No Dudes, Few Women: Life with a Navaho Range Rider

By Elizabeth Lester Ward and Frank Waters

The story of a woman’s life lived among her Navajo neighbors— a life lived with sparkling humor, and a sympathetic understanding of the natives, set against 25,000 square miles of cold, heat, wind, dust and loneliness. The author’s husband was a range-rider on the Navaho reservation during the stock reduction program of the Indian Bureau.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Release date: May 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839745324

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© Barakaldo Books 2020, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

NO DUDES

FEW WOMEN

BY

ELIZABETH WARD

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

FOREWORD 6

PREFACE 8

CHAPTER I—THE WAGON ROD 9

CHAPTER II—A FALSE START 16

CHAPTER III—LAND OF THE NAVAHO 23

CHAPTER IV—LIVING QUARTERS PROVIDED 31

CHAPTER V—THE TRADING POST 39

CHAPTER VI—HIM GOOD NAVAHO 48

CHAPTER VII—THE SQUAW DANCE 56

CHAPTER VIII—NAVAHO OBSTETRICS 65

CHAPTER IX—YEI-BI-CHAI 73

CHAPTER X—RELIEF AND ELECTIONS 81

CHAPTER XI—FANNY RED-HORSE 89

CHAPTER XII—A NAVAHO WEDDING 97

CHAPTER XIII—RESERVATION JUSTICE 105

CHAPTER XIV—LEAP-YEAR DAUGHTER 113

CHAPTER XV—THE FIRE DANCE 121

CHAPTER XVI—A TYPICAL SUNDAY 129

CHAPTER XVII—GRANDMA ETSLAH 137

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 144

DEDICATION

TO MY SON

IRVING ROSS STUART, USN

...because the boiler-room of a fighting ship is a far cry from the wide desert spaces...

FOREWORD

BY

LIFE WITH A NAVAHO RANGE RIDER,

FRANK WATERS

Who of us are not familiar with the romantic happy-ending of our favorite stock movie? The American Cowboy and the Girl of the Golden West married at last, and riding hand and hand into a technicolor sunset which outlines an Arizona cactus and a feathered Indian on the horizon.

This is the beginning of Elizabeth Ward’s engrossing autobiographical book. She did marry a lanky cowhand who reminded her of Gary Cooper. And she did ride away with him to work in the 25,000-square-mile Navaho Reservation in New Mexico.

It is a tribute to her courage and sense of humor that she survived all hardships and disillusionments; and to her sharp eye and tolerant understanding that she won through to a love for the land and The People. This is the real story of a real woman who had what it takes.

A one-room plank shanty, miles from the nearest neighbor. Weeks of aloneness. Cold, heat, wind, and dust. Indians banging on the door any hour. A race between a blizzard and the arrival of a new baby. All these, in a woman’s account of a woman’s life in the wilderness, vividly recall the pioneering life of our forefathers.

Yet the time is contemporaneous and significant: hardly a decade ago, during the Navaho stock reduction program of the United States Indian Bureau. In this firsthand account of her husband’s activities as a range rider, we see sketched with searing humor the effects of academic bureaucracy upon a proud, resolute people. There in Washingtone are They-Who-Spend-Much-Money ordering them crates of choice, individually wrapped Delicious apples from Washington state, while sixty miles away, along the San Juan, a bumper crop is rotting on the ground. Here are the Nahtahnis, the local Powers-That-Be, taking from the Navahos a large number of their sheep, their sole means of support. And everywhere stand the useless, gaunt, starving horses known as Johncolliers, the symbol of a tragic, idealistic fiasco. Yet here too we observe the efforts of many Government employees to cut through red tape and the bureau caste system to render actual service—to avoid, as the mimeographed directive states, The tendency to treat these socio-economic factors typologically and as independent variables rather than regionally and functionally tends to obscure in our scientific procedures the significant interrelationships and local variations...

Threading all this is a sympathetic description of Navaho life. The author does not sentimentalize. She shows us the dirt, the lice, but also the inherent freedom, honesty, and vitality of this largest Indian tribe remaining in the United States. Customs, viewpoints, traditions, frequent glimpses of those complex ceremonials we call Sings. The stench of a sheep-dip. The creak of saddle leather. The fragrance of rain-washed sage and fresh-cut cedar. The collective face of a people whose heritage stems back to an America beyond the written memory of mankind.

How fresh, simple, and spontaneous it all emerges from these pages! To remind us of our own heritage, our own years, and that in the hurlyburly of city life, we also can become homesick for the clear, blue skies and wide, peaceful silence, and say with her: "Yahteh-hey! It was good!"

