebaker wagons. And then we would order the wagons from them, and the Navajos would save up, and when their wagon came in, I remember them coming in and you'd put the new wagon together. Jack: The whole community would. All the Indians around would all help put up the wagon. They could put a danged new wagon together in two hours. Snick: They'd bring their best team in. Jack: Yeah, a fancy team, and they'd drag that new wagon....
But they'd deal for two or three months, and they'd finally make a deal.
They'd come in with all their clean fancy duds on, and a big celebration
with that new wagon. That's like buyin' a new car! (chuckles)
Worked together, get that darned thing--they were green and red.�they'd
put 'em together. They knew how. They wanted to, they liked
to do that. Even to this day, a lot of those families will buy a
brand new car or pickup, and they'll take it home and lay out a great
big tarp and they'll tear it out, piece by piece, and put it back together.
Then they know what's wrong if something goes haywire, and where it comes
from. *** Edith Nichols Kennedy: Well, most [Navajos] lived in their hogans-they didn't have very many houses. Many of them lived in just one big hogan/room, and they would all pile down on the floor on their Pendleton shawls or robes and sleep. But they kept warm because they had a stove, usually, right in the middle of the hogan, and wood. They didn't have many possessions, so they weren't really crowded. And what they did have, they would hang up on the side of the hogan on the wall on pegs or nails or something. They had to haul all of their water, of course, which a lot of them still have to haul water. They had Coleman lights. We sold an awful lot of Coleman fuel, and mantles for them. They made bright lights. Or they had lanterns with kerosene. They were very scarce possessions that they had, just their cooking utensils, and they slept on the floor, and their blankets that they covered up with. And they also wore their Pendleton shawls or robes for coats, too. But as you'd go into those hogans, they were neat inside, because they didn't have a lot of trash in them at all-they kept them neat, the ones that I was in always, they were very neat. �. They came from up on the mountain, way up the foot of that mountain,
probably, from Cove, oh, probably twenty, twenty-five miles. And
we had a hogan out by our trading post�. They'd come and spend the
night. It was too far, it'd be late-in the winter, especially-and
we had a stove in it, and they would stay all night in that hogan.
They'd just bed down out there, and bring feed for their horses, and spend
the night. Of course when they'd come to the trading post, that
was their social event, too. In the bull pen they would meet and
talk and laugh and have a good time. That was when they would come
to the store to buy groceries, also to socialize. *** Virginia Burnham: My mother made us get up early, before the sun was up, every morning, to start our chores. And then we went to bed with the sun. When the sun went down, we had to be ready for bed. We always had early evening dinners, and then lots of times we would sit around and tell stories, or tell of the day's events. Then the funnest time I think we had was when my grandmother used to come over. Another one of my grandmother's brothers-we call him Shichei-he used to come over and tell us stories of the Navajo legends. You know, the coyotes, and about the lizards-just lots of stories. That was like watching TV, I guess. (chuckles) We used to want to hear those stories over and over. We really enjoyed the stories in the evenings. Cole: Was he a good storyteller then? Burnham: Oh, my grandmother was a good storyteller, and
so was my grandfather. Adakai Begay [phonetic spelling] was his
name. He was an old medicine man, and he told really good stories.
I never recorded any of those. My stepfather, later, when he started
staying around a little bit, I would hear stories. He would sit
down and try to tell us stories, but he didn't have.... You know,
he would leave some of it out, and we always reminded him, "No, it's like
this! That's not the way it is!" But my grandfather's gone
now, and he was the best storyteller, and so was my grandmother.
I wish I'd have known to record some of their stories. *** Jay Foutz: Well, [around 1954] it was just strictly a trading--there was no money of any kind. I mean, it was strictly trade. We got paid twice a year: in the spring was wool and mohair, and in the fall was lambs and cattle. And that was it, that's the only two times you ever handled any money. The rest of the time it was all just the barter system. They'd bring a basket in or a rug in or whatever. And if they needed something, they pawned a little something for it. You never saw any money. I mean, you might operate for a whole month and handle thirty dollars, you know--which was a lot of money in those days� And then later, when they started hiring a few of the Indians to work on the railroad, why, then that's when a little money became available. That's when a little money started circulating, because they'd go off to work on the railroad in the summertime, and then they'd come back home in the wintertime. And then they'd sign railroad unemployments, which at that time was fifteen dollars every two weeks. We were the post office and everything there. We had to pick the
mail up in Shiprock and haul it ourselves and everything. And I
was a railroad representative that took the claims and everything and
mailed 'em in and all. And really, that was the beginning of any
cash flow of any kind in this part of the country, anyway. There
might have been cash flow other places, but that was the only cash flow
we had. *** Hank Blair: [Red Mesa] was a bull pen store, old bull pen store�.Everything was on credit, there was no cash money.... Even us, I remember going to Farmington, to the Farmington Mercantile, which was the wholesale house where we got everything. I remember my dad, we wanted to go out and eat, my dad would go down to the wholesale house and draw ten dollars on their account, cash, so we could go eat. I remember somebody comin' in when I was a kid, probably came home from
working on the railroad or somethin', with a twenty-dollar bill and bought
like a bottle of pop or something, and my dad and mom were emptying all
the piggy banks and everything, trying to get change for a twenty-dollar
bill. Especially early on, it wasn't a cash business--it was all
on the tab. That's the way it was. *** Joe Tanner: At that point in time, I had finished my sophomore year of high school�.I wanted to really learn the whole story of trading, and Jewel McGee had worked for my father at the very beginning of his career at one point in time, and so Jewel agreed to bring me out to Red Rock. And Troy Kennedy was just, at that point, kind of Jewel's apprentice trader�. I was just spellbound by Jewel McGee. Jewel McGee was, in my opinion, and still is, just the perfect Navajo Indian trader. And a great trader is like a great banker in a community. If he's successful, not only is he successful, but all the people he touches are equally successful. And of all the trading characters that I've ever met, Jewel McGee was and is the fairest, most straight-shootin' trader that I've ever met. He helped upgrade the livestock business. So I worked for Jewel along with Troy. I kept telling Jewel, "Jewel, I need a trading post. I want to get in the business." "Well, you're doin' just fine." See, I'm the ripe old age of seventeen here. (laughter) I'd been there for about a year, and Jewel's brother, Melvin McGee, had
Tocito Trading Post. Tocito, they had the trading post, and then
the brothers Roscoe and Melvin and Jewel had a whole series of trading
posts over on that side. Well, Melvin was working at their cattle
ranch. They had a collective cattle ranch where they'd buy the stock.
