JIM BABBITT INTERVIEW
   
   
   
   [BEGIN SIDE 1]
   
   This is Brad Cole from Northern Arizona University.
It's July 21, [1999].  We're visiting today with Jim
Babbitt, and we're going to talk to him about his
experiences with Indian Trading.  This interview is
part of the United Indian Traders Association Oral
History Project.
   
   Cole:  Jim if we could just start at the very

beginning, where and when were you born?


   Babbitt:  I was born right here in Flagstaff, 1948,

and grew up here, went through the school system here,

all the way through high school, and then left here to

go to college.  My mother had a strict rule that we all

had to leave not only the town, but also the state, to

go away and get our college education.


   Cole:  Where did you go?


   Babbitt:  Well, I started out at Notre Dame, back in

Indiana, kind of following a string of brothers who

went there--found it not very much to my liking,

though, so ended up, after a couple of years,

transferring to Stanford in California, and graduating

out there.


   Steiger:  Why did she have that rule?


   Babbitt:  Well, she was a big-city person, she had

come back here sort of unwillingly in the 1940s, when


Flagstaff was a very small town.  They'd moved from Los

Angeles.  And she had little confidence, I think, in

the educational system--and also wanted her kids to get

out and see a bigger world and not be so insulated and

isolated.


   Cole:  And who were your parents?


   Babbitt:  Paul and Frances Babbitt.  Paul was the

son of C. J. Babbitt, who was one of the original

brothers who came here to Flagstaff, so I am one of his

grandsons.


   Cole:  How did you become involved with trading?


   Babbitt:  Well, I'd been, in the late 1970s, working

in Northern California for Bank of America.  In 1979 my

wife and son and I moved back here to Flagstaff, and I

went to work with the family company, and worked for a

few years in what you would call today the human

resource area of the company.  So I immediately was

involved from that aspect with our family's trading

post businesses on the Navajo and Hopi Reservations.

So I was involved with it really right away, and then

later on moved over to supervise those trading post

operations.


   Cole:  Maybe we could get a little bit of a

background on the Babbitts in the trading business.

When did they become first involved in Indian trading?


   Babbitt:  Well, it really goes back a long way.  It

was something that when they first came to Flagstaff in

1886, they were really interested in being cattle

ranchers.  That was the thing that was really foremost

in their minds.  Along the way, after they had been in

the cattle ranching business, they also got into the

mercantile business, and the lumber and hardware

business--parts of which they had done back in their

home town of Cincinnati, Ohio.  Never had a mind about,

or any idea that Indian trading would be something that

they would do.  They came to Flagstaff in 1886, and I

suppose that early on, they probably around town and so

forth experienced a few Navajo people in town, or Hopi

people, or whatever.  They had never gone up into the

Indian country in those early years.  And certainly

never had any goal towards getting involved in that

business.  It just happened in a very serendipitous

way.

     As part of their mercantile business, they

conducted both wholesale and retail operations.  And

for a lot of those small, kind of independent,

entrepreneurial traders who were establishing

themselves up in the Indian country, after the railroad

came to Flagstaff, they had, for the first time,

really, a source of supply for manufactured goods, for

canned food and hardware and tools and kerosene lamps

and so on and so forth.  So Flagstaff was the nearest

source of supply for at least a lot of the small

traders on what we know today as the western Navajo

Reservation.

     And in 1891, one of those people was a German

Jewish merchant, Sam Dittenhoffer [phonetic spelling].

He had established himself at a little trading post--

outpost if you will--at Tonalea, Arizona--Red Lake,

about twenty-five miles up past Tuba City.  In those

days, a completely remote and isolated little place.

And his source of resupply, after he conducted his

trading business up there for a series of maybe weeks

or months, and had taken in trade all these Indian-

manufactured goods:  rugs, and baskets, and pottery,

and silver and so forth.  He would load those on a

freight wagon and come to Flagstaff to our wholesale

operation, and he would exchange all of those Indian

goods for a new supply of groceries and saddles and

wool shears and wool dye--all the things that we

supplied.  So in April of 1891, he had been in

Flagstaff doing that business, and after he was done

with the business part of his visit, went out and had a

little round in the local saloons, and made the

acquaintance of a young lady.  The two of 'em kind of

hit it off pretty well.  She accompanied him back up to

the trading post there at Red Lake a day or two later.

They had been up there not more than another day or two

when another suitor of hers arrived on the scene, got

in a fight with Mr. Dittenhoffer, and killed him out in

front of the trading post, took his girlfriend or

whatever, back to Flagstaff, and so that kind of left a

little problem for my grandfather and his brothers.

They extended a lot of this wholesale business to these

small traders on credit, and so now they have this

little isolated trading post up at Red Lake with an

inventory that they had extended on credit, and

literally now, no one minding the store.  So my

grandfather went up there, never having been anywhere

up in that Navajo country, went up there, found this

little Red Lake outpost, went in, kind of got behind

the counter.  He knew no Navajo language or anything,

didn't know the trading business as such, but started

doing it, and started communicating as best he could

with the local Navajo people.  After doing that for a

few days, he found that he really liked that sort of

Red Rock country up there, that Navajo country; liked

the local people, became kind of interested in their

language and so forth.  But I think most of all, he

really enjoyed this, what in those days was a real

barter-trade kind of economy there.  There was no cash

up there, certainly no way for the--you know, the

Navajos didn't have payrolls or jobs or any way to get

their hands on cash.  So it was truly a barter economy.

     I think my grandfather kind of liked that.  You

know, "I'll trade you three sacks of groceries and a

kerosene lamp for your little rug, and maybe a silver

belt," or what have you.  A far cry from business

today, you know.  Accountants would be driven crazy by

trying to account for those types of transactions.  But

he liked it, got into it, and the family basically has

been in it ever since that day.


   Cole:  Now, your grandfather, was that C. J.?


   Babbitt:  C. J., uh-huh.


   Cole:  Do you remember him at all?


   Babbitt:  I do.  He died in 1957.  I think I was

about nine years old, or so, when he died.  And what I

remember of him, he did have two things that, in

business particularly, that he really loved.  He was

instrumental in the family's cattle ranching

operations, and he really loved the cattle ranches.

And on Sunday mornings, after we went to mass, he would

always take us in his old car and we would drive out to

one of the ranches and spend Sunday afternoon lookin'

around at the cattle.  He also loved his cattle.

     But I think a close second in his business career

were the trading posts.  He really loved the trading

posts.  And starting out from that one little trading

post there at Red Lake, over the years he expanded into

a very wide network of small trading posts, and a

wholesale operation to supply not only our own trading

posts, but a lot of the other trading posts on the

western Navajo Reservation, as well as the Hopi

Reservation, and for a time we even had a trading post

down on the Apache Reservation at Cibecue.  So he got

pretty widely diversified there.


   Cole:  Do you know, were there any differences in

how trading occurred with the different tribes?  Or was

it all pretty similar?


   Babbitt:  You know, I think it was pretty similar.

There certainly were differences in types of goods that

were offered one to the other, with respect to the

Navajos, of course.  The things related to sheep and

wool and rug weaving were always big parts of those

stores--wool shears, dye for the wool, and all the kind

of things that related to weaving.  Down at Apache, of

course, you know, it wasn't that way.  But most of the

stores' inventories, I would say, were pretty much the

same.  They were little general stores.  They carried

groceries and canned goods and pots and pans, a little

bit of hardware, saddles and tack, horseshoes--just all

the kind of things that the people in those areas

needed.


   Cole:  Would your grandfather ever take you guys out

to the trading posts at all?


   Babbitt:  Yeah.  He was quite elderly when I was

young.  He was already in his mid or late eighties.

And the occasion to really go out and visit some of the

trading posts was generally in connection with a

summertime visit to the Hopi mesas to go to one of the

ceremonial dances.  Then along the way, stop at, for

example, at the Tuba Trading Post, or up there at Red

Lake, or what have you.


   Cole:  How were the stores staffed?  Did they set

traders up in business, or did they actually own the

trading posts?


   Babbitt:  Well, I think they did it in a number of

different ways.  Probably the most prevalent way was

that it would be a little partnership, and our family

would really provide the financial resources for

generally half, or maybe a little more than half, of

the ownership of the trading post.  And then there

would be a partner who would be the manager--the

resident trader, if you will.  And so we were partners

with a whole bunch of people around the reservation who

functioned as the resident trader.  We in town then did

all the accounting work and all the financing, as well

as the wholesale supplying of the goods to the trading

post.  That's the way it generally worked.  Sometimes

we owned a trading post outright, and would then just

hire a trader on salary to go out there and work.  It

could be different combinations.


   Cole:  In the case where they owned a string of

trading posts or partnerships, it seemed like they

might have produced a lot of arts and crafts kind of

things to sell.  Would Babbitts bring those into

Flagstaff and wholesale 'em out of Flagstaff?  Or how

did....


   Babbitt:  Well, that is a very interesting question,

because you hit the nail on the head.  With several

trading posts doing this barter business in Indian arts

and crafts, obviously you're going to amass a big store

of this stuff.  And somehow you need to in turn sell

that, or market that somehow.  So in the early days

when there were just two or three trading posts, in our

store here, downtown in Flagstaff, we always had some

section either in that store building, or somewhere

else in the downtown, that was our own retail--we

called 'em curio stores--that sold Indian rugs and

silver and pottery and that sort of thing.