FRANK WATERS

PREFACE

This is Dan’s story, and only indirectly mine, so I can write it, even in the face of comments that the public may possibly be weary of clever books by clever girls who have done odd things in odd places. The answer to that is, I’m not clever. A really smart gal would have known better than to marry a cowboy in the first place, according to Joe Cline, who was manager of the biggest ranch in Arizona, and therefore in a position to know. And I think an honest account of a cowboy’s life among the Navaho Indians needs no elaborating.

But you have to be more romantic! a wailing chorus protested. You can’t picture things as they are!

Can’t I? It seems to need no embroidering, that picture. Not when I remember days when my only knowledge of the Navahos was that the outline of their Reservation makes an extremely wide blank space in the lower section of any road map of the western United States. And not if you think that in these modern days the West exists only in the movies, as I did when I didn’t even know from which side of a horse one mounted, or that real cowboys are actually very different from those in the movie versions.

That’s another thing. It might be difficult to convince the average person that it is entirely possible to grow up in Texas without seeing cowboys, or knowing anything about their way of life. But it’s true. I knew about oil fields, newspaper work, and social service, but I didn’t know about cowboys. This is Dan’s story, as I said, but it is also the story of my learning his way of life. And of the two of us learning about the Navahos—what we taught them was negligible; what they taught us was immeasurable.

E. W.

CHAPTER I—THE WAGON ROD

My girlhood dreams did not center about a tall knight of the saddle who’d ride out of the west and carry me off on a big black charger; they ran more to visions of a rich oil man, who’d carry me off in a Cadillac coupe. They came true, too, or nearly enough so; the oil man materialized, and at least a Buick, and two children, all very quickly, and life was fairly well settled until the stock market crash, when the dreams died lingeringly and I found myself back where I had started.

All of which leads up to Dan, and the inscrutable effect of the attraction of opposites. I knew nothing about cowboys or ranches, and he knew practically nothing else. I did know that he looked almost exactly like Gary Cooper, which was enough for me, and that he rode a horse like poetry in motion—tall and easy in the saddle, with a certain quiet informality. Everything about him was quiet and sure. There was no way to tell what he thought, or whether he thought at all, because he didn’t talk, not then. He remained silent, and he let his audience place its own interpretations upon his silence; interpretations which were almost always flattering, I being the audience. He still insists that I asked him to marry me, and it’s entirely possible. I was never at a loss for words, but my younger brother would have had a name for that, too. He it was who advised me: Never marry a cowboy—if you want to eat regularly! I disregarded that advice, not being too interested in food, anyway. The decision was mutual, and Dan and I were married. This was the beginning of the story, rather than the usual ending.

We went first to Arizona to live on a huge ranch called the Wagon Rod. I never did learn whether the ranch was named for the branding iron, or the iron for the ranch, but the big cattle empire contained a hundred thousand acres of grazing land, which included desert, valley, and mountain, and for one hundred miles the water rights to the San Pedro River in southern Arizona. That is quite a bit of the good earth. We never did see all of it, but it was an ideal place for a tenderfoot to begin learning cattle lore—on the old theory that if you’re thrown into deep enough water, you’ll learn to swim.

The Wagon Rod was deep water, symbolically speaking. It brings a chuckle, now, to recall the misgiving I felt at the prospect of life on the ranch. I didn’t know how such people acted or how I was supposed to act. Dan wasn’t much help when I mentioned my jitters—he couldn’t imagine anybody feeling alien to a ranch.

You’ll get along, he said, smiling his slow crooked grin. Just don’t talk too much, and keep plenty of coffee made.

It was a formula not far from perfect, his simple credo; and it worked—for him. It probably would have for me, if I could have achieved the first part, the wisdom of which was soon proven. Cowboys’ wives weren’t supposed to do much talking—they did the cooking. I learned two things very soon after we arrived at the huge storybook house that served as headquarters for the Wagon Rod. Part of the advantage in hiring a married man lay in the fact that the wife did the cooking for the other men. The other advantage was that a married man stays home better than the single ones. But I was happily unaware of all this when I entered the ranch kitchen for the first time, to be greeted by the queerest odor that ever assailed any nostril. I whispered to Dan that these boys must be terrible housekeepers and some leftover food must be in the last stages of spoiling. What was that foul smell?

Sh-h, whispered Dan. That’s his sour dough for bread!

And there it was on the back of the big stove, sharing space with the two-gallon coffee pot and the cast-iron bean pot, where it could keep warm and sour—a grayish mass of soggy, evil-smelling dough with big bubbles boiling up in the middle. I firmly held my nose.

It sure is working, said Dan, with what seemed like pride in his voice. I stared at him in wonder. Could people really eat such stuff? I found that they could, and did, and so did I, and that sour-dough bread is wonderful.