Melvin was haulin' a load of water, but got run over by the truck and
killed. And a few days after the funeral, Jewel came out to Red
Rock. I was cookin' breakfast--I never will forget. He came
in and he threw a set of store keys on the table and he said, "Well, kid,
I bought you a tradin' post." (laughter) I went out to Tocito.
*** Elijah Blair: Everything that happened in this community, say, of a radius of twenty miles or so, this was the hub. It all came into the trading post, and everybody met there, things were done. And you dealt, whether or not she had a rug to sell or to barter with, or they had an account already established with the trader previous to you. They would bring in their rugs to pay the account. Or they would sell a cow. You would be in there, and someone would say, "Well, Sam Begay has got a cow out here." So you go out to the corral and you would weigh or buy or look at the cow, and then you would go in and he would take out pawn pay on his account, etc. This happened over and over.... If it was in wool season when they were shearing the sheep, then they would bring the wool in. Or lamb season, they would bring lambs in. Or if they ran out of food, they would bring lamb in to trade for merchandise... they would need flour and things they didn't have, like lard, baking powder, sugar, salt, stuff like this... And any products that they produced, whether it was farm products, livestock they raised, piñon nuts that they [gathered] if there was a piñon crop that year, rugs, saddle blankets, anything that they had... we furnished a market for it. It didn't matter... They met friends there, they made arrangements to have ceremonies or stuff like that. They would lots of time find the medicine man there. So they would hire him. This was the hub... And this was basically what we did, and we was there
to take care of anything that they wanted, or if we didn't have it, we
could get it. *** Ed Foutz:
So the trading era, back in the forties and fifties, was starting to
change--the change being that� people wanted cash, because they were maybe
going to outside markets and had different demands for that cash than
they'd ever had before. ***
Edith Kennedy: We stayed open most of the time 'til six o'clock every day. But
when the uranium started, we'd close for a little while and open back
up. We stayed open lots of times until nine o'clock, because they
didn't get out of the uranium mines 'til late. And Jewel and Troy
would have to cash their checks. They'd bring their checks in for
us to cash. It was big business, that uranium, when it was going
on-vanadium trucks were coming out and hauling it into Shiprock to
the smelter there. And Kerr McGee had this big smelter at Shiprock-or
whatever they call that, where they took the uranium and vanadium, separate
it, ship it out. We would stay open during those years until late
at night. And then a lot of times when we were buying lambs in the
fall, we stayed open, because they always liked to get the lambs real
full (laughter) to bring 'em in, so that they would weigh more.
And so we would be late in the afternoon and evening, buying 'em, and
we'd be open until maybe seven or eight o'clock, 'cause it was still sunlight,
and light, you know in the fall. But we'd usually buy 'em.� We didn't
buy very many early in the morning, 'cause they weren't full enough�.
(laughs) Let them eat all day, and drink water just before they
came in. *** Jay Foutz: And then after a while, they raised the unemployment benefits from fifteen
to thirty dollars every two weeks, which was exceptionally good at that
time. And then later they raised it to.... Well, the last
year or so that we signed for railroad unemployment benefits, I think
the checks were $120 every two weeks. But basically that was all
the cash flow there was until the uranium started, you know. And
then the uranium industry hired a good many of 'em, and they paid 'em
every two weeks, which.... Well, that was quite nice, you might
say. We were rollin' in dough, you might say. (laughter)
I mean, really, because �.it'd been such a trade and barter system so
long that it was good to start really handling a few checks and handling
a little money. *** Ed Foutz: I wasn't really working for Teec Nos Pos as much as I worked with Russell.