     But after the trading post network began to

expand, there was even more than could be retailed

through a location in Flagstaff.  So right around the

turn of the century, our in-laws--my grandfather and

two of his brothers--had married into this Cincinnati

family, the Verkamp family.  My grandmother had a

brother, John Verkamp, who after my grandparents had

been here in Flagstaff for, oh, I suppose maybe ten or

eleven years, her brother came to visit in the summers

a couple of times from Cincinnati, and found that he

really liked Flagstaff, and in particular he liked the

Grand Canyon.  And I guess even in the late 1890s,

there were quite a number of tourists visiting in the

summertime up at Grand Canyon.  So my grandfather

thought this would be a good way to market some of

these Indian arts and crafts.  So he got his brother-in-

law, John Verkamp, in the summertime, to take these

rugs and silverware and pottery and baskets, with him

up to the South Rim of the canyon.  They set up a

little tent there, and John Verkamp sold for the

Babbitt Brothers Trading Company, these Indian arts and

crafts, for a couple of summers.  I think it worked out

only fairly well, and so after a couple of summers,

Verkamp quit that for a while, but then he came back a

couple of years later, I think about 1904 or so, and

established himself permanently there on the South Rim.

He actually settled there, built a building, and was

in, and has been, in the Indian arts and crafts

business there ever since.

     So that was one little experiment that resulted in

doing business on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

But nonetheless, they still were looking for ways to

market more widely at retail, this stuff.  So they did

establish another store over in Southern California, in

Montebello, California, which they operated for some

years.  And for a while they had people in Phoenix,

selling out of a little storefront there.  So they were

always trying different ways.  They tried also mail

order, as many of the Indian traders in the Southwest

[did] at one time or another--made little catalogs and

tried to sell mail order.  I think you have in the

collection here, one or two of our company's mail order

catalogs.  So there was a whole variety of things that

they were trying to do.


   Cole:  And then what about your father?  Was he

involved in trading posts at all?


   Babbitt:  No.  No, he really wasn't.  He, in fact,

grew up here in Flagstaff and then went away to college

and to law school, and started practicing law in Los

Angeles, and met and married my mother over there in

California.  They had actually settled in Los Angeles,

were raising their family, and he had an established

legal practice there.  And then in 1944, back here in

Flagstaff, his younger brother, Jim Babbitt, who had

been the company's attorney and legal person and so

forth, was killed in a hunting incident down on the

Mogollon Rim, in the late fall of 1944.  So my father,

being an attorney, was asked by the family to come

back, after Uncle Jim's sudden death, and take over the

legal aspects of the business.  So he did.  He came

back in 1945, and brought the family over here.  He

really functioned as the company's attorney then from

1945 to about 1978 or so.  So he concentrated on the

legal work.  There were a couple of times when legal

issues came up, of course, that involved the trading

post stores or relationships with the tribes, and he

would get involved in that way, but never directly

actually in the day-to-day running of any of the

trading posts.


   Cole:  What kind of issues would come up that he'd

help?


   Babbitt:  Well, leases that would need to be

negotiated with the Navajo or Hopi Tribe.  Oh, bonding

kinds of requirements that the Bureau of Indian Affairs

would require.  Some of the land that we owned within

the reservation, we owned in fee simple, so these were

isolated little islands within Indian reservations.

And they had a whole kind of set of legal ramifications

in themselves that he had to deal with--rights of way,

and property and sales tax issues, and all those kinds

of things.


   Cole:  Once you became involved with the trading

posts yourself, describe what the setup was like then,

maybe how many stores you owned, if you remember.


   Babbitt:  Yeah, okay.  Well, it was certainly a far

cry from maybe in the 1930s or 1940s when Babbitt

Brothers Trading Company owned, in one part or another

maybe, more than twenty trading posts, scattered around

the reservation.  By the time I became involved, in the

early 1980s, the trading post business had evolved a

great deal, and was actually really on the way out.

Our stores had reduced from probably more than twenty

down to--I think we had four at the time on Navajo and

one at Hopi.  Those were Navajo ones:  Tuba City, Red

Lake, Cow Springs, and Cedar Ridge.  And then the Hopi

one at New Oraibi, or Kykotsmovi.  So by the time I

became involved in it, it was really a declining kind

of business.

     And I think the explanation to that is a

complicated one, as to why the businesses were sort of

on the way out by then.  But certainly part of it had

to do with after the Second World War, the Navajos had

more wage employment, they had more money, they became

more mobile.  At the same time, the Bureau of Indian

Affairs throughout the reservation was improving the

transportation network.  They were paving and building

lots of new roads and bridges, and as the Navajos--and

the Hopis, too--began to acquire pickup trucks and cars

and so forth, they became mobile, really for the first

time.  They could really move around.  At the same

time, through maybe the fifties and sixties, all around

the reservation, American free enterprise was hard at

work, and big stores were being built:  Safeway Stores,

and Yellow Front Stores, and eventually the K-Marts and

the Wal-Marts.  So once all of that happened, and the

Navajos and Hopis, all the Native American people, had

a choice, and maybe an opportunity to do a little price

comparison--of course they're no different than anybody

else.  They could travel and shop and compare and buy

where they wanted to.  And these little general stores

scattered throughout the reservation could in no way

compete on price or selection with larger retailers.

     And so starting, I would say, in a large way in

the 1970s, the old-time trading posts started to close

up, and it became really a dying way of life.  So by

the time I became involved in our trading operations,

it was already becoming a dying part of our family's

business.  And from the time I started in the business,

we had five trading posts.  Today, 1999, we are down to

only two--Tuba City and Red Lake.  We closed down Cedar

Ridge Trading Post, we closed down Cow Springs Trading

Post, and we sold the little store at Kykotsmovi to the

village there, to the village people, and they

continued to operate it.  But even with our two

remaining stores, I would say we won't be in that

business a lot longer.  And those few so-called trading

posts that do survive, I think were able to survive

only because they were able to develop a new market,

and that, of course, is the tourist market.

     So the surviving so-called trading posts today

have some things in common.  They're generally on a

main highway, they generally have a motel and a

restaurant along with them.  And their business

nowadays is overwhelmingly Indian arts and crafts and

tourist-related items.  You would be very hard pressed

any more to see a Navajo or a Hopi family going to a

trading post to do their main shopping.  It just

doesn't happen anymore.  At the K-Mart or Wal-Mart in

Flagstaff, you will see more Native Americans than you

will see in the few surviving little trading post

stores on the reservation.

     And I would say I remember going to negotiate

leases in Window Rock with the Navajo Tribe's

Department of Commerce, and they used to have a big map

on the wall of the whole reservation, and they would

put a little blue pin in the map for every location

where they had a trading post lease in force.  And even

in the middle 1970s or late 1970s, those little blue

pins covered the map.  I mean, they were dense all over

the reservation.  But through the seventies and

eighties, I would say literally hundreds of little

trading stores closed and went out of business.  The

pins were removed.  If you look at that map today, it

is a far different kind of thing than it was twenty or

thirty years ago.

     And its a sad thing to see, certainly.  Trading as

it once existed had its ups and downs, and it had its

good aspects and it's not so good aspects, but it was

sort of a unique feature of life in the Southwest,

where different cultures came together to do commerce,

and two cultures kind of interfaced for well over a

century.  And I think now that's all going into the

pages of history.


   Cole:  What are some of the good aspects that you

can think of?


   Babbitt:  Well, I mean, at its most basic level,

particularly in the early days, I think the traders

were actually providing a service, and that was access

to goods, to manufactured goods that made life easier.

I mean, it was a tough and primitive life in the late

1800s in Northern Arizona--very tough.  And I think

having manufactured goods--horseshoes, kerosene--

brought the first, probably, nighttime light to the

interiors of Navajo hogans and so forth.  I mean, these

are very simple things, but back in those days, I think

they were very important things.  Ropes, for example,

manufactured ropes, to rope livestock with.  We think

nothing of it today, but I think back in the 1880s that

was a major convenience to have.  Manufactured shears

to shear the wool off the sheep.  Dye that was aniline

dye that was commercially manufactured back in

Pennsylvania, which we packaged and sold and supplied

to lots and lots of trading posts.  [That] ended, in a

way, or at least for a lot of the weavers, the

backbreaking and time-consuming work of gathering all

of these plants and making these vegetable dyes.  Of

course, that was revived later on and thought to be a

really good thing, and an artistic thing--which it was--

but at the time, I think things like that were great

conveniences.  So I think at the very basic level,

there was a service being provided.  That service sort

of evolved into all kinds of other forms of services.

The trading posts became, for example, post offices.

So the Navajos then could have access to the postal

system.

     The story I'm sure you have heard from others

about the Navajos not liking sickness or death, and

having to deal with the burial of dead relatives and so

forth.  Something in their culture that is a very scary

kind of thing, and they would rather not deal with it.

A lot of the traders in the early days took over that

function.

     I think through the trading posts, also, medical

service probably first came to the reservations, along

with the Indian Health Service.  Education, certainly.

I think a lot of the early-day traders, before the

Native American kids were in U.S. Indian Service

schools, could learn at least the rudiments of English

and the rudiments of doing business and currency system

and so forth.

     So I think there's a whole variety of good things

that came from our culture to their culture through

this sort of commercial intermediary, the trader.


   Cole:  And then what about the flip side?  You

mentioned there were some bad aspects.


   Babbitt:  Inevitably, you know, people have

weakness, and people will take advantage of other

people.  I have heard countless stories through the

years of how people in the position of the Native

American people being vulnerable and subservient to a

dominant population, are easily taken advantage of.

And I think a lot of that happened through the years.

People just taking advantage of people who didn't know

better--whether it was through charging too much, or

you know, all kinds of different ways of taking

advantage of the Native Americans, and I'm sure that

happened a lot.


   Cole:  And what about, you mentioned culturally that

probably some things from the white culture went into

the native culture.  What about the other way?


   Babbitt:  Well, yeah, I think a lot of wonderful

things came the other way--primarily in the area of the

arts and crafts that people admired so much then, and

we still do admire--just the wonderful craftsmanship

and creativeness and the design and so forth.  But I

think beyond that, there always was a real fascination

with the Native American cultures, with the language

and with ceremonial stuff, and with whatever you'd call

it, religion or mythology.  I think through the years

there has been a great interest in all of that.


