 They were cultural centers, these trading posts on the Navajo reservation.
“A community place for people to meet, get their mail, maybe make a phone call if there was a phone in the area,” trader and manager Bill Malone says at Shush Yaz Trading Co. in Gallup, New Mexico.
Malone would know. Since 1961, he has traded at Lupton, Piñon, Keams Canyon and Hubbell before he came to Shush Yaz two years ago.
The first Navajo trading post was awarded to George Richardson at the despised Bosque Redondo reservation in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. In 1868, when the Navajo were allowed to return to their country in the Four Corners area, trading posts sprouted across Navajo country, often “located near water, and far from any commercial centers,” Gian Mercurio and Maxymilian L. Peschel write in The Guide to Trading Posts and Pueblos.
“Out here in this country,” trader John Lorenzo Hubbell said, “the Indian trader is everything from merchant to father confessor, justice of the peace, judge, jury, court of appeals, chief medicine man, and de facto czar of the domain over which he presides.”
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