And I really stayed with Russell and Helen in Farmington. And Russell,
back in that era, did not spend much time at the stores. He'd go
out for a day and then come back in. The roads were still dirt,
and I can remember in trucking out to Teec Nos Pos, that several of those
washes would be washing at that time. And of course they were hauling
a lot of uranium out of Monument Valley, and so we had convoys of uranium
trucks. But a lot of the times when the washes would be running,
they would run so high that even the uranium trucks, the big diesels,
couldn't even go through 'em. And we would sit there on one side
of the wash, if we were going out, and we had commodities on the truck,
so I'd pull out some sweet rolls, and they'd have a coffee pot, and we'd
make some coffee, or we'd have some pop, and we'd sit there until the
water would go down. And then they would hook onto my truck, because
it was a deuce-and-a-half, it was still small enough that the water would
go through the running boards and out through the engine, and they'd pull
me across with a winch. They could get through, and then they would
pull me through. But at that time, it would still take a long time
to get out to some of those roads. They could be in pretty bad shape
real fast because of the weather.
***
Hank Blair: In the fifties, the first thing that came along was the uranium. There was a uranium boom on the reservation. It seemed like everybody, all of a sudden you were seein' strangers at the store, and everybody had a geiger counter and they were gonna get rich. (laughter) I'm serious! Everybody was gonna get rich. And Navajos were out there. I remember one guy that worked for us found a petrified log that was like pure uranium, but that was it. But everybody had a geiger counter. And so, boy, I was just a little kid, and this was exciting, because all of a sudden you saw people at the store, rather than the same customers. Then they had the oil field boom. Red Mesa was just below Aneth, Utah. Red Mesa Trading Post was only about 200 yards from the Utah state line. Whenever the surveyors would come out, they'd pay me fifty cents or a quarter or something like that, and I'd go show 'em where the stake was, where the section marker was. But the oil boom came, and we didn't have electricity. And we sold
gas, and we had one of those old pumps that you fill up. You pump
it by hand, and it fills up that glass thing. Well, if you were
fillin' up like one car a week, givin' 'em five dollars' worth of gas,
that was big business. But then they had these Haliburton oil trucks
come, and they had 150-gallon tanks, and you're goin' (pantomimes pumping
gas) to fill that glass thing up. It probably held twenty gallons.
So my dad bought a World War II surplus generator, and then we had one
light bulb hangin' in the kitchen. At first we only turned it on
at night, or when somebody needed some gas pumped--we turned the generator
on. That really changed the whole.... I mean, like I said,
there were no roads, and then all of a sudden they were just bulldozin'
roads everywhere for this oil deal. And that was cash business,
people comin' in there. And the thing was, you were doin' it all
behind the counter. It's not like a convenience store where you
just check everybody out. That was a lot of work. And I remember
my parents. They were so eager for the business, people would come
by in the middle of the night and want gas--they had a buzzer, people
would get up. So it changed the whole complexion of the business.
***
Mildred Heflin:
….And then when uranium mining came in, they employed some of the Navajos to mine the uranium, which was very dangerous, people found out later, and a lot of the Indians got very ill and died. They've closed up all those mines now, although I understand that the pits are still there. I mean, you could go and fall into it and get lost forever, I suppose. Cole: Was that in the 1940s they were doing that, or the fifties? Heflin: Probably 1950, when they were doing all that--yeah, about 1950. Cole: What happened, do you recall when World War II broke out? Heflin: A lot of the Navajos from our area went out to work on the railroads. There were very few people who spoke English well enough in the area we lived in, to be drafted into the Army, but they were taken out to work on the railroad. My husband used to take 'em out and put 'em on.... Let's see, he took 'em to Flagstaff and put 'em on the train there, and then they'd send 'em to various places in the U.S. to work on the railroad. They got a lot of education, they learned a lot, because a lot of those people had never been off the reservation, you see. So that was a real experience for them. It was good. Cole: Did that create change in the trading post? Heflin: Yes, it did, to some extent. They came back and they wanted different commodities. Some of the foodstuffs were different. And I guess.... I was trying to think about what time they began to buy cars. My goodness! I guess after we moved over to--probably about 19 ... 57 or 1960, somewhere in there, they began to buy cars…. Up until then, it was all horse and wagon--pack horse and wagon and foot, uh-huh.
*** Stella McGee Tanner:
Well, the boys always wanted to have a trading post, all of 'em together--my sons. J. B. had went in town and he decided that he'd like to have one at Gamerco. That's just out of Gallup. And so he and Don talked it over, and then after Chunk died, we still owned one house there in Cortez. They made us sell that, and that's how we got started at Gamerco� We called it Navajo Shopping Center. Then Chunk's oldest brother came in and helped, loaned us some money to get that goin'. And that was a big business�. The Indians would just help themselves, and then take it up to the counters and pay for it. Where out on the reservation, way back there, why, you just had to set in the bull pen and point to stuff that you wanted.