I also learned that a cowboy expects his girl friend to be pretty and a good dancer, and he wants her to have a nice personality. But for his wife, and his friend’s wife, the only criterion is whether she can cook. Usually, these sun-baked sons of the saddle live in lonely line camps, where they alternate beef and potatoes with fried potatoes and beans; and when they come to headquarters their greatest desire is a home-cooked meal. Even a hot bath runs second. Previous to Arizona, I had dragged myself sleepily from bed in time to snatch a cup of coffee and a glass of fruit juice before catching the bus to work. Now, as the one woman on the ranch, I had the job of arising at the unearthly hour of four А. M.—earlier in roundup time—and making breakfast for fourteen hungry cowboys, who, in the meantime, filled the air with smoke as they squatted on their spurs around the wall and drank pots of coffee and told good-natured lies.

Dan fitted their schemes perfectly. They were as playful as young mountain lions, and just about as subtle. They loved spoofing me, and I swallowed everything they said for a long while, until I began to watch Dan’s expression when they started conniving. They were all alike, basically, although their actual features differed: sunburned and lean, and bowlegged from years in the saddle. Jeff was the tallest and he chewed tobacco vigorously and talked loudest, but otherwise there was little difference in these punchers at the Wagon Rod. They rode hard, worked hard, and played hard. They would drive fifty miles on Saturday to an all-night dance; or take in the nearer activities with equal gusto, coming home in the bright morning sunshine, completely drunk, and usually completely fagged out. Sunday morning, our one opportunity to sleep late, would be interrupted by the wild yea-a-hoo! of the returning Romeos back from carousing in Bisbee or, more often, Naco, across the line in Mexico. With wide and carefree grins, they rode the beaten-up old ranch touring car as if topping the liveliest bronc; over sand dunes and scrub mesquites, bumping erratically across pasture to the backyard fence.

Yea-a-hoo! Jeff’s yell rang out triumphantly. We ran to the kitchen window. He was sitting astride the hood, while two other pairs of Levi-clad legs clamped the fenders. But in front of Jeff the pennant of victory was flying—a pair of oversized pink and frilly panties, waving back from a baling wire tied to the radiator cap. Dan grinned—reminiscently, I thought—and said he guessed Jeff would be just the man to ride the valley that day, to keep Sunday picnickers discouraged.

No amount of excesses seemed to affect their appetites, and they ate as they worked, with wholehearted absorption. They always wanted sympathy and they always wanted food, and the place to find both was in the big kitchen where they were always welcome, since they were willing to wash the dishes.

You can tell when Dan does the cooking, drawled Shorty. He cleans up the pots and pans, and only the dishes from the table are waitin’. But Liz—she stacks the sink to the ceiling!

Yeah—but boy, can she cook! said Jim, who was wiping the dishes, and the others agreed. It was my salutatory, and when I made sixty hot biscuits for dinner—not sour-dough—and not one of them was left, I knew I had qualified.

But learning to be a cowboy was quite a different matter, and one for which I had no inborn gift. They had begged me to ride, but I feared embarrassment for Dan, who learned to ride before he learned to walk. I postponed the ordeal as long as possible, hoping that a day would come when we’d be alone, and he could saddle a very gentle old plug for me—preferably one of the plow horses. The day inevitably came when I was to ride, but not alone. The boys, down to the last one, had business to keep them around the house that day. One lent me a pair of run-down boots, and another gave me some chaps, which I fastened dubiously over denim slacks. Dan donated an old Stetson. He didn’t need it any more, he said. There had been much ado about which horse. Nobody went along on the ancient plug idea, and on the Wagon Rod they didn’t break horses gentle. But nobody wanted me killed; so Jeff saved the day by lending me Marie, his pet mount.

Is he a lady horse? I questioned innocently, noting the name. There was a concerted roar from my assembled audience, and Dan blushed apologetically. It seemed that the misnomer was due to the fact that Jeff’s current girl friend, who boasted French extraction, was named Marie. She graced a dance hall in Naco, and her French ancestry was probably real; at least, real enough so that she was Marie instead of the Spanish Maria, and the horse, French or not, was called Marie in her honor.

I still think that the roughness of his gait was the main reason why sitting was so painful for the rest of the week. It couldn’t have been altogether because I insisted upon going so far down the river on that first horseback trip, ignoring Dan’s admonition that it was always farther back than out. That had a contradictory sound, and I was much too smugly happy to heed even an expert’s word of caution, but he was right. While I didn’t actually eat breakfast from the top shelf, as they said I did afterwards, I really secretly longed for a soft cushion. Yet that ride opened new vistas of living for me. How different the world seemed from the back of a horse! But I couldn’t see how the boys sat a horse so casually, while I bounced all over the place. When I asked the secret of their technique, nobody seemed to know what it was, or that they had a secret.

