TOADLENA, N.M. — The front room of this century-old trading post is lined with Hamburger Helper, motor oil, confetti cake mix, sheep shears, 40-pound sacks of Blue Bird flour, fist-sized pickles floating in jars, boxes of lard and hundreds of other neatly lined necessities and treats.
The cramped back rooms are given over to a riot of handmade rugs — hanging, stacked and slung over every available surface.
Neighboring women have turned the wool of the local sheep into these rugs and carried them here, rolled under their arms, to barter for the groceries and for cash — or to have credit added or debt subtracted in a thick book kept near the cash register.
They have also come here to find out who has died or had a new baby. Such events call for extra groceries. And this is the place to learn who has been cursed by a witch or sighted Bigfoot in the nearby Chuska Mountains.
This is the way it has been for generations at this outpost on the Navajo Nation. And this is the way it remains.
Trading posts have been community centers in the vast, sparsely populated tribal lands of the Southwest. The traders often learned the difficult languages and many times married the native women while serving as de facto bankers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, policemen, celebration planners and marriage counselors.
That explains why a straggling of true trading posts continue to hang on out here — even if by a shoestring — in a land where lamp oil, not kilowatts, still lights the night for some hogan-dwelling residents. And sheep can provide many, but not quite all, of life’s necessities.
“Wal-Mart can’t replace us. We take care of the people,” explained Bruce Burnham, a fourth-generation trader who was born in a trading post in the 1930s and still operates a post across the border in Sanders, Ariz.
Burnham feels the pressure shared by all traders — the Wal-Marts and Loaf ‘N Jugs creeping in and high unemployment upping crime.
But being a trader is something that seems to get in the blood and holds these businesspeople to remote posts that can be very dicey financially. Traders can operate but aren’t allowed to own the posts on Navajo Nation lands. And tribal- law changes in the 1970s outlawed holding pawn for their customers. Pawn was a large and traditional part of the trading-post business, and its loss has left many posts abandoned and created a thicket of pawnshops in border towns.
Those problems aside, 96- year-old John W. Kennedy can’t imagine doing anything else but trading. He started as a tot standing on a milk crate behind the counter in his parents’ trading post in Salina, Ariz. His first job was measuring strips of beads.
He went on to ship wagon- and later trainloads of wool, rugs and piñon nuts to the East Coast. He now trades rugs, baskets and jewelry every day — by phone from his Albuquerque home.
“The trader was the best friend an Indian ever had,” said Kennedy, who still has Navajo and Zuni customers come to him for his advice. “Ninety- five percent of traders were good, hardworking people.”
The other 5 percent have caused traders to be maligned through history. The bad ones long ago traded in Navajo women as slaves, sold debilitating whiskey to the men and kept the best of government goods for themselves. In more recent times, they cheated the Indians out of their pawned valuables.
“It was exciting”
Elijah Blair, the big-hatted patriarch of a family that started half a dozen Southwest trading posts, said that in the past, cultural differences also contributed to misunderstandings: Navajos believe in sharing wealth rather than accumulating it.
“Some said we were crooked for selling a can of beans for more than we paid for it,” Blair explained.
That notion of traders as swindlers drew a laugh from Mark Winter, the trader at Toad lena for the past 11 years.
“If you are going to take advantage of people, it doesn’t make much sense to go where there are very few people and they don’t have much money,” he said.
Traders gave Indians a way to make a little money, said Navajo Jerry Cohoe, and to have food beyond the mutton and the few crops they raised. Cohoe said, as a child, that put him in awe of the men who ran the posts.
“We thought the traders had special powers. They owned everything,” said the Cortez artist and heavy-equipment operator.
Growing up on the reservation in the 1950s, Cohoe walked — and later rode in a wagon towed by a tractor — 3 miles to a trading post in Tocito, N.M.
“It was the center of activities for us. It was exciting,” Cohoe said. “We traded my mom’s weavings for some necessities of life.”
And some luxuries.
Cohoe closed his eyes and licked his lips remembering “the crinkle of the wrappers on the little Loretta pies. . . . And the Cracker Jack. There were eight brothers and sisters, so my mom cut the boxes in half.”
More than 30 traders and some of their Navajo friends like Cohoe, most draped in fine silver and turquoise jewelry, gathered in Cortez recently to swap tales about a profession that has through generations entwined the lives of most of them.
“They are disappearing and disappearing quickly. After this generation, the trading posts could be gone,” said Frank Lister, who organized the Southwest Traders Rendezvous.
Most surviving traders have melded the old ways with new technologies. Some conduct auctions off the remote posts. Cellphones were jangling at the gathering for a few who were bidding or selling in distant locales. Many have websites for online sales. Some, like Steve and Georgiana Simpson at Twin Rocks Trading Post in Bluff, Utah, are computerizing rug, basket and painting patterns for some of their more contemporary-style native artists.
But memories were the heart of their talks together over mutton stew and fry bread.
Burnham told of the familiar smell of kerosene, mutton fat, sheep pelts, flour and greasewood smoke that drew him back to his roots when he walked into a Shiprock trading post in 1960. He had just returned from the Army and was making deliveries of Coca- Cola. He quit that job the next day, went to work in the post and has not turned back.
Bloomfield, N.M., banker Larry McGee, who comes from a long line of traders, told of grandparents racing their rattletrap vehicle to town during the Depression to beat a loan- payment deadline at the bank. A rock tore a hole in the oil pan, so they patched it with what they had — a piece of Indian fry bread and a diaper — and made it to the bank in time to save the store.
In another sign that traders adapt their art to the times, trader John D. Kennedy told of finagling a complicated string of trades for Super Bowl tickets along with hotel rooms and airline tickets three days before the big game.
Banter with weavers
New stories stack up every day at Toadlena, where Winter and his partner, Linda La rouche, support 150 weavers.
On a recent Sunday morning, some of those weavers trooped in to go through the historic ritual of trading.
“Obviously, you’re here to take advantage of me today,” Winter joked to Barbara Tso sie when she unrolled a grey, black, brown and cream-colored rug in the coveted style known as Two Grey Hills.
Fifteen minutes and much back-and-forth and banter later, Tsosie left happy with cash in hand, a chunk taken out of a large bill she owes the post and several bags of wool on credit so she can start a new rug.
A man called in needing $6 in cash because he ran out of gas. A grandfather asked for credit to buy potatoes and flour for his grandchildren. A couple from Colorado oohed and ahhed and plunked down a credit card for a rare circular rug. A family heading to the mountains stopped for ice cream and queries about bear and Bigfoot. A 16-year-old girl, the daughter and granddaughter of accomplished weavers, tucked bills into her stylish jeans for the latest placemat-sized weaving she finished. A grandmother asked for a $200 loan based on a rug that has just started inching up a loom set up in the shadow of a big-screen TV in her hogan.
Virginia Deal will be 82 next month, and the Toadlena Trading Post not far from her stick- built hogan — or from the stone remains of her ancestors’ hogans — has been an integral part of her life. There is now a convenience store 10 miles down the road, but the store doesn’t give credit, buy rugs or serve as an information hub.
She’s had a lifetime of interaction at Toadlena. She calls Winter “shi yaz,” Navajo for “my son.”
“If I’m hungry, I go there and get some groceries,” she said, waving a weaving comb in the direction of the post. “When I was young, I go with my mother. I get an apple or an orange. It was something to make me happy.”
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com