   Cole:  Would Babbitts have many Navajo or Hopi that

would actually come into Flagstaff and trade?  Or was

that mainly on the reservation?


   Babbitt:  You mean come into the store here in

Flagstaff?


   Cole:  Yeah.


   Babbitt:  Well, of course the great magnet, at least

starting in the 1920s, was the annual powwow in the

summertime, where Navajos, Hopis, Apaches, lots of

different tribes, would come in for that celebration on

the Fourth of July here in Flagstaff.  We have lots of

old pictures of the store with Native American

customers here in the store in Flagstaff.  I think that

was probably the big time, but you have to remember,

until the Native Americans became mobile--and I think

that didn't happen 'til after the Second World War--it

was a big endeavor to travel from, say, Red Lake to

Flagstaff by horse or by wagon.  That was a big deal to

do.  Now, it's a couple of hours in the pickup truck.

But up until the 1950s, they just were not nearly so

mobile, and so they were kind of tied to the one or two

trading posts that were nearby to them.


   Cole:  What about some of your memories of the early

powwows when you were a kid?


   Babbitt:  Well, I guess also it kind of had its good

aspect and its bad aspect.  I certainly 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 [was in] what we called

City Park--today it's Thorpe Park.  But they would just

have this huge encampment in the forest up behind City

Park.  It got to be overwhelming for the city--just

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.


   Cole:  How would you describe Navajo-Anglo trade

relationships to somebody that's not familiar with it?


   Babbitt:  In what respect?


   Cole:  Well, maybe looking at how, do the different

cultures view economics the same or differently?


   Babbitt:  Well, I guess our experience really was

mainly with the Navajo, and then to some degree with

the Hopi and the Apache.  So I couldn't really speak

much for the Hopi or the Apache.  The Navajo, at least

in the old days--and this certainly predates my time--

always, I think, at least in some of our trading posts,

the feeling was that they always enjoyed this game of

kind of trading and bartering, and trying to get the

better of each other.  They always enjoyed that, much

like my grandfather on the other side kind of enjoyed

that.  And I will tell you something--and I don't mean

this in any way to be derogatory or anything--if you

look at the very old-time trading posts, almost

inevitably there is a high counter that runs around the

inside of the trading post, and that separates the

customer from the goods.  So when they want something,

they have to ask for it, and the merchandise has to be

passed individually across the counter.  Even before,

in the earlier times, from the top of the counter to

the ceiling often would be chicken wire strung up, with

just a little opening through which to pass the goods

back and forth.  I think early-day traders would tell

you that at least the old-time Navajos would almost

make a game of maybe trying to get away with a few

things here and there, and that it was not looked down

upon within their culture, at all, so long as you

weren't caught, it wasn't such a terribly bad thing to

make off with a few things here and there.  So I think

that is one kind of unique aspect of at least the

Navajo trading, and the way they viewed this

interchange.

     I guess I could comment less about the Hopi and

the Apache part of it.  I just don't know that much

about it.


   Cole:  What about once you'd become involved in the

early eighties?  Were the economic systems similar

then, or were they still....


   Babbitt:  Well, of course it was a barter economy,

as I had alluded to previously, for a long time out

there, because there was no cash economy out on the

reservation.  There were no payrolls or ways for

Navajos or Hopis to get their hands on cash, and I

think that didn't come about, maybe, until the time of

the New Deal programs that were creating job programs

out there, public works projects that hired Navajo and

Hopi workers.  First time they ever really got their

hands on cash money.  By the time I came along in the

early 1980s, it was pretty much entirely a cash-based

economy.  There was no more so-called trading or

bartering, really, going on anymore.  There were

various kinds of credit systems in place, but they were

all based on a cash economy.

     Now, if you go back to--well, I suppose the turn

of the century--when it was a barter-type economy, I

think a lot of the traders out there were never all

that comfortable with a barter economy.  After all, we

love to reduce things to numbers that we can put in the

ledger book, and at the end of the day say, "Well, I'm

ahead or I'm behind by this amount."  And, of course,

with the barter system, that's awfully hard to do.  So

the traders came up with this system of trading tokens--

seco they used to call it, dry money.  And what that

was, each trading post would have issued a series of--I

think they were almost invariably metal tokens, stamped

with the name of the trading post, and a monetary

value.  And then they would give these out in exchange

for things.  And at a later date, the Navajos or Hopis

or whoever, could then turn 'em back in to that trading

post, and they would have a value on the face of them.

     The U.S. Indian Service, which from the very

beginning, has regulated trade with the Native America

peoples, never liked them.  They didn't like it because

it tended to tie a customer to only one store.  The

token was only good at the store that issued it, and so

the federal government saw that as kind of a bad thing,

as a restraint of trade, or a limitation of the

Indian's choice.  So they did outlaw the use of those

tokens, but that was one attempt to kind of create a

cash economy where no cash economy existed.  But after

the Second World War, I would say everything was based

on cash, and has been ever since.


   Cole:  Has the Navajo-Hopi land dispute impacted the

Babbitts' business on the reservation?


   Babbitt:  Oh, that's a good question, and yes it

certainly has--at least in one aspect.  You're probably

familiar with the Bennett Freeze, which was an order

that prevented--in part of the disputed territory--

prevented any kind of maintenance or improvement of

buildings.  And I would say with our little trading

post up at Cedar Ridge, north on Highway 89 up towards

Lee's Ferry, we probably would have stayed with that

business longer, had we been able to make improvements

or even, for that matter, build a new trading post.

But for years the Bennett Freeze would not allow for

new construction, or even substantial renovation.  So

the poor little trading post, which wasn't much to

begin with, and had actually seen a previous life in a

different location--it was called the Echo Cliffs

Trading Post, and was down actually in Hamblin Wash at

the base of the Echo Cliffs.  And when Highway 89 was

rerouted and paved, the practical thing to do, instead

of abandoning that building and building a new one, was

just to take it off the foundation and move it up the

hill and make a new foundation for it--which they did.

It became known then as the Cedar Ridge Trading Post.

But anyway, the land dispute, I think did impact the

business, at least in that way.


   Steiger:  Bennett Freeze?  I'm not quite sure....


   Babbitt:  It was a piece of legislation named after--

I don't know if he was a senator, I believe he was

Senator Bennett.


   Cole:  Probably Paul Bennett's father, maybe?


   Babbitt:  Yeah.


   Cole:  Senator from Utah.


   Babbitt:  Yeah.  Which said, in very general terms--

and I don't know the specifics of this at all--but

while this dispute is pending resolution, neither tribe

can go into the disputed area and make a whole lot of

improvements that might result in, say, an increased

value having to be paid for all that land, when the

thing was finally settled.  So they called it a freeze

on construction and renovation.  And it was after the

senator who sponsored that particular piece of

legislation.


   Cole:  Who were some of the traders that you might

have interacted with, that are kind of memorable in

your mind?


   Babbitt:  Oh, you know, John Kennedy, in my time,

anyhow, probably stands out.  Although by that time he

was not actually kind of running a trading post.  He

was more in the wholesale jewelry and rug business.  So

he would always come through selling rugs and jewelry,

and he was always an interesting and kind of imposing

sort of figure.  Because of our location there at Red

Lake, we interacted a good deal with a couple of the

traders further north toward Navajo Mountain--Al

Townsend, at Inscription House; and Dick Johnson up at

Navajo Mountain.  We were good friends with them for a

long time.  And in fact, Little Navajo Mountain Trading

Post, one of my favorite places, run by Dick Johnson,

the road up there is a long, long road, which now is

paved for the most part, but back then was just a dirt

road.  The grocery companies refused at one point to

send their trucks up on this long, bumpy dirt road to

Navajo Mountain.  So poor Dick Johnson could no longer

buy groceries, 'cause they wouldn't deliver to him.

And he tried going and hauling groceries himself with

his own truck for a while.  That didn't work out.  So

for a while we were having our grocery supplier deliver

his groceries to our trading post there at Red Lake,

and then he would come down with his truck and take it

the remaining way.  But that was just one of the final

blows to Indian trade--this wholesale grocery supply

just became an impossible situation.  The little stores

just couldn't buy, except at very exorbitant prices,

and their remote locations, the wholesale grocery

supply didn't want to deliver there.  So that was just

one more kind of nail in the coffin of Indian trading.

     But other traders who we knew well, we certainly

knew Joe Atkinson [phonetic spelling] and his family at

Cameron, and Bill Beaver [phonetic spelling] down at

Sacred Mountain.  We knew the Blair family--in

particular, Hank Blair up at Lukachukai-- Bruce

Burnham, who I know you've talked to.  And Bill Malone

out at the Hubbell Trading Post.

     One family that was very important for us--they

worked for us for a long time--was the Norris family:

Don Norris up at Cedar Ridge and his brother, Jerry

Norris, who ran Red Lake for us for a long time, and

then who I brought over to Tuba City to run the Tuba

City Trading Post.  Very important group of people that

were around the reservation for a long time.

     Just any number of families.  The Powell family

was another important family that worked for us for a

long time.  Bruce Powell, who ran our little store at

Kykotsmovi, New Oraibi during most of his tenure there.

And his brother, Max Powell, who worked for us up at

Cedar Ridge.  Great bunch of people.

     So we knew lots and lots of people through the

years, who were involved in the business.  Their names

don't all spring into my mind right now, but there were

certainly lots of wonderful people out there.


   Cole:  Thinking about all those different people,

are there any characteristics that come to mind of why

these people are traders and maybe others aren't?  Is

there any common thread there?