You just climb in the saddle, said Dan, and ride.

No help there, so I watched and drew my own conclusions. The whole thing was like dancing. You relaxed, and followed the horse’s movement, which with Marie was more easily discovered than done. But if I let my elbows go limp, and kept my stomach taut, and let my shoulders bear the brunt of the weight—all at the same time, I got along fairly well. It took many rides to learn co-ordination, and I was very proud of my original discovery.

Anybody would know that, Dan told me, when I explained clearly how a cowboy rides. I let it go at that, wondering why I punished myself so strenuously, anyhow. There was no appreciation for my efforts, and cowboys were a taciturn lot, entirely unimpressionable. Why bother?

I found out, the day we rode the upper river pasture. The San Pedro flows northward, lazily at that time of the year, the current shallow and purling contentedly. We had been quiet, ourselves. Dan always was, and my chatter had been stilled as we rode along, enjoying the cool breezes from the distant Huachucas and keeping a sharp watch for straying cattle. At least Dan was watching for cattle, and occasionally watching me.

Why do you keep looking at me? I asked, thinking of the unbridelike battered Stetson, and windblown hair. You couldn’t be entranced by my sunburned nose, so what are you thinking about?

I’m thinking you ride like you’d been riding all your life, he answered, surprisingly, and for once I didn’t criticize his choice of English. The sky was bluer, suddenly, and the birds in the willows were singing louder, or maybe the music was in my own heart. My agonized endurance of all the miserable hours in the saddle was justified. Dan thought I could ride. Moreover, he had said so! The range horses probably thought it an entirely silly proceeding, but they reluctantly allowed themselves to be persuaded closer together, and then I learned another range technique, and that a kiss from the saddle can be a very satisfactory thing.

But I still didn’t know enough not to cut through a moving herd of cattle, and any such error on my part brought the perfectionist in Dan to the fore. He had the right word to bring me back to my tenderfoot status with a jerk, and my inflated ego back to normal, and he did it with an infuriating impersonality. I was learning slowly, the hard way; he allowed no skipping of details. I was all thumbs when I handled a rope, but after seeing him casually rope a bobcat from the crotch of a spreading cottonwood tree, I determined to rope a calf, and I practiced diligently. I finally succeeded, and at noon I told the admiring cowboys about it. They admitted that I was pretty good, and my triumph was complete, except for one thing.

She didn’t tell you that the calf was blind, drawled Dan.

They razzed me, then, and I said unkind words about cowboys.

You’re absolutely right, said the grizzled old foreman. Never was a cowboy had any sense—if he had, he wouldn’t be one!

I wasn’t willing to go that far, not then. But the next day I decided that it was an understatement. They were riding the lower river pasture, combing out wild three-year-old steers, which was too much of a hard riding job for me. So I decided to bake bread, an undertaking I had contemplated all summer. The experiment was successful to the last rising stage, which was rapidly progressing while I hummed busily about the quiet kitchen. Jeff came in suddenly, softly, with his hat in his hand.

Hello, I said, absently, with one eye on the dough. Then I did a swift double take. Where’s Dan? Why are you back so soon?

Now, don’t you get excited, Jeff cautioned, ominously, it seemed to me. I hadn’t been excited. Dan’s okay. Nothing for you to worry about. By this time I was worrying a great deal. What on earth had happened?

"Horse fell on him, in the sacaton sinkhole," Jeff was continuing, with exasperating casualness. I swiftly visualized Dan lying at the bottom of one of the big river holes, with the huge weight of Cornet on top of him, mashing him slowly to death. I screamed at Jeff to hurry and tell me the truth.

He’ll be all right. I left him at the line camp, Jeff said, soothingly. Dan can’t ride for awhile, so I rode in to tell you to get the car. I gave up, then. His cheerfulness seemed forced, to me. The car hadn’t been out of the shed for such a long time that the keys were lost. I found them, praying that the battery was still good. We were soon bumping over the rough, river terrain, following a dim wagon road through the pasture to the line camp cabin where, in my fevered imagination, Dan lay helpless, crippled for life.

For eighteen miles I fought the steering wheel, under Jeff’s direction, and finally pulled up in front of the crude line shack. Dan was lying on a bench on the lean-to porch. He sat up with a shamefaced grin.

Hi, he greeted me. He was pale, but apparently unharmed. I didn’t know yet that the lower part of his spine was painfully injured, and my breath