Navajo Trader

By Gladwell Richardson

Gladwell "Toney" Richardson came from a long line of Indian traders and published nearly three hundred western novels under pseudonyms like "Maurice Kildare." His forty years of managing trading posts on the Navajo Reservation are now recalled in this colorful memoir.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 1986
• ISBN: 9780816545940

Book preview

Image: Gladwell “Toney” Richardson c. 1939.

Gladwell Toney Richardson c. 1939.

NAVAJO TRADER

by Gladwell Richardson

Edited by Philip Reed Rulon

Foreword by Barry Goldwater

The University of Arizona Press

Tucson

Gladwell "Toney" Richardson

was a member of a prominent trading family in northern Arizona. His great-uncles came west and began trading with the Navajos in the late 1870s. Richardson arrived on the reservation in 1918 and spent the next forty years as a trader. Before his death in 1980, he also published hundreds of short stories, historical articles, and novels about the closing of the American frontier.

Philip Reed Rulon

Director of Research, Center for Excellence in Education at Northern Arizona University, has written on Southwestern biography for over twenty years and is noted for his work on L. B. Johnson and U.S. national and international education policy. He joined the history department at Northern Arizona University in 1967 and is a frequent contributor to scholarly journals.

All photographs in this book were taken by Gladwell Richardson and are used courtesy of Millicent Richardson and the Richardson Collection, Northern Arizona Pioneers’ Historical Society, Northern Arizona University.

Third printing 2003

The University of Arizona Press

Tucson

Copyright © 1986

The Arizona Board of Regents

All Rights Reserved

This book was set in Linotron Sabon types and Cochin Italic with Peignot caps.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

This book is printed on acid-free, archival-quality paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Richardson, Gladwell.

Navajo trader.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Navajo Indians.    2. Richardson, Gladwell