***
JB Tanner:
[Before Navajo Shopping Center, just after a partnership went sour at Ganado] I had twenty dollars in my pocket. I loaded Lorraine and the kids up. Sherry, she was born while we was there at Ganado, so she was just a baby�. We got in and we got a room at the motel, had breakfast the next morning.� I had a dollar eighty-five left. That paid the motel and breakfast and supper that night. The next morning I got up. I had paid Pete Videll the first and last month on the lease, $600, and I drawed it out of Keam. So I don't know whether you know where Gross Kelly's used to be, the wholesale house. It was there on the one-way street goin' out old triple six [Highway 666].... Well, I met my brother Jerry, and he had a store at Kayenta. He was killed later in a plane crash... D. B. Clark had had the flyin' service in Gallup... But he [Jerry] said, "C'mon, let's go have some coffee." It was right on the tracks. And I said, "Go on down to Fairmont, and I'll turn around and come on down." And he went down, and I told him what I was up against. I said, "Whatever you can come up with will help." He said, "Well, I can write you a check for $2,500. I know it ain't much, but," as he put it, "it'll give you walkin'-around money while you're puttin' the bigger money together." I said, "But you don't know how I appreciate that, 'cause I just got $1.85 left." So I got Frontier Airlines in there in Gallup, and there's a plane over--I think it left at 10:30--and one from Denver would pick you up in Farmington, take you back to Gallup, around 2:00 or 3:00, whatever it was. Well, this check he give me was on Farmington Bank, and I wasn't established with anybody in there, and just goin' through that involuntary bankruptcy, I couldn't afford to take a chance on them cashin' it. So I flew over there and came over here and cashed it and then went back. That night I went out and seen a guy by the name of Bernie Vanderwagen [phonetic spelling]. I knew he was one of the biggest sheep buyers at that time--him and Tobe Turpen. But Tobe was sick, or I'd have went to him. But he was sick and down in Tucson--pneumonia or something... I went out and seen Bernie, and I told him, "We can start buyin' ewes and lambs..." this was the first of August... "Bernie, just buy any damned thing they bring in, no matter what it is, at a price that we can both make some money on. You let me make some money, and I'll let you make some money." So he said, "Well, we can talk about this later," but he wrote a check out for $5,000, and he said, "This'll get you started." He didn't have any idea whether it'd be.... I told him, "You'd better damned sure come to town in the morning by noon, because this won't last very long." But he give me the five, and I had that $2,500. I let Don take $2,000 of it, I think, if I remember right, and go down to Buvany [phonetic spelling] Lumber Company, buy lumber to start making shelving and make a supermarket-type in this quonset building. And then we built steps up to the scales, over in the livestock building in the back, and put a vault on each side--one for the bookkeepers on one side, and pawn on the other--and then put these homemade shelving deals. Don done a hell of a good job on that He checked California supermarkets and.... . He really done a good job. I think it was about September 10, Bernie had everything covered.
He had a lot of grazing land out towards Zuni, Whitewater and in there.
�Finally, he got some lamb buyers and we started to rotatin'. He'd
sell some. We managed to get some cash flow comin' back just before
they buried it. And this D. B. Clark that I mentioned... Jerry--(they
went into the side of the mountain out there and killed both of 'em...)
But D. B. Clark loaned me quite a bit of money later in September.
And Fred Cavigia [phonetic spelling] that owned the Pepsi-Cola plant was
a financier. And Uncle Don, Colin's [phonetic spelling] dad, he--I called
him, and he come over--I told him, "I need to stock these shelves that
Don's gonna build here." He always had a habit of rubbin' his forehead.
You just had to let him go through his procedure... He always liked
to lay down on the couch when you were tellin' him a deal. So I
knew that, so I had a couch on the left. I said, "Come on over here,
Uncle Don. I've showed you everything. Here, lay down on this
couch." He said, "Well, it's gonna take quite a bit to stock this.
This is a big store." I said, "Well, it'll take $30,000, at least."
That was a lot of merchandise back then. And he said, "I haven't
got that much loose money. And it's wheat time, I'm buyin' all this
wheat from the farmers, and I'm committed on it." I said, "Well,
Henry Polacca believes in me. But due to that bankruptcy, he can't
jump in..." Kind of had me between a rock and a hard place.
I said, "The reason I got you over here is to guarantee him. You
don't have to come up with any money, you can just guarantee me."
He said, "Well, I'll just go tell Henry to give you the [advance].
It'd be $40,000. As I bring the flour to him, he don't pay me, he
just credits. I'll pay him off with flour," because he furnished
all the trading posts, see. Well, that stocked it. Within
six weeks.... (laughs) This is the fifteenth of September.
Within six weeks, with $1.85, Don and I had that thing stocked and ready
to go. *** Joe Tanner:
I brought my money to Navajo Shopping Center, and my brother J. B.'s idea was to create, for the first time, a marketplace for the Navajo, and any other tribe that might want to come--a place where you could sell anything that you produced, for cash. And then on the other hand, we'd put the other hat on and try to sell them anything that they bought, for cash. And this was one of the most successful, the biggest operation of its kind that had ever been done. We started that thing out on a wing and a prayer, but everybody--my mom and dad, all my brothers, myself, my Uncle Don that had the flour mill--put money into it. We split the pie. J. B. was the largest stockholder. My brother Don and my mom and dad were the next-largest, and then I owned 10 percent of it. We started this place out, buying lambs, steers, rugs, pinons--but everything they produced, we tried to create a market for, and find a willing buyer. And so it was a brokering thing, to keep up with it. Took a lot of money, but this thing took off just like a house afire. We did so much business so quick, made so much money so fast.... Like in the grocery department of it, we would butcher our own sheep, right there at the facility. There wasn't any government laws then. And this old sales barn had a big corral, like most sale barns do. And we'd buy these butcher ewes, and then like on a Saturday--just to give you an idea of the volume of this place--we would bring thirty head of sheep down at a time, into a little corral just outside the.... Here's the meat case in the store. The back door was this corral where these sheep were. I struck a deal with the Navajo ladies that would come and butcher. They got to keep the insides and the head. I'd bring the mutton in and I had days there that when I was runnin' the meat department when we first started, where I would cut and wrap and sell a hundred head of sheep on one busy Saturday--with no help.
