Trading_Post

Over the years, 259 documented trading posts were on or adjacent to the Navajo Reservation. I bet nearly all these posts had at least one Name Rug!

Early in the 20th century, as pictorial weavings evolved, women also began weaving words into their rugs. In the 1930s, when Sallie Lippincott at Wide Ruins insisted on using vegetal dyes, one weaver tired of hearing about it wove the words "Vegetal Dye" into a rug she brought to the post. It's important to remember that in the 1930s, less than 20 percent of Navajo people could read, so the weaver probably copied someone's hand-printed note.

When my father first started trading in Navajo weaving, he was a partner in the Pepsi Cola franchise in Durango. The company name was The Jackson-David Company. His two partners were David Watkins and David McGraw.  He had a showroom in his office at the Pepsi Plant where rugs he traded for and the ones weavers brought in were displayed. One day, a weaver brought in this rug.

Jackson_David_Company_Rug

It was the first and, of course, when a weaver brought in a rug with your company name on it, you had to buy it! Over the years, he bought several.  Occasionally, he would also get a Pepsi weaving! "The Pepsi Man" was a nickname weavers gave him. Even if he didn't buy a rug, the weaver always got a case of Pepsi.

Pepsi_Rug

Dad decided we needed a different company name as he moved out of the Pepsi business, and we began expanding the Native American Art business. Several of the weavers we worked with at the time lived south of Teec Nos Pos on Toh-Atin Mesa. Toh-Atin means "No Water" in Navajo (although on some parts of the Reservation, it is pronounced "Toh-Adin." He named it in honor of those weavers, although, in later years, he sometimes attributed the name to drinking his whisky straight (which was not always true!)

Toh-Atin_Trading_Post_Rug

It wasn't long before we got the first Name Rug for the new business. Two years later,  in 1983, we moved into a beautiful new gallery space. Laverne Barber, one of the award-winning Burnham weavers whose work we promoted, gifted us my favorite Name Rug.  We had moved an old Route 66-type sign from the Chief Diner, which had closed in Durango, to the gallery parking lot, and Laverne thought it deserved to be preserved in a weaving. Forty years later, a little faded, it still hangs inside our front door.

The_Chief_Rug

We have been assembling a small Trading Post Name Rugs selection and want to share them with you. One of the oldest is from a store in Gallup that sold livestock feed (note the Purina squares around the border) and was a pawn shop. The business is 54 years old and still operates on Maloney Street.

navajo_weaving_-_pictorial_c009381

In 1906, John and Louise Weatherill founded a trading post north and east of Monument Valley.  Oljato Trading Post was a tent with outbuildings to hold wool purchased from Navajo shepherds. It was abandoned in 1910 due to a lack of business, but in 1921, Joseph Heffernan, raised in the Animas Valley north of Durango, built an actual post at Oljato.

The store went through various owners, including Mildred and Reubin Heflin, whose children later built the Holiday Inn in Kayenta and whose granddaughter and her Navajo husband, Richard Mike, later built the Burger King and Hampton Inn in Kayenta. Several other owners (primarily cousins) operated the post until 1991 when it was sold to a Navajo woman, Evelyn Yazzie Jensen, who ran it until it closed in 2010. The building is abandoned today, and old gas pumps are in front of the store. This weaving came from that time, nearly 30 years ago!

navajo_weaving_-_trading_post_rug_c009383

Between Shiprock and Farmington,  the Hogback Trading post was established in 1884 (based on a date painted on a board used as a countertop.)

This store had a random merry-go-round of traders who seemed to move from one post to another, but it eventually ended up in the hands of Wilford Wheeler, who leased the store to Joe B. Tanner. The Tanner family ran multiple posts and still operates stores in Gallup, Ellis Tanner Trading and Tanner Indian Arts, where son Joe, Cindy and their daughter Emerald operate a legendary establishment.

A few years later, Wheeler took the post back until 1950 when his son Lloyd, a good friend of my father, took the store over. In 1973, Wheeler built a new post on the other side of the highway, and his son Tom, who taught me a lot about the Navajo rug business, took the reins. He sold the company in 1983, and it is now a small supermarket. Wheeler still runs an Indian arts business in a building next door.

The Hogback rug is unusual because the weaver, Mosi Yazzie, put her name in the center of the piece. It also features the logo of the Indian Arts and Crafts Association which Tom helped to found and once served as its president. The weaving is at least 40 years old.

navajo_weaving_-_trading_post_rug_c009380

In 1923-24, a man named Charlie Ashcroft was moving a wagon load of goods from Mexican Water, where he had gone broke in a trading post when his wagon broke down near a spring at Dinnehotso (which translates to "Meadow of Game," so it must have been a good-sized spring!). He decided to open a store there but first had to pay a "powerful medicine man" named Whole Kidney to use the land.

It went through various traders until Phil Foutz took it over in 1988 and closed it in 1994. This weaving is at least 30 years old.

navajo_weaving_-_pictorial_c009382

As time passes, we will see a few more of these Trading Post Weavings, but few from recent times. Of 259 traditional trading posts, fewer than a dozen are surviving. The others have disappeared or been turned into Speedway gas and convenience stores.

I like that about these weavings. They remind us of a different time and way of life that we won't see again.