   Babbitt:  Well, I think no question beyond just

bein' ornery people.  They have to be real independent

and real....  They have to like a life of kind of

isolation, and a life dealing in a culture that is

different from their own.  And even in the 1960s and

1970s, it was no mean feat to find qualified people to

live out in those very remote locations, to do that

business.

     I had mentioned Jerry Norris, though, who traded

for us at Red Lake for many years.  His brother Don had

been trading up at Cedar Ridge.  Jerry was a

construction worker over in California, and he came out

to Arizona on a vacation with his wife and two infant

daughters one time, and visited his brother Don there

at Cedar Ridge, and stayed around the trading post for

a few days, and decided he kind of liked what he saw

there:  the wide open spaces, the relative freedom to

kind of run the business the way you best saw fit, and

to have this clientele of a real different and

interesting culture that spoke an almost unfathomable

kind of language--at least to our ear.  So Jerry

decided--he went back there to California, and he was

pretty disenchanted with life in Southern California at

the time.  This was in the early sixties:  crime was

getting bad, pollution, traffic congestion, on and on

and on.  So about a week after he'd gotten home, he

called up and said, "You know, if you ever have an

opening there in any of the trading posts, I'd sure

like to come."  So the opening came up at Red Lake and

we called him back and said, "Well, if you're really

serious, we got a job for you, come on!"  So he moved

lock, stock, and barrel with his wife and two infant

daughters to Red Lake Trading Post.

     The apartment for the trader was on the second

floor of this old ramshackle building.  It was about

two big rooms up there, and he moved his whole family

in there and stayed there for many years.  I will never

forget people coming through Red Lake, hearing his

story, and saying, "Gee, you know, we can't imagine

ever doing that!  Why would you ever leave Southern

California?!"  And invariably he would say, "Nope, I

made the right choice.  My kids would have been goin'

to a crime-infested school, and we'd have been spending

hours in traffic, commuting.  Out here, it's a

wonderful life, these are wonderful people that we're

living among, and we're workin' hard but we just love

it."  His two daughters went to the school system there

in Tuba City and are very successful people today, well-

educated women.  And so that's just one little story of

somebody who came from a way different kind of place

and fit into that trading routine and really liked it a

lot.


   Cole:  Have you had much involvement in dealing with

arts and crafts people yourself?


   Babbitt:  Oh, yes.  You know, during the years I

worked up in the Tuba Trading Post, I bought all the

arts and crafts for that trading post.  And we have

manufactured through the years, or had manufactured for

us, silver goods and so forth.  Had silversmiths

working for us for years and years and years--both in

the retail store downtown, and then in the trading

posts.  I employed as recently as probably the early

1990s, a silversmith that we would buy all of his

output.  He was a particularly skilled silversmith.  So

yeah, I've had lots of involvement with it through the

years.

     Another angle on that, although it isn't really

Native American arts and crafts:  In the very early

days, going way back, the Navajo people learned weaving

probably from the Pueblo people, over on the Rio

Grande.  They had never woven before they met up with

the Pueblo people.  Well, being so adaptable and doing

things so well, as they do, they picked up this weaving

art and turned it into something uniquely their own,

and wonderful.  But in the early days, anyway--and by

"the early days," I'm meaning the early or mid-1800s

maybe--they were weaving for a utilitarian purpose.

That is, they were weaving wearing garments.  And they

did that for a long time, and very well.  But at some

point or another, they figured out that they could sell

those wearing garments to Anglo people for a big price,

and then they could go out and buy a machine-made

woolen wearing garment, in the early days made by the

Pendleton Woolen Mills, or there were two or three

other woolen mills that were producing these Indian

trade blankets.  Very serviceable, very durable, and

very cheap.  So weaving became something other than

what it started out as--that is, a utilitarian kind of

wearing garment.  I will never forget hearing from some

of the real old-time Navajo people about that, and

about their complete inability to grasp what happened

when they would sell these wearing garments to the

Anglo people.  They said the Anglo people would take

them and do a thing that they never could understand.

They said they would throw them on the floor and walk

all over them!  And I think they had a big joke about

that for a long time.  Of course they became rugs, and

we all know what happened.

     But anyway, going back to the Pendleton business,

that was part of our wholesale supply to the trading

posts, because the Indians bought those and still do,

as both wearing and burial garments.  And so in 1989,

at the 100th anniversary of our company, we were up on

our buying trip to the mill in Portland, the Pendleton

Mill.  We'd go up there once a year to do our annual

buying.  And we had mentioned in conversation with them

at the time that it was our 100th anniversary.  So they

asked us if they couldn't produce a special Pendleton

blanket commemorating that 100 years.  So we worked

together on a design, actually a storm pattern design,

of a prevalent type of Navajo weaving that came out of

the Red Lake area, and they produced for us a storm

pattern interpretation in that Pendleton blanket, that

turned out to be a great success, both with the Navajo

people and with sort of the collectors' market.

     So there were a lot of aspects to the arts and

crafts part of the business.  For years we would go to

California to the arts and crafts shows, and transport

to those shows rugs and silverware and stuff from the

reservation, and sell it in California and up in

Denver.  There's a whole circuit of those kind of

shows--Santa Fe and so forth.  So yeah, I had a lot of

involvement with arts and crafts.


   Cole:  Do you have any favorite weavers that you've

dealt with yourself?


   Babbitt:  Oh, gosh, probably too many to name.  And

the thing that I really focused on, that storm pattern

that I alluded to, was a pattern that was woven very

commonly around Red Lake, and probably actually started

there in that area, with weavers there.  And there is

an old story that, as you have heard probably from many

of the traders, that in some way or another they

interacted with the weavers and suggested or promoted a

given type of rug or a pattern or a given way of

weaving.  I think Bruce Burnham is doing that with the

Burntwater rugs, and also more recently with the

revival of the Germantown rugs.  I think Cozy McFarrin

[phonetic spelling] up at Chinle in the twenties and

thirties was instrumental in kind of getting some of

these Wide Ruins and vegetable dye rugs going.

     Anyway, there's an old story at Red Lake that that

storm pattern really was initiated by one of our

traders there who said he needed a new device, kind of,

to sell these rugs to the tourists.  And so there had

to be a story behind the rug, because the tourists

would always fall for it, if there was some story

connected with the rug.  And so it is said that that

trader had created, by the weavers, a rug called the

storm pattern, which depicted some of the major

elements of the Navajo creation story.  And so that is

the story.  The truth of that I'm not sure.  I do know

that through that Red Lake Trading Post we probably

traded and sold thousands and thousands and thousands

of those storm pattern rugs.  The original form, the

old form of which, remained the same for a very long

time, and which was used by our company as kind of a

logo.  It was on all the stationery and the shopping

bags and the little gift boxes for jewelry and so

forth.  So it was very popular.  So that was my

favorite kind of design.  I like the old storm pattern

design.

     By the time I came to work at Tuba City, that

pattern had evolved a great deal.  It had become much

more complicated and elaborated, and not the old simple

design.  And so I wanted to get the weavers to go back

and revive the old pattern.  Well, the old pattern,

with its symbolism of the Navajo creation story

included on two sides of the rug, swastika patterns.

And so I would get the weavers there in Tuba City--and

this is in the 1980s--and I would say, "You know, I'd

like you to weave this special kind of rug for me, this

old-time rug," and [they'd] say, "Well, yes, that's

fine.  Show me a picture of it."  And so I would show

them a picture of that old rug with two swastikas, and

it would make 'em very nervous, very upset, and they

would say, "Well, we will weave that," and then they

would come and put their thumb over the swastikas--

weave it all except for that, 'cause they associated

it, of course, with the Nazi swastika.  And of course

many Navajos went off to Europe in the Second World War

and never came back, and so patriotism and what have

you, they didn't like that symbol.  But if you would

talk to them about the place of that symbol within

their own kind of cosmology, and explain to them that

that was a symbol in not only their culture, but many

native cultures, long before the Germans ever picked it

up, they finally kind of warmed up to the idea, and

started weaving once again these old pattern storm

pattern rugs.

     And so I guess while I don't have so much of a

favorite weaver, I certainly have a favorite design,

and that's my favorite of all the Navajo designs.


   [END TAPE 1, SIDE A; BEGIN SIDE B]


   Cole:  This is Brad Cole from Northern Arizona

University.  It's July 21, 1999, this is Tape 2 of an

interview with Jim Babbitt.

     Jim, you had mentioned a couple of times that you

worked or ran the Tuba City Trading Post.  Tell us a

little bit about when that was and what you did there.


   Babbitt:  Well, as I mentioned before, I got

involved sort of peripherally in the trading post

business of the family, starting about 1980 through the

human resource angle.  And then I would think it was

about 1984 or so [I] was kind of transferred and placed

as the supervisor of those trading post operations.

And so those were my direct responsibility, those five

trading stores out there.  Tuba City itself was at the

time the biggest and the most important of those five

operations.  We had a motel there and a restaurant, as

well as eighty acres of fee land within the

reservation.  And on that fee land we had a mobile home

park and several commercial leases to other businesses.

So that was kind of the hub of activity, as well as

being probably the most centrally located of all the

trading posts.  So from there, I could go and visit the

other ones quite easily.  So for a number of years I

worked up there at Tuba, both in the trading post and

then kind of overseeing, after I brought Jerry Norris

over there to manage it, I kind of oversaw that trading

post and the other four from there, and then from back

in the office at Flagstaff.  It was a great experience

for me.

     A lot of people, goin' up to Tuba City would kind

of pass on through town.  It isn't, I guess I would

say, a real impressive sort of looking town.  Not much

up there, kind of a dusty, windy old landscape.  It's

kind of hard to appreciate, 'til you spend some time

there, get to know a little of the history, and get to

know the people a little bit.  And it is truly a real

unique and wonderful place, Tuba City.  And the more

time I spent up there, the more I kind of dug into the

history of the area.  It has a very rich and kind of

wonderful history.  And I just often wish that people

traveling through there for the first time could

appreciate that a little bit, because as I say, at

first glance it's a hard place to kind of like, I

think.  But a great place for me.