***
Paul D. Merrill:
I heard that the trading post at Fort Wingate was for sale.... So I got a thirty-day leave of absence and went to Fort Wingate, and with Dick White and I together, we finally came together on a purchase price of the Fort Wingate Trading Post. I went to the First State Bank in Gallup and borrowed the money to buy it and made a deal, and then went back to California and resigned my commission and left the Marines and went to Fort Wingate and took over the trading post January 1, 1946. In doing so, I became postmaster-that went along with it. That was the first time I'd ever run a trading post and the first time I had ever been postmaster, and the first time I'd ever been in the trading post to know any of the customers. So I had a lot to take on right quick there, after I got out.
So I did a little of everything during this forty-six years, including buying jewelry and rugs and sheep and cows, and trading sheep for cows and jewelry for rugs, and rugs for jewelry-a little of everything.
***
Clarence Wheeler:
....And then, too, you gotta stay up with the times. You gotta change. You can't simply stay the way you are. Like I was, "Hey, I ain't gonna change the bull pen." "Ha! It's too late, we've already got the counters out!" So, you know, it's with the times. The cars is come, the transportation's come, these modern facilities in town brings 'em to town. And we had that, too, we still had competition. We started sales. That was never heard of on the reservation, to cut a price: eight cans of pop for a dollar. You know. Those is things that you had to do. (sigh) I just don't see that.... I think a guy could do it if he had the backing.... My laundromat, I started to put a laundromat, and I was financially unable to finish it. It would have saved my bacon. A car wash would have saved my bacon. See, it's all changed into services. The other thing that I would have liked to done very much was put these Kentucky Fried Chickens, or the McDonald's, or what have you. Would have been a great deal. Some of 'em, that one at Chinle was the top chicken seller around in this country here for quite an area. Now, that's taking in pretty big for Albuquerque and everywhere--and down to Farmington, it outdone it. They said it was the top store, so that thing, tourist business was good. Mr. Goulding come to Greasewood and got up on the counter. That was the thing to do, is your competitor friend would come and set and shoot the bull. He got up on the counter and he said, "Wheeler, I know your uncle, but Wheeler, you're makin' a mistake. You need to start these tours. There's money in it. I have it at Monument Valley." And I said, "Mr. Goulding...." Harry Goulding was his name. He said, "I'll go to Phoenix with you. Walter Bimson is the head of the Valley National Bank and I can get you the financing, put you in a deal here. I'll go and I'll assist you and I'll back you as the wisdom to it." And I said, "Harry, I'm not interested in taking tourists and touring and doing stuff like this." I lost a gold mine. I let a gold mine go away, it was right in front of my nose. But I wanted to be like my uncle. We seen the book over here with, what was it, eight stores? I wanted to be king of the reservation, I wanted to have eight stores--the most trading posts on the reservation. That was what I wanted to be. And that was poor vision. If I had listened to old Harry, I'd have had her made. (sigh) That's my idea. .... I don't have a $10 million pawn deal, and $10 million worth of Navajo rugs, or one of the best collections, 'cause I had to sell 'em. I do have a watch, and my wife has a little bit of jewelry, but we had to sell it to make a living. But like I say, it was the best times of our life was when we were with the Indian trading business.
***
Bill Beaver:
….I always thought I liked the little stores, but I left Shonto because a friend of mine in New Mexico got a deal over there on surplus commodities and welfare and stuff. The state started taking over from the feds, and he wanted me to come back to New Mexico and work for him, and I told him I really didn't want to. So he said, "Well, I'm on my way to Phoenix. Maybe we can get Arizona to pick you up." I said, "This I could live with." So originally we were supposed to set up in Keams Canyon; I quit Shonto, moved to Keams Canyon; they weren't there; and then a phone call said, "Move to Phoenix." I spent five years in Phoenix, with my territory up here on the reservation. So I got lots of per diem, driving back and forth. Some days my per diem checks were bigger than my paychecks. But the beauty part of that was I got to hit every trading post or supervisor's office on the Arizona part of the reservation, and went into New Mexico because a lot of times we'd have to stay in Gallup to catch 'em on that border between the two states; or we'd stay at Shiprock to catch that Four Corners area. So while I wasn't working there, I would get to know a lot of that border area. And of course I knew something about the Chaco area. Cole: You were working for the State? Beaver: Yeah, State of Arizona. That came under the Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Act, which was ninety-eight cents on the dollar was federal funds. And it was a real good deal, and I heard a lot of people gripe about it. I said, "Look, Arizona puts up two pennies, and somebody else puts up the ninety-eight pennies, and the whole dollar is spent here in Arizona. You can't beat that, unless you got a stick in your hand!" (laughter) So why are they bitchin'? And that included the administrative costs: my salary, the