Most people who know about Navajo weaving know about the Teec Nos Pos weaving area. The post is just southwest of the Four Corners, where the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet.
Vintage Red Mesa Navajo Runner
The post was one of the last established on the Navajo reservation and used to be against the hills south of the present location. It is now on U.S. Highway 160 that connects Shiprock with Kayenta and goes on to Flagstaff, Arizona. John McCulloch, one of the last real traders on the reservation, owns it.
The weaving area is known for two types of rugs, one that resembles Oriental weavings and the other that draws its influence from the serrated patterns of the early Hispanic weavings.
This second style is referred to as a Teec Nos Pos outline, as most of the colors are separated by a single line of a different color.
To the west of Teec Nos Pos, on Highway 160 towards Kayenta, is a convenience store that bears the name of the old trading post, Red Mesa. The original post was further north and moved to the location on the highway where the convenience store now stands in 1962.
One of the unique features of many weavings from Red Mesa Trading Post was the inclusion of orange as an accent color. The designs are very similar to weavings from the Teec Nos Pos area, but Willard Stolworthy and Rosco McGee, the traders at Red Mesa, liked the orange (or at least they didn’t object to it). They sold the dye packets that all of the Navajo weavers used, but most trading posts didn’t stock orange.
Interestingly, the first owner of the Red Mesa Trading Post was a Navajo man, Robert Martin, who ran the post from 1917 until 1932.
Trading posts, as viable business models, began to fade away in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Small posts like Red Mesa either closed or converted to convenience stores. Red Mesa was first sold to the Thriftway chain of convenience stores. Today, Red Mesa Express is a chain of convenience stores across the reservation.
As Red Mesa became less of a trading center, Teec Nos Pos expanded its offerings. They added an extensive selection of groceries and other products and continued to buy wool from weavers. Today it is the last post on the reservation that still buys raw wool. The few surviving original Red Mesa weavers take their rugs to Teec Nos Pos or off-reservation dealers.
See All Teec Nos Pos Area Weavings in the Gallery
We have several excellent Red Mesa weavings in the gallery, but I wanted to single out this piece from the 1940s that is classic. It has a border synonymous with many Teec Nos Pos weavings, and a thin stripe of orange outlines the geometric shapes in the rug. It is also a long, narrow weaving, 86” x 39”. Anytime a rug measures more than twice its width in length, we call it a runner. These are not common in Navajo weaving.
It’s a beautiful piece that is in excellent condition.