     And our old trading store there was another thing

that really I spent a lot of time on, and I really came

to appreciate.  The old building, when I first arrived

on the scene up there about 1980 or so, it was an old

run-down, kind of ramshackle stone building, that had

been modified greatly through the years, to a point

where you could hardly tell what it was.  So I began--I

like old buildings, and I've always liked to restore

old buildings.  So I started looking into the history

and digging up old photographs and trying to see what

the place was when my grandfather and his partner, Sam

Preston, built that place back along about 1902.  And I

actually found some original photographs.  What it was

was a great big eight-sided building that faced to the

east, to the rising sun.  And of course that would mark

it as a hogan structure, the structure of the Navajo

people.  And it is.  It's built out of locally-quarried

limestone.  It was built by a stonemason from

Flagstaff, Mr. Diedtzman [phonetic spelling], who built

a lot of buildings around here, around the turn of the

century.  [He] went up there and built that for my

grandfather, this great octagonal hogan.

     But as I say, through the years, it suffered a lot

of insults and was modified drastically.  So starting

about 1984 or 1985, we did a big restoration project to

restore and reopen the east entryway, and take out a

lot of the modifications that had been made over the

years, to restore it more or less to what it had

originally been.  It was a great project, I enjoyed it

greatly.

     It was kind of interesting to see that all happen,

and I remember one incident one day.  The store had

been modified so the east entryway--the Navajos

building their hogans faced them to the rising sun--as

that trading post had originally been built.  But

somewhere along the way, that entryway got closed off,

and a new entryway and porch put on the south side of

the building.  And so we were inside working.  We had

kind of more or less gutted the interior of the store,

and it was closed down for several months.  And I'll

never forget one day the old screen door kind of

creaked open, and this ancient Navajo lady came into

the store, as it was all being torn apart, and she kind

of looked around and her comment to me was, "You make

like the old way."  And of course I didn't have many

photographs of the interior, so I didn't have much to

go on.  So my ears perked up right away, and I said,

"Yeah, we're puttin' it back like the old way.  Do you

remember it in the old form?"  "Yeah, yeah, pretty

much."  So we had many meetings after that, and she

described to me in great detail how it was on the

inside of that store, so we were able, kind of using

this oral history, to go back and reconstruct a lot of

the interior of that building, absent any old

photographs and stuff.  So it was just kind of a

wonderful experience to have her recall all of that.


   Steiger:  What was her name?


   Babbitt:  Lew, I don't recall right now.  I probably

have it somewhere.


   Steiger:  Did you actually make a recording of the

conversations?  Or it was just she would sit in there

and talk to you?


   Babbitt:  She'd just come by and we'd drink coffee,

and I'd ask her questions:  kind of like you're

prompting me, I would prompt her.  She had a remarkable

memory for things, just remarkable.


   Steiger:  I wonder why that original design was

cooked up, or why your grandfather did that.


   Babbitt:  Oh, I think it was easy.  You know, Frank

McNitt, who wrote probably the best book about the

history of Indian trading, remarked upon that Tuba

Trading Post in the book there, and he said, "You know,

it is certainly one of the most substantially-built and

largest of all the trading posts throughout the

Southwest," which is true.  If you look around, most of

'em are kind of dry-laid or it's mud and stone.  The

old ones were pretty small and pretty insubstantial--

but that was a big one.  So Frank McNitt in his book

said, "Well, it's this big, imposing, eight-sided

building.  Kind of looks like a fortress.  Undoubtedly

the architecture derives from the octagonal school

found in the Hudson River Valley in New York."  And I

read that, and I just couldn't believe it, because it

is so obvious.  My grandfather and his partner Preston

were just building in the local architectural

vernacular of what the local people built--eight sides,

like a big hogan.

     But during the restoration, another interesting

thing happened.  As we reconstructed and reopened the

east-facing entryway, on either side of the double

doors there, painted on the walls, were a couple of

Hopi wicker plaque designs that the Hopi women make.

And one design was a black hawk, and the other was a

butterfly, on either side of the door.  And through the

years they had become very faded, and the paint was

chipped and so forth.  So during the restoration, my

inclination was to just clean 'em off, get 'em off

there, get it back to its sort of pristine condition.

But then before I did that, I thought, "Well, maybe I

should find out about these first."  So we have a Hopi

lady who's worked for us for many, many years there,

and of course the Hopi village nearby, Moenkopi, is

part of our customer base up there.  I mean, the Hopis

also used that store.  So I got the Hopi lady, Loy Coin

[phonetic spelling], who had been a clerk in the store

for a long time.  I brought her out to the front porch

and I said, "Loy, we're gonna erase those Hopi patterns

from the front of the trading post.  But before we do,

I wanted to ask you do they have any meaning to you or

anything?"  And she looked at me like, "Golly, this guy

doesn't know anything!"  And she just looked at me--not

in a condescending way, but in a way to say, "You

certainly should know better about this."  She said,

"I'll tell you this:  No self-respecting Hopi would

ever approach a giant Navajo dwelling unless they had a

sign or a symbol or something that they were welcome to

come there.  Those were put there for the benefit of

the Hopi people, to make them know that it was okay for

them to come there."  So after that story, what could I

do?  So the symbols stayed there by the front door, and

in fact we freshened 'em up and kind of repainted them

and so forth.  You know, I think generally she's

probably right.  I'll bet there are--at least among the

old-time Hopis down there at Moenkopi--a certain sense

of foreboding, coming around those big Navajo

structures.


   Cole:  Did you employ a lot of Navajos and Hopis in

your trading posts?


   Babbitt:  Oh, exclusively.  That's the only labor

pool to draw from up there.  So that's the entire labor

force.  Even in later years, certainly seeing the

handwriting on the wall with what was happening with

the trading post business, it became harder and harder

and harder to get Anglo people to even fill the

trader's position.  So we started employing Navajos and

Hopis as traders.  And I'm not sure that that really

happened hardly anywhere else on the reservation.  I

think the first one--he's still with us and still

trading--a Navajo guy, Leo Lee.  And I thought it would

be a good thing to start working the local people into

these stores, and Leo started for us as a young man as

the, well, first assistant, but then the trader at

Cedar Ridge.  And then he moved over to Red Lake and

has been there ever since.  Very accomplished and very

capable--I would say "young" man, although that's

probably not true anymore.

     And it reminds me of a couple of stories, and I'll

just talk here until you stop me.  Leo comes from an

old-time Navajo family, really out behind Red Lake.

And during the years that I supervised the trading

posts, every springtime we liked to get everybody

together and go on a trip somewhere and do something

for a day or two.  Maybe it was just a picnic or

whatever.  So one time I was asking Leo, "You know,

where would you like to go for the annual outing?"  And

he said, "Well, let me think about it, and I'll come

back to you."  And so he came back a few days later and

he said, "You know, my grandmother is really old now,

and she has never been very far away from Red Lake.

She always sees on TV, trains.  And she's fascinated by

trains.  She would really love to ride a train.  She

has never been on a train in her whole life."  So we

took that summer and took all the employees and went up

to Durango, including Granny Lee, and got on the little

stream train there, and it was absolutely a riot!

sitting there on the little steam train, goin' up to

Silverton with old, old, Mrs. Lee sitting there in her

velveteen skirt, and her eyes were as big as saucers!

the whole time.  But anyway, just a little side story

about Leo Lee.

     Over at Hopi, a very different proposition over

there because, really, the Hopis wanted Hopis to work

there.  And we had working in one of the other stores,

a young man, Tommy Canyon.  And Tommy was half Navajo

and half Hopi.  His mother was Hopi.  And he had been

raised as a Hopi and spoke Hopi, so I thought he would

be perfect over there, and so I put him in as the

trader there at Kykotsmovi, and he did real well over

there, in spite of being never 100 percent accepted by

the Hopis, because he was not fully Hopi.  But he

functioned and still runs the store for the village

over there at Kykotsmovi.  Very capable, very good

young man.

     And again I say, I don't think, at least in the

seventies or eighties, there really were any other

trading posts that were really employing Native

Americans in the trader kind of supervisor role.  But

it worked very well for us.


   Cole:  Did Babbitts have any kind of employee

benefits, like insurance or profit sharing or anything

like that?


   Babbitt:  You bet, all of the above.  Yup.  And

those, of course, extended to all the employees in the

trading posts also.


   Cole:  Okay, I'd like to ask you a couple of

questions about the United Indian Traders Association.

Were you a member, or Babbitts?


   Babbitt:  Well, Babbitts was.  I never participated

in that.  And really, during the years that I was

involved with our family's trading posts, it was pretty

much inactive, during the late seventies and through

the eighties.  I don't even know if they ever had a

board meeting.  I guess they did once in a while, but

really, it was very active in the sixties, and then got

extremely activated by the Federal Trade Commission

inquiries into credit practices on the reservation.

And at the time, a relative of mine, Ralph Bilby, was

involved in supervising the trading posts, and he was

involved in the United Indian Traders quite heavily at

the time.  But after that, my brother Paul supervised

our trading posts for some years.  He was, I think, a

director of the United Indian Traders, attended maybe a

few meetings over in Gallup and Farmington, but really

wasn't that active.  And then by my time, it was

completely inactive, and I think disbanded.  I'm not

sure when they really sort of kind of went into

retirement, but my sense is it was probably either in

the late 1980s or early 1990s.


   Cole:  Do you know if Babbitts were members of the

UITA when it--I think it started in 1934?


   Babbitt:  Yeah, I'm sure we were, although the

organization I think was very heavily slanted toward

the New Mexico traders, the eastern end of the

reservation, and they really were the ones who started

it and always had kind of a dominating influence on the

board.