gasoline, and all of this, because we were driving State vehicles. This was beautiful. We just had aid to dependent children, old age, and blind. Child welfare and all that kind of stuff, BIA still had. I remember at Shiprock, there was a guy up there--doesn't matter what his name is--and he was the government worker. We drove out through the Sweetwater area. We had to go through the Four Corners to get to Arizona. His interpreter wasn't workin' that day, so the two of us went and we got down there. This old man came up, and we were sittin' in the vehicle, and he talked to me, and I listened to him, I asked him a few questions, and then I turned to this--oh, Everett, Everett was his first name--I said, "This is one of your cases, probably general assistance." So he said, "Well, what's the guy's name?" And I said, "He said it was in the book." (laughter) That was all. You asked him, "Oh, it's in the book." The guy said, "Open the book up, find their case numbers and stuff." So I was surprised. "Everett, how long have you been out here?" "Fifteen years." "And you still don't know how to ask the man his name?" "No." "Okay, I'll interpret for you. And that just shows you, you have faith, 'cause I could tell you anything." (laughter) Always remember that when you're working with an interpreter--they can make or break you…. Well, politics always changes everything in this state, so BIA said, "We want you at Fort Defiance." And I hated living in Phoenix, so I said, "All right, I'm your boy." I checked into Gallup and they said, "No, there's been a change. You gotta go to Crownpoint, New Mexico." So I went to Crownpoint, New Mexico, and that was my introduction to what they call the checkerboard area. Are you familiar with the checkerboard? Cole: Uh-huh. Beaver: Okay. It was so messed up over there, because there was state land, federal land, which would be, say, Indian Service land, and then Bureau of Land Management. And there were some sections that were Santa Fe Railroad. And the jurisdiction thing was enough to send you up a tree. If you found a dead body out there, you had to bring in a surveyor to find out what cop you called. (laughter) "Well, his head's here, and his feet...." (laughter) I think the most fun was tracking down--they have what they called the individual Indian money accounts. This was when the leases were getting real hot and heavy out in there--coal, uranium, and stuff--and these companies would want to lease ground, and BIA would say, "Well, let's see, we've got an allotment in there," or "we've got a block of allotments, and the money will have to go to the heirs." Well, the ridiculous thing is, because it was federal, we had to go bilateral. We had to go down through the father's side and the mother's side. And the Navajo always figured on the mother's side, and we were havin' all sorts of problems there, because you'd say, "Well, we got these kids, and we go to auntie and their orphans." "Well, their mother was my sister, blah, blah, blah." "Well, who's the father?" "He was from somewhere over that way, up toward Shiprock. And after she died, he moved somewhere else." And they don't keep track of that side of the family. And then we had some cases where BIA had not probated the estates, going back into the twenties. Now, we had to pick up a trail in the twenties and try and sort it out. It got real devastating. I wasn't involved in the money, per se--I was just trying to find out who was who, because a lot of Navajos were living on allotted ground that wasn't theirs--they lived on somebody else's. And that family was many, many miles over the other way, living on somebody else's allotment. But they could care less. In the earlier days, they just, "Well, we've been movin' around all this time." So we ended up with many allotments that were totally fractured. We had quite a lot of descendants, and they were getting like one-fortieth of the proceeds. And then I had three girls who were orphans, and tracing out on their father's side, there was a lot of allotments going from their father into the grandfather. Same thing on the mother's side. And those gals were gettin' about--they were drawing off of several allotments, and each girl was getting around $35,000-$40,000 a year, and they're just schoolkids. So what the sup. over there was doing was putting the money into government bonds and holding for them. And they were in boarding school since they were orphans, so we'd cut checks off for like clothing allotments and things like that. I never did see 'em, but that was very interesting how they ended up with a piece of pie. Seemed like every allotment that there was, some shirttail relative had oil on it. (laughs) And these other guys, ____ bring in a duster. So I found that pretty neat, but I found workin' for the government impossible. Cole: How did that work when it came to leasing? Would the people having the allotment have any say as to whether they were going to allow 'em to drill for oil or not? Or was that a federal decision? Beaver: I never knew how the releases were negotiated--probably through a multitude of lawyers. You can be sure of that. (laughs) The oil company's lawyers, the government lawyers, the tribal lawyers. Somewhere in there, the people are supposed to get the benefit. Just how they determine how much money was coming in, I always wondered about, too. I never saw anybody out there checking to see how much oil those clowns were pumpin'--how many thousand barrels. "Oh, we'll pay you on these last ten." I mean, I'm not saying it happened, but I never saw anybody go making checks on that.
***
Joe Danoff:
When I went up to Ganado, I went up to run a business. I didn't know what kind of business we were gonna have, or what we were gonna do, but it was such a diversified store--I mean, you had everything. I got the idea that we ought to open it up as much as possible, because I got tired of runnin' around the counters all the time and grabbing things. So me and Camille Garcia from Chinle, I think he and I were the only ones that finally opened up especially our grocery side of the stores. We put gondolas in, and we had our groceries and made it sort of a self-service deal. Everybody kind of thought, "Boy, these guys are gonna have troubles…." But it really worked out pretty good. I put in a frozen food case, and I had all these things out, sort of like a regular grocery store had. Our dry goods, of course, was still behind the counter, and some of our smaller items. But I tried to modernize as much as I could. And of course our clientele, we depended on state welfare, ADC, there was some government, that is, tribal checks that came in, subsistence checks, and Social Security started coming onto the reservation pretty good. We had people come out there at least once a month to interview for Social Security. And all these things was part of our business, and I encouraged it, because that was all we had. The other part was that we gave credit to those people who had something to pay for it with. And usually it was either the ADC check, or the subsistence they got from the Navajo Tribe, or their Social Security. Most of those checks would come to our store. In fact, I would say 95 percent of 'em did. So we sort of had control of the credit. It was difficult to keep 'em within the limits of the checks, and very seldom ever did. Sooner or later, the trader was gonna lose on that account. We knew it, I knew it, they all knew it. We had trouble in people transferring. They could go and they could change the address on their check to another trading post or anyplace they wanted, and you're sittin' there givin' 'em credit, and you don't know it until the checks come in. And so you're usually out for that. So it was kind of a risky business. I didn't get much into the artifacts. I bought rugs. The only jewelry I ever worked with was pawn. We did take pawn, and even that I kept to a minimum, because I used to go out to these trading posts, and my God, they had fortunes in their vaults of pawn that they've held for years and years. Well, the old traders did that, they held that pawn forever. And I was too much of a business person to say, "Hey, this is not makin' me any money." So I wanted that pawn to turn over, and I would push that pretty hard. And when it came due and they didn't redeem it, it went out in the showcase and I sold it. I didn't keep any artifacts. We had a few rugs, but they were all stolen here about ten years ago, in this house. We were robbed, but I wasn't much on the artifacts, and I wasn't much on carrying items for tourists. It was strictly a business with the Navajos, that's all we did. They were good people to deal with. I'd have trouble with some of 'em, but most of 'em were good. They could wear you down with stories and excuses and they'd always have a new one. You'd think you knew 'em all, but they'd come up with a new one. You know, it was sort of a game. In fact, I had a lady…. used to come in the store and it was a game with her to see if she could steal or if I would catch her--and she did. Sometimes she'd get away with it, and sometimes I'd catch her, but it was sort of a game, you know. She didn't feel bad about getting caught, it was just one of those things. So these things went on, and it was very interesting. It was an interesting business. You dealt with all these people and you got to know 'em personally, and you wanted to help 'em.
***
Peterson Zah:
I think one of your questions was how DNA got started�.one day I was here [at ASU], and a lawyer gave me a call. He was just a young lawyer that came out of Harvard Law School, and his name was Theodore Mitchell�.And he says he just got hired by Peter MacDonald, and Peter MacDonald was the director of the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity. And the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity had a community development program, they had a child development program which turned into preschool, Head Start. It had a construction program to build modern homes. It had all of these components, and one of them was legal services. And so Ted Mitchell was the person that got hired under what they called ONEO. And Ted Mitchell then went and hired a guy named Leo Haven. And Leo Haven used to be the head of community development. He just switched over to help out Ted Mitchell, because he knew all the people around the reservation. And so Ted Mitchell and Leo Haven came down to Phoenix, and they wanted to talk to me. So I came to work one morning, and they were sitting in my office here. They said, "We are going to start a legal aid program, and we would like to talk to you about coming back to the Navajo. What in the world are you doing 300 miles away from the Navajo?! You should be back with your own people." And so they really laid the line on me--especially Leo. He was describing how he used to be in Riverside, California. He said, "I was in Riverside, California. I had a nice house, I had a family, and I decided What in the world am I doing in Riverside, California, so many miles away from the Navajo?! So I returned. Now I'm feeling very good about myself and about the people, and all of that. I'm really enjoying my life. I know you'll be the same," and so on and so forth. And so I told him I would sleep on it, I would decide later. So
my wife and I talked about it, and we decided to go back. We decided
to go back, and so we went back. So I was the third one that got
hired by the program. The way Ted Mitchell put it, he said, "I want
Leo to be involved in the community, working with the chapter people,
agency people, and the tribal council. With you, I want you to hire
tribal court advocates. In our budget there are positions for thirty-four
tribal court advocates, so I will need to hire thirty-four people that
can practice law in tribal courts. We also need to train them.
Maybe we need to work with the law school here at ASU and have them train
our tribal court advocates. We'll also need to go to every school
on the reservation, and see if we can recruit some young Navajos from
those schools. And then I want you to work with the tribal judges
and maybe we could do a better job of representing the Navajo people who
appear in court, many of them without counsel. And the tribal judges
are wearing three hats: one of them is the prosecutor, one of them
is counseling the defendants, and then they're judging at the same time.
We need to talk to the tribal judges, they shouldn't be doing that.
