In 1878, a decade after Navajos returned from the Long Walk and their forced imprisonment at Fort Sumner, John Lorenzo Hubbell established a trading post at Ganado, Arizona. He would come to oversee a trading post empire and influence the quality and popularity of Navajo weaving.
Since 1967, Hubbell Trading Post has been a National Historic Site. If visitors put blue booties on over their shoes, they can tour his large adobe house, step on stunning Navajos rugs and see interior furnishings as he left them more than a century ago.
Best of all, the Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site is still an active trading post where I saw canned beans, laundry soap, canned spaghetti and shoelaces on shelves. The current trader wasn’t buying weavings, but the post had modern Navajo rugs for sale with patterns from former trading posts like Crystal, Wide Ruins, Teec Nos Pos, Two Gray Hills and samples of the Ganado Red style with intricate diamond motifs, which Hubbell helped to create.
Hubbell “encouraged local weavers to specialize their designs and improve their craft in order to better market their unique art to the outside world,” writes Paul D. Berkowitz in his book, “The Case of the Indian Trader.” Of all the traders who encouraged Navajo families to produce quality weavings as floor rugs, “Among the most recognized of these designs is the Ganado Red, characterized by black borders and contrasting use of brilliant red, black and grey geometric patterns,” Berkowitz said. Traders like Hubbell bought lambs, wool and ewes for mutton, but what they really sought were high quality Navajo weavings to sell to American customers via catalogs and department stores beginning with the arts and crafts movement from 1890 to the start of World War I in 1914.
Navajo weaving originated as wearing blankets, not floor rugs, but the arts and crafts movement highlighted a new style of American domestic architecture with oak hardwood floors, built-in wooden shelves and bookcases, few carpets and no heavy drapes or curtains. Native American arts and crafts were perfect for bungalow architecture popular in cities from coast to coast. Traders to the Navajo people successfully tapped into this burgeoning market and provided valuable employment opportunities to Native artisans who produced jewelry, baskets, painted pots and distinctive floor rugs. Hubbell Trading Post has historic examples of all this art as well as row after row of modern bracelets, necklaces, bolo ties and weavings with storm patterns, Yei figures, pictorials, eye dazzlers and rugs with the Tree of Life.
The Hubbell Post is a marvelous blend of old and new. In addition to vintage farming equipment, the grounds still have 10 sheep, 20 chickens and an aging domestic turkey. Park store manager Shoshana Martinez told me that every three months it gives away a bag worth $30 in goods to elderly Navajos, a practice that Hubbell would have approved of. He got along well with Navajo families, and he spoke Navajo, Spanish, English and Hopi. At one time, he owned 17 trading posts across the Navajo Nation including two in Hopi villages. He maintained a large warehouse in Winslow, Arizona, close to railroad tracks that allowed him to ship goods in and out.
“Lorenzo was a man of strong convictions; nothing about him was tentative, nothing he did was part or halfway,” writes Frank McNitt in, The Indian Traders. “He did not smoke and once said that he never tasted a drop of liquor, adding that, ‘Liquor of any sort is, to use the popular Mexican expression, buena por nada.’”
“The Hubbell Trading Post was a place of gathering, a place to get a job, to hang out, get the news and what not,” said interpreter and intern Keifer Begay, who gave my wife and me an excellent tour of the Hubbell home and its valuable rugs, pottery and baskets attached to the broad ponderosa pine vigas that stretch across the ceiling. “There was not a night in this house without a guest,” he told me as we looked into bedrooms on both sides of a central room.
Hubbell not only employed Navajos to build his house and other buildings, including a massive stone barn, but also to bring in materials for building construction. Navajos in turn got credit in the trading room known by the vernacular name of “the bullpen” where all the swapping and trading occurred around a warm potbellied stove in winter with free candy for children and tobacco for the men if the trader was generous, which Hubbell was.
“He was fair and honest, which he needed to be to have a trading post empire,” Begay said.
“It is said he created a market for Navajo rugs,” he said, and I believe him. Standing in the Hubbell home I saw rug after rug on the floor, a variety of tribal baskets on the ceiling, and oil paintings and drawings from the Anglo artists who befriended him and stayed on for days, weeks and months drawing the landscape and Native portraits. Eastern artist A.E. Burbank lived at the Hubbells’ on and off for 15 years and produced numerous pastel sketches from life of Navajo men and women. Artist Maynard Dixon came by personal invitation and three of his oil paintings remain.
The house contains a large, mounted bison head and an elk head. One side of the main room has Hopi cotton sashes draped over guest bedroom doorways and the other side has folded saddle blankets with intricate detailed beadwork over west-facing doorways. Books in the house include complete sets of the works of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. A small patio out back of the Hubbell home has additional doors opening into other rooms including a large kitchen.
Close to an adjacent creek is a guest hogan, an octagonal building traditional to the Navajo, made of cut stone with a doorway facing east. It was built in 1934 to honor J.L. Hubbell four years after his death. His son took over the business for two generations of Hubbell family members trading with Navajos and Hopis before purchase of the trading post by an act of Congress in 1965. Hubbell descendants regularly come to visit, approximately 150,000 artifacts on site require a full-time National Park Service curator to clean and care for them.
“This site is a hidden gem,” Begay tells me with a smile. I believe him.
In American Western history, we celebrate mountain men and cowboys, but we forget about the importance of Indian traders who helped bring Native peoples into a cash economy and who not only assisted with providing loans and gifts of essential food and supplies to families in need, but even helped to bury elders in a traditional manner. A trusted trader was a vital link for Native families struggling with the difficult transition to reservation life during the horse-and-wagon era. In the 21st century, almost all the old-time trading posts are gone.
To understand the importance of traders and unique styles of Navajo weaving, learn from Jackson Clark of Toh-Atin Gallery in Durango. He will speak about “Saving Navajo Weaving” as part of the Life-long Learning Series on campus on April 17. At the Center of Southwest Studies at FLC, schedule a visit to see the Durango Collection of rare historic Navajo, Hopi and Hispanic weavings curated and collected by Clark’s father and Mark Winter, who runs one of the last original trading posts on the Navajo Nation at Toadlena, New Mexico.
“The very first traders were patent outsiders, pioneers and settlers who came to the reservation to establish commerce with the Navajos. They became the critical link between two worlds,” writes Berkowitz.
Hubbell epitomizes the early traders. His house, barn and trading post represent a significant National Historic Site. Visit the Hubbell trading post but also go listen to Clark describe Navajo weaving. He has almost as many stories as he has rugs.
Andrew Gulliford is an award-winning author and editor and a professor of history at Fort Lewis College. He can be reached at gulliford_a@fortlewis.edu.