   Cole:  I was kind of curious--Bill Richardson told

us that I think maybe his dad was over in the Tuba

area.


   Babbitt:  Yeah, that's probably right.


   Cole:  And I don't know if you've ever heard of

this, but in the 19-teens there was actually some kind

of a Western Traders Association.  Have you ever heard

anything about that?


   Babbitt:  No, never have.


   Cole:  He has a photograph from about 1918 with

about six or seven traders, I think, at the Tuba City

Trading Post, and said there was some kind of a....


   Babbitt:  Trade group or whatever.


   Cole:  Trading group on the western side.  That's

the only time I'd heard of that.


   Babbitt:  No, I'm not aware of that at all.


   Cole:  How do you think the Babbitt Brothers Company

was perceived by other traders around the reservation?


   Babbitt:  Oh, you know, I think in different ways by

different people, because it had such a large role in

both having a lot of stores out there, and also in

being a wholesale supplier.  I'm sure a lot of people

took a pretty dim view of it, and probably said, "They

charge too much," and on and on.  I don't know any of

that, really, first-hand so much, but I just suspect

that that was probably true--much in the way that today

a lot of people would have bad feelings toward Wal-Mart

or the big guy now, you know, whoever that might be.

So I guess that's pretty much as far as I could comment

on that.


   Cole:  And then when you were in the trading posts,

did you have any dealings with pawn at all?


   Babbitt:  Yeah.  I mean, we were still, at a couple

of the trading posts, taking pawn.  But by then it had

become quite a bit of a bookkeeping chore to keep track

of it, because there were new and probably much needed

regulations regulating all of that--some of that

growing out of the 1970s FTC proceedings and hearings

on the reservation.  But I always thought that it was

kind of a unique part of the business.  We have old

photographs that show the pawn vaults, and if nothing

else, to be able to show people that aspect of the old-

time Indian trading I thought was a neat thing.  We

tried to bring it back at Tuba for a number of years,

maybe in the late 1980s, but it just, in the end

result, probably wasn't worth the time or the effort to

do it anymore.  And anymore, I don't really know of

hardly anybody, outside of a few people in Gallup, that

are doing it anymore.  Even the local people here in

Flagstaff who were doing it have now gone out of

business.  So I think it's an awfully tough thing

economically, as well as the notion that you're taking

people's goods and holding them, and if they're

unclaimed, you're selling off people's heirlooms or

treasures or whatever.  It has kind of a negative cast

to the whole thing.


   Cole:  And then what do you know of the FTC

hearings?


   Babbitt:  Oh, I wasn't in Flagstaff for those years.

I was away at school and then working.  So I don't know

much more than I've read in the books or in the

newspapers about it.  There clearly were big credit

abuses going on--widespread across the reservation.

And something clearly needed to be done, and I think

that the hearings were very instrumental in bringing

reform to a lot of that.  I'm glad it happened, myself.

I think it was a good thing.  I think a lot of the

traders really felt very differently about it, felt

very threatened and felt very much under the

microscope, if you will.  But no question in my mind,

both with the credit system, the pawn system, with this

whole notion of having people's Social Security checks

held at a trading post, and then signed over on the

spot and taken as payment for accounts.  I mean, all of

that stuff was not good, and it's good that they put a

stop to it, I think.


   Steiger:  It's interesting that you say that,

because we haven't been hearing that very often.  We

haven't heard very many people say that the regulations

were good, and all that was good.  And maybe just a

little more--I mean, not naming any names--but if you

could describe the nature of the abuses.


   Babbitt:  Sure.  Well, you know, I think number one,

just tying a customer to an account at a given store

and limiting their freedom to choose, the little

trading posts, by the time this was going on, were

charging already much higher prices than the Indians

could get by going off the reservation, simply because

they had to, to try to stay alive.  They couldn't buy

on the same basis as a Wal-Mart or a K-Mart, so they

had to charge a lot higher prices to begin with.  But

then to say to a credit customer who had a credit

account with you, "When your check comes in, because

we're the post office, we're gonna hold that, and you

have to pick it up in person," and then when they come

to pick it up, you have a pen ready and you say, "Oh,

by the way, you have a balance on your account of $300.

This check is for $310.  Sign it over to the trading

post, and we'll give you $10 change," just seems like

not a good way to conduct business.


   Steiger:  So that was pretty common?


   Babbitt:  Extremely common, extremely common.  And

then the interest rates that were charged on pawn

accounts and so forth were probably legal, but they

were very high.  I mean, very high.  And so there were

a lot of those kinds of things that were going on, that

I think in fairness to the Indians, needed to be

changed.

     And I know that most of the traders really

resented the FTC coming in.  You got this whole overlay

of beyond the hearings themselves, just this thing, the

resentment of the big government and the lawyers coming

in and all of that.  So I would suspect that you would

hear a bad story from most of the other traders.


   Steiger:  I'd say the common story that we heard

was, "Well, a lot of people like to pawn things because

they wanted to put 'em someplace for safekeeping, and

the trading post was a good place.  It was like the

bank, the safety deposit vault."  And what we heard was

that people would trade their treasures to keep their

relatives from gettin' ahold of 'em.  And that most of

the traders would never have sold 'em, they would hold

onto it forever anyway.  And so the complaint was that

with the regulations, it outlawed it, and then those

people went off reservation, and then did lose all

their old stuff.  Wouldn't you say that (Cole:  Yeah,

pretty common.) was about a synopsis?  At least the

common trader point of view of what went on.  So it's

interesting to hear somebody say that.


   Cole:  And a lot of times they'd refer to it as

their "Visa card."


   Babbitt:  Well, certainly there were very ethical

people throughout the reservation who operated in a

good way, and who didn't sell off, even though legally

they could have sold off the old pawn and stuff.  And

certainly there probably were cases where they banked

it for whatever reason, or put it there for

safekeeping, I don't know.  But it seems a little far

fetched to say that the whole system was built on

trying to keep their treasures and heirlooms away from

their greedy relatives or whatever.  (several chuckle)


   Steiger:  It wasn't put exactly like that, but kind

of!  What we hear more is the philosophical issue--I

mean, where it comes into the Navajo culture is more

socialistic, where you're supposed to share all of your

wealth with all your relatives.  No so much greed, but

just that we heard it explained to us that this was the

way for people to kind of circumvent that in a tactful

way.  I don't know if that was true or not.


   Babbitt:  Well, you have to also remember that the

FTC hearings were initiated in large part by the Navajo

Tribe itself, by the people themselves.  And I don't

think that would have happened unless there were

widespread abuses going on.  I just know there were

abuses going on.


   Cole:  Jim, what are some of your favorite memories

associated with the trading business?


   Babbitt:  Oh, you know, just maybe some of the

anecdotes, some of which I've related to you, dealing

with the people themselves--both the people who worked

with us as traders, and the local people, Native

American people.  Just wonderful stories.

     I remember one time in the mid-1980s.  I related

to you that I am a big fan of old historic buildings.

On my way out to Oraibi, I used to cross the bridge

there at Leupp and I used to look off toward the bridge

there, and see that wonderful big red sandstone

building just kind of melting away into the desert.  I

used to entertain fantasies of re-doing that, because

that used to be one of our trading posts, the Sunrise

Trading Post.  And it operated probably up until about

1985 or so, and then it was kind of abandoned and left

there.  So I approached the Navajo Tribe and the

chapter there at Leupp on several occasions, to see if

I couldn't get a lease renewed there, and at one point

they were actually going to do it, and we were going to

rehab the building.  And to prevent further vandalism

and stuff, we sent a crew of cowboys from the ranch

there, and put a fence around it to prevent people from

carrying off more stuff while we negotiated.  Well, in

the end result, it didn't turn out, didn't happen.

     But in the course of that, I remember one thing

about going to a chapter meeting.  There was very hot

debate among the local Navajos as to whether they ought

to lease it out again and have it restored.  And if

they wanted to do that, was Babbitts the right people

to do the lease with?  And the debate was hot and

heavy, some pro and some con, and carryin' on.  This

old Navajo lady at one point raised her hand and kind

of walked up to the front of the room and she said,

"Well, in [my] opinion, Babbitts were okay, we could do

the lease with 'em."  And I felt very good about that.

And then somebody said, "Well, what makes you say that

they're okay?  I mean, after all...."  And she said,

"Well, back in the forties, terrible snowstorm out at

Leupp.  Everybody was stranded, the livestock was all

stranded."  It was before the days when the National

Guard flew hay in to the animals and stuff.  And she

said, "Old Babbitt"--meaning C. J. Babbitt--"sent some

grocery trucks from the grocery store at Winslow, up

there to Leupp in the midst of this big snowstorm and

blizzard and stuff, for the local folks around the

Sunrise Trading Post.  So Babbitts, they're okay."  And

I think the lease eventually would have been approved,

but we never really got it going.  Whatever.

     But it's kind of those kind of stories that are so

fun.  I mentioned our trader Leo Lee also.  We were

trying to do a similar thing in the midst of the

Bennett Freeze, up at Cedar Ridge, trying to get a

lease renewal that would allow us to remodel or expand

that store.  And so the Cedar Ridge Chapter of Navajos

had their meeting on Sundays, and so you'd have to go

before the chapter.  So I always wanted the trader

there to go with me to the chapter meeting.  So I would

go up there on Sundays and sit through these long

chapter meetings, and it never worked out, either,

after many trips up there.

     But the first time I will never forget, going into

this chapter meeting with Leo Lee, who was well-known

in the community--he's the trader, after all, at the

trading post.  Two of us go in about noon on a Sunday

to the chapter meeting.  Dozens of local folks in the

chapter house there, seated all around.  And we walk

into the meeting and walk up the front aisle there and

take a seat near the front of the whole chapter.  And I

remember being very worried, because we walked in and

walked up there and sat down.  Leo Lee, the trader,

apparently didn't know anybody in the whole chapter

meeting.  He didn't say hi to a soul!  And I thought,

"Gee, he's not gettin' around very much in the

community."  This is bad for us, because the trader

there should be an integral part of the community.  So

after we'd been sitting there for three or four

minutes, waiting for the chapter meeting to begin, but

only after three or four minutes, he got up and went

all around the chapter house, shaking hands and

greeting people.  And I thought that was the strangest

thing.  So after this long chapter meeting, I got him

aside and I said, "Leo, what's the deal here?  You

acted like you didn't even know any of those people for

the longest time."  And he said, "Oh, no, Navajo

culture, it is not polite, when you first encounter

somebody, even if you know them very well, it's not

polite to go running up and shake hands with 'em right

away.  You sit there for a while, and after you've been

there and they know you're there and so forth, that's

when you go and say hello to them."  Unlike us, you

know, who we see somebody and we run over to 'em and

shake their hand, or slap 'em on the back.  It's a very

different and much more subtle thing.

     So learning those kinds of things about other

cultures, for me, was also a very wonderful thing.


   Cole:  Did you ever learn to speak Navajo?


   Babbitt:  Only a little bit here and there.  I

believe most of the traders who have learned it

fluently have probably been married to Navajos, or have

spent a very long time in a trading post environment.

Very difficult language, obviously.  During my time,

there was a wonderful guy here at NAU, who taught

Navajo language, Ervie Goosen [phonetic spelling], and

I remember taking it here, and going to the language

lab.  He would have these tapes and play it through the

headphones in the language lab.  And the exercise was

that you were to mimic the sound of Navajo, repeat it

back.  He always gave me very high marks for being able

to repeat what I had heard with a very good accent and

very fluently.  Of course I had not the foggiest idea

of what I was saying!  But I had a great accent and

could repeat it back.  And I never really got a very

good handle on the Navajo language.

     Navajos like to name people who are familiar to

them.  I'll just tell you a couple of little name

stories here.  And they came up with a name for my

grandfather, C. J. Babbitt, in the midst of his sort of

great expansion in the trading post business.  They

called him Naalyéhé_ání, which means sort of roughly translated, "many trading posts."  That's how they identified him, as Old
 
Mr. Many Trading Posts.

     The other funny name story that I can recall was

being out at Red Lake, and one day going into the old

trading store there.  There were four or five youngish,

maybe in their twenties or thirties, Navajo ladies in

there, and when I came into the store they were all

just giggling and giggling over in the corner--laughing

and kind of looking down at the ground.  So Jerry

Norris, who was the trader in there at the time, said,

"Well, these ladies are very curious about you."  And I

said, "Oh, is that right?  Why would that be?"  And he

said, "Well, let me introduce you to them."  And so he

got them and they came over very shyly and they were

still all giggling and stuff.  And he said, "Jim, I'd

like you to meet your cousins, Eloise Babbitt, Elsie

Babbitt, and Betty Babbitt."  And I didn't know what to

make of all this, 'cause they were all laughing, and he

was laughing.  He'd called them my cousins.  Well, of

course the background to the story is when back in the

old days, say in the twenties or even before that, the

U.S. Indian Service, or the BIA maybe by then, when

they were putting all the Navajo children in school and

teaching them English, they were requiring all the

Navajos to take anglicized or English names.  And who

did they take their names from when they did that?

Well, from whoever was around a lot, or who was

familiar to them.  So here at Red Lake my grandfather

was around there all the time, so they took Babbitt,

that became their name.  So to this day there is a very

great clan of Navajos around Red Lake, they're all

named Babbitt.  So when I go up there, I feel very much

at home.


   Cole:  What do you think the future of business with

Native Americans will be?


   Babbitt:  Well, it more and more will become their

own future, their own business.  They will become the

entrepreneurs in whatever kinds of business might

develop out there.  It won't be owned by outsiders off

the reservation anymore.  And the types of business--

certainly the Indian trading business, the way it was

as we have discussed, almost entirely a thing of the

past.  But I think you will see, eventually, more and

more Navajo-owned enterprise out there, Navajo

entrepreneurs, and more and more commerce out there.

     Now, as much as Indian trading is fading away, I

would tell you something else.  Maybe this is a little

more controversial, but it's something that I really

believe, at least with respect to the Navajo.  I think

they will undergo increasingly a lot of pressure to

change their own lifestyles and stuff.  And I do

believe that their livestock-based economy, that is

dependent on sheep and cattle and horses and stuff,

will become a thing of the past.  I likewise kind of

see another trend out there.  Because their life was

based on sheep and the land out there was so poor, and

they needed these large, large tracts of land to graze

sheep, their lifestyle or their way of living, they

lived in a very dispersed pattern, over large areas of

land, separated from one another by a long ways--unlike

the Hopis who are all in little pueblos or villages.  I

think that as that livestock-based lifestyle of the

Navajo goes away, I think that settlement pattern will

likewise go away, and with the Navajo you will see more

and more congregation into town living.  And I think

the old Navajo way of life is not long at all for the

future.  And I think you see that change going on right

now.


   Cole:  What about the arts and crafts industry?  Do

you see that waning too?


   Babbitt:  I do, yeah, I sure do, for a variety of

reasons.  In the jewelry business, of course, it's the

knockoffs and the imitations and the stuff that is

produced overseas.  It's just killing the

silversmithing and the jewelry business--other than at

the real high end.  There will be jewelers and

silversmiths still producing good work at the real high

end, the real expensive and kind of creative level.

But as far as just kind of the mass production of

silver jewelry and so forth, that's rapidly, if not

already, kind of a thing of the past.  Weaving?  You

know, there's maybe another generation or so in which

Navajo women might be content to sit at home for days

on end in the wintertime, weaving a rug, and then sell

it for--you know what they sell it for.  But those days

are numbered, clearly, in my mind, as the Navajos kind

of change their way of life, and as they become more

dependent on wage labor, just like us.  I think

eventually you're going to see that fading out.  And

I'm sorry to say that, but that's just kind of what I

see in the future.


   Cole:  And one thing that popped to my mind:  Has

Babbitts, in recent times, had any difficulties

obtaining leases for the five stores you have?


   Babbitt:  No, I wouldn't say difficulty.  I would

say that there were protracted negotiations, and often

we would operate a store without a lease.  And if you

just understand the way things go out there, time is

different out there, in a way, than it is with us.  And

in our company, in the past twenty years or so, we have

brought in outsiders to run the company, and it was

probably the most frustrating part of running our

entire enterprise, was in trying to run those

reservation businesses, because people trained in our

way of doing business--you know, it's aggressive, it's

"gotta do it right now," and "no time to wait," and

"you gotta be productive every minute of every day."

And it used to drive people crazy to have an

appointment on the reservation to talk about a lease

and go out there and have nobody show up from the other

end of things, or not show up for two or three hours

after the appointed time.  But they have a different

perception of business and time, and we just have to

kind of understand that.  So I wouldn't say there were

difficulties, per se, with the leases.  They became

more advantageous, as they should have been, to the

tribes--that is, the lease fees got higher as the time

went on.  And the term of the lease got shorter, but

you know, that's the way it should have been, I think.


   Cole:  Is there anything else you'd like to add?


   Babbitt:  Yeah, I want to tell you another story

about bureaucracy and the sense of time and

responsibility and stuff.  We are great bureaucrats,

but the Navajos learned bureaucracy very well from us.

And I remember one time with the Bureau of Indian

Affairs, attempting to negotiate a right-of-way for

Tuba City on our private property.  The road within our

private property was a Bureau of Indian Affairs road,

and we needed to make a curb cut for a new entryway

into the trading post.  So in Tuba City is the local

Bureau of Indian Affairs Roads Office, staffed entirely

by Navajos.  And I went there to inquire of where did I

get a permit to make a curb cut in the BIA's road.  And

they said, "Well, you have to go to the BIA Roads

Office in Gallup."  So I called up and made an

appointment over there, and drove over there one day to

make the application.  So I went in the office and the

person I had the appointment with, a Navajo man, of

course wasn't there that day, he was out on travel.  So

I said to the secretary there, "It's a very simple

matter, really.  I'm just trying to get a right-of-way

permit to make a curb cut in the road in Tuba City."

And she said, "Well, wait a minute.  Maybe there's

somebody who can help you."  She went in the back room,

and out came the assistant roads director, also a

Navajo, in the bureaucracy of the BIA there.  And he

said, "Well, I'm not sure about this.  I don't know if

I have authority to do this or not."  And I said,

"Well, I think you do.  I think the authority is here,

that's what they told me in Tuba City."  So he hemmed

and hawed over it for a while, and finally was reaching

in his pocket to get his pen out to sign the permit,

and I thought, "Hallelujah! after driving all the way

over here and waiting for hours, and having this guy

agonize about it."  Well, then somebody else came in

the office and they said to him, "I don't think I'd

sign that if I were you.  I'm not sure if the authority

is with your position or not, to sign this permit."  So

I'm thinkin', "Oh, dear, this is terrible."  So he ends

up sending me back to Tuba City.  He said, "We've had a

big reorganization in the BIA, and authority for all

right-of-way permits has gone back to Tuba City."  So I

go back to Tuba City.

     Anyway, to make a very long story short,

eventually we got the right-of-way permit, but the

Navajo people have learned the art of bureaucracy and

bureaucratic stalling from us, and have expanded it and

refined it to a high degree.


   Cole:  Do you have any questions, Lew?


   Steiger:  I've got a little one, and then one that's

a little bit broader.  The little one is just for me.

I wanted to ask again about the swastika--what it meant

to the Navajo before World War II and Hitler and all

that--that symbol that shows up in the storm pattern.


   Babbitt:  Well, I don't know if there's a definitive

answer to that at all, but as it has been related to me

through the years by both Anglos and by Navajos, that

storm pattern rug, as I had alluded to earlier, had

elements in it from the Navajo creation story, and so I

went back and looked in the literature as best I could,

and asked some of the older Navajos what that story

entailed.  And it is really remarkable, that story is

not very far different from our own.  That is, in the

beginning with them there was a great flood, also.  And

they didn't build an ark, but they were scurrying

around, looking for some way to survive the deluge, and

they were in the vicinity somewhere of the Little

Colorado and Big Colorado Rivers, and the water was

rising and rising and rising.  And so they found some

big cottonwood logs and they lashed them together in

the form of a cross--these great big logs--and they

made a big raft out of it, and they got out into this

deluge and survived the deluge by having this raft.

But as they came into the big Colorado River somewhere,

there was a big whirlpool.  And as they went down, they

got caught in this whirlpool, and the big cottonwood

log raft started whirling and whirling and whirling,

and that is the symbolism of the whirling logs.  They

eventually survived it.

     There's another little interesting kind of facet

of that.  Navajos never liked or would touch fish at

all.  And I never understood that, because you see

sometimes, or in the store you'd try to bring in, I

don't know, canned salmon or whatever.  No way would

the old-timers ever do that.  And the reason being,

according to the way it was related to me, during the

deluge, the fish ate the Navajos that fell into the

water, and so it was very bad taboo ever to eat fish

for them.  But that's the whirling log story--at least

the version that I have always heard.

     Some of the other symbolism on that old-time storm

pattern:  there are four squares on the outside, those

are the four mountains, the sacred mountains, that

surround the reservation.  And they're connected to the

Place of Emergence of the Navajo people in the center

of that rug, by lightning bolts.  And then you have

this whirling log from their creation story on either

end of that.  So I don't know, undoubtedly, like the

trader wanted, [it] made a good story to tell to rug

buyers, if nothing else.


   Steiger:  That was a good one.  And my big question

is....  This is really big.  It seemed like the Great

Society was a watershed for--or I don't know if

"watershed" [is the correct term].  It was a

significant event for both the Navajos and for the

traders, just in the form of the welfare that the tribe

began to get.  I wonder....  I don't know if you care

to even get into this.  I wonder if you'd care to

comment on that, how that worked out for 'em, and if

you have any thoughts on how it's working for them

today--just the welfare system as you know it.


   Babbitt:  Well, of course there were other forms

going on before the Great Society, going all the way

back (Steiger:  To FDR.) to the New Deal.  And that's

when it really started with Social Security payments

and death benefits and all of that.  You know, even

before then, they were wards of the government, in a

way.  You know, in a way, they don't even own their

land.  I mean, they talk about sovereignty and all of

that, but here they live on trust land.  The whole huge

Navajo Reservation is held in trust by the federal

government, after all.  And I think that's been really

a hard thing.  But of course the great fear is that if

they are left on their own, to their own devices, we

will take such advantage of them that they just won't

have a chance.  So, I mean one thing the Great Society

did spawn out there was the creation of legal services

and the DNA and so forth.  And of course that in turn

started off the FTC inquiries, and a lot of other kind

of legal stuff out there.  I think generally that was

all very positive.  I think that was all good stuff.

But the dependence on the federal government, I don't

know how to really answer that.  I mean, it has been

necessary, up to a certain point, and up to a certain

time.  I would think at some point or another, that

will have to change.  I don't know when that happens or

how that happens.  But you look at why economic

development can't happen out there, or has not

happened, really:  it is virtually impossible, if you

can't own and sell real estate, to have any kind of

tradition of economic development.

     Have you heard about the little experiment up at

Kayenta?


   Steiger:  No.


   Babbitt:  Well, somehow or another up there, they

have put that township of land there into some kind of

different status, where they actually can do more than

lease the property.  They can sell it.  Anyway, the

tribe has agreed to a little experiment there.  I think

economic activity there is really booming.  And I don't

know the ins and outs of that, but I think eventually

the federal government has got to kind of let loose,

let it happen out there for the people themselves.


   Cole:  Okay?


   Steiger:  Yeah...  (inaudible)


   Cole:  Well, thank you, Jim.


   Babbitt:  You bet.


   Steiger:  That was great.


   Cole:  That was a good interview.


   Babbitt:  Good!


   Steiger:  Outstanding.  (aside about needing room

tone for editing)


   Cole:  You were telling us a little bit more about

the Pendleton blankets.


   Babbitt:  Yeah.  It's been a long-standing

relationship for us.  I told you about going up to the

mill and having this special 100th anniversary blanket

made in 1989.  Well, while we were at the mill, I like

old history and so forth, so I asked them if they had

any archives on site, and they said, "Well, sure, what

do you want to know?"  I said, "Well, how long,

exactly, have we been distributing and selling your

products?"  So they said, "Well, I don't know, we'll go

see."  So they went in the basement and dug around a

little bit and came back with an old salesman's book

from when he used to make the rounds down in Arizona.

And it was before the turn of the century, and here was

all of our trading posts and our Flagstaff store in his

little book, and how many blankets they bought, and so

on and so forth.  So it reminded me of a great little

story of much more recent times.

     I mentioned to you that traditionally the Hopis

and some of the Navajos will buy those Pendleton

blankets as burial blankets.  So up at the Tuba Trading

Post, starting in the fifties, we had a trader there,

Arlis Cornelison [phonetic spelling], and Arlis and his

wife Winnie were the traders at Tuba all during the

fifties and sixties and on into the seventies.  Arlis'

son, Lendell [phonetic spelling], who was born in Tuba

City, remained there even after his parents retired and

moved to Page, and Lendell was the postmaster there for

many years.  I think he's just probably recently

retired, Lendell Cornelison.  But anyway, after his

parents retired, they moved up to Page and lived in

retirement up there for quite a long time.  Arlis, the

father, passed away, I suppose it would be around 1990

or thereabouts, and so I went up to the funeral, which

was held in a church up there in Page.  And it was just

quite an amazing site for several reasons.  Arlis was

laid in the entryway to this church for viewing, as

people came into the church--they could, you know, view

Arlis.  And he was wrapped in a Pendleton blanket, much

in the tradition of the Navajos.  And so here he is, in

the casket, wrapped in a Pendleton blanket.  And it was

very curious to watch, as people would come in and pass

the casket and go into the church.  The Anglo people

would come into the church and pay their respects to

Arlis and then go be seated in the church.  I would

watch the Navajo people come into the church, and

because of their taboo with death and so forth, they

wouldn't look at the coffin or Arlis or anything, and

they would just edge their way around, as far as they

could get, and still get into the church.  So that was

fine, that was kind of a nice way to give Arlis a send-

off.  But then after the funeral was said, his family

had one of the old green Navajo wagons, and they put

Arlis' casket in the back of the wagon, and went a mile

or two through the middle of Page and out to the

cemetery, and everybody walked along, following the old

green wagon.  Since Arlis had been a trader for so many

years there in Tuba, he had so many Navajo friends that

this procession of Navajos following the casket on the

wagon must have been a couple miles long, of Navajo

people.  And I thought it was just such a poignant

thing to see him.  The Pendleton story reminded me of

it.  But I thought, "What a wonderful way to be sent

off, with all of your friends following along."

     Those old green wagons:  Through the years, they

came through our wholesale supply house here in

Flagstaff, and then out to the reservation.  And

through the years they would come in here on the

railroad from two or three different makers in the

Midwest:  Moline Wagon Company, and John Deere Wagon

company, and there were three or four others.  But

through the years we must have brought into Flagstaff

and then taken to the reservation thousands of those

old green wagons.  And you know, it's like anything,

what you're used to, you don't value very much.  So

after they quit making them, what did I want in the

worst way, but one of those old green wagons!  Of

course now you can't hardly find one anymore.  But

[that's] pretty interesting.

     I did want to digress a moment and tell you

another story.  I've been talking before about federal

regulation and the BIA and bureaucracy and all of that.

We tend to think in a way that that federal presence

and federal regulation is sort of a new thing, but in

fact it really isn't.  My grandfather, as I'd mentioned

to you, started in the Indian trading business in Red

Lake in 1891.  He liked it, so he kind of expanded

fairly rapidly, and with his partner, Sam Preston, got

the old Tuba Trading Post right at the turn of the

century, and then they built this new building about

1902.  Well, along at the same time, they got a third

trading post over at Willow Springs, which is up under

the Echo Cliffs there, kind of beyond Moenave.  And at

Willow Springs there was a band of San Juan Southern

Paiutes, so that was a Paiute trading post.  So by 1901

or 1902, they had three trading posts.  But even in

those days, trade was regulated by the U.S. Indian

Service.  And whoever was sitting back at the traders'

licensing desk in Washington saw the third trading

application come through for Babbitts, and he said,

"Nope, can't have this," because to him, back there, he

thought they were trying to develop a monopoly.  And he

thought if they could get a monopoly on the Indian

trade [END TAPE 1, SIDE B; BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A] they

would raise prices and cheat the Indians and so forth.

So they wrote a letter to my grandfather, and I still

have a copy in the files, and it says, "We will not

allow this monopolistic practice to go on.  At the

most, you may operate two trading posts, but a third

one is out of the question.  So you have to either

divest yourself of it, or close it down."  So they

looked at their three trading posts and decided that

Willow Springs was the most marginal, and they closed

it down.  And it is, to this day, a ruin in the desert

out there below the Paiute settlement up in the Echo

Cliffs.  Of course after that, they did kind of think

the better of that, and they started allowing more than

one or two trading posts in common ownership.  But

there was a time when they just wouldn't hear of it, so

we had to close down and let go.


   [END OF INTERVIEW]