We'll be a defense program. We'll have Navajo defendants come to
DNA. The tribal government can take on the prosecution, and that
will leave the judges to judge those cases. So that would be your
work." That's what Ted said. We tried hiring the experienced lawyers--it didn't go very well, because the experienced lawyers were already into their work, and they had families. It was pretty hard to move somebody that has a house in Phoenix, for example, to move up to Window Rock. We didn't have houses to begin with anyway. So we decided to go after the young ones at law school. And we got some pretty darned good lawyers out of those law schools. But the key was interviewing them while they're in the second year and third year, and you choose them. Out of the forty or fifty lawyers that I kept a portfolio on, we would invite, let's say, twenty of them to come to the Navajo [Nation] for further extensive interview by the staff. And we would drive them around the reservation. If I really wanted a lawyer to come to DNA, I would take them to Grand Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, Monument Valley. Nine times out of ten they would say, "Yes! I'm coming." So I used it. (laughs) I used those areas to entice them to come, because we weren't paying that much. My pitch to them was that, "If you're interested in money, don't think about money now. Do something worthwhile in your life. We've got cultural things that are so rich we could offer you. On the weekends you can go drive out to Grand Canyon. These are beautiful places, these are beautiful people, and we really want you to come and make a commitment to DNA for two years. Then after two years, you can go back to Illinois or New York, Wall Street, you can start making money. But you'll always remember DNA, and you'll always remember what you did immediately after law school." Well, my job was to set all of that up, and be able to maintain all of that. At some point, Ted Mitchell just turned to me and said, "Mr. Zah, you handle the young lawyers. You interview them every spring. You take one month to go comb this whole country. You need to keep on top of all of that." And so that's what I did. And talking to all those young lawyers, that was my pitch to them. My pitch to them was that, "You're never ever going to experience any other things as exciting as DNA. Yes, we don't have any money, we can't pay you much. But we have a Tribal Court system here that we're trying to develop. There is a Navajo sense of justice. We do have our own views about what we mean by due process of law, which may be different than the Anglos' concept of due process of law. And your job is to weigh those when you're handling these cases." But, as we talked more and more about cases, I was telling the young
lawyers coming out of law school that, "Yes, the scenery is out there.
The landscape is beautiful. The people, the culture that's different,
that's also beautiful. But the cases are also the most interesting
ones. And what we're trying to do nationwide for American Indians
is that we're trying to enhance tribal sovereignty. The general
public out there doesn't understand tribal sovereignty. We need
to take some good cases to the Supreme Court where we can prove our points
about tribal sovereignty and how those are really, really important to
the Indian people." And so DNA during that period handled some of
the most interesting cases coming out of Indian country. And it
was those cases that developed American Indian law for everybody across
the nation.� So those kinds of cases became very, very famous. *** Bruce Burnham:
Well, it was the Great Society. You know, it was the fact that the states came out and had these social programs, welfare programs and everything, that the Navajos really hadn't been�I think they were qualified to receive welfare, but never had the opportunity to apply, just because they didn't know it was there. And so there was a thrust of wiping out poverty in the sixties, and part of that thrust was to let everyone know that they were eligible for welfare benefits. And so in the mid-sixties, I know in Arizona they sent case workers out to the trading post. These are case workers that weren't familiar with Navajo, they didn't speak Navajo�those came later�but the early bunch came out, and they would use the trader to interpret. Well, the deal was that if an individual owned 500 head of sheep, they weren't eligible for welfare. So what they would basically tell us to tell our customer, or their future welfare recipient, was if they would transfer their grazing lease and ownership of those sheep to a daughter or somebody, then they would be qualified for welfare. If they would divest themselves of their wealth, they would be eligible for $260 a month. That's just a figure I'm pulling out of the air, but they would be eligible for this welfare assistance. So the Navajo people just thought of that as a great opportunity�and so did the trader. Because what the trader could see was, well, sure, they're going to give that livestock to a daughter, and they're still gonna have that wool to sell, collectively, as a family, plus we're going to have the bonus of Mary Rose getting $260 a month cash. Well $260 a month in cash was equivalent of a $1,500 livestock account in the store. That's a pretty good-sized livestock account, someone that had $1,500 worth of wool that came in and paid twice a year, either $1,500 worth of lambs or $1,500 worth of wool was the equivalent of what this lady was going to get just for divesting herself of this herd of sheep. And from a pure standpoint of economics, boy, that was the thing to do. I didn't know a Navajo that got rid of their livestock. They only transferred the ownership over to a relative�usually a daughter�and so that doubled their resources, their source of income. With that came the biggest change to ever hit the Navajo Reservation, and that was that all of a sudden there was money, everybody had money to spend. So stores started converting from behind the counter to self-service and merchandising. Boy, you know, we thought that was just great! I guess we weren't smart enough to see that we were signing our own (chuckles) death certificate as traders, because with this cash flow came pickups. Everybody could make a down payment on a pickup and then the big investment in a Navajo's life became their pickup truck. And this whole $260 went to make a truck payment. That left 'em with havin' to come up with money to buy gas and all that. So there's a short period of time in there between receiving the welfare check and finally buying a pickup truck, that the traders just really profited, because it gave us a whole new type of business, and that was a cash flow business�cash and carry business. And with that, we were selling so much more in goods, that we wanted to find where we could buy goods the cheapest, so that we could offer a little bit better prices and stuff, because we were starting to merchandise�. We were one of the first trading posts at Dinnebito to switch to Associated Grocers, and really greatly expand the line of groceries in the store to where it was more like a supermarket. We were treating these people like they lived in town, and we gave 'em choices that they'd never really had before. The old theory to a trader on the Navajo Reservation is you don't necessarily sell 'em what they want, you sell 'em what they need. And that changed with that influx of cash. So that was when the trading really changed. And it's been changing
ever since, because two things happened when the Navajo bought a new pickup.
Their first wave, they bought old trucks, to where it wasn't that big
of an investment. Second wave was they liked new trucks, too, just
like you and I. So they bought a new pickup truck. So then
not only had they spent the largest portion of their welfare check on
a down payment on that vehicle, they also had to buy insurance.
If they bought a new vehicle and financed it, they had to have insurance,
too. So they ended up almost using up their entire disposable income
just to have that pickup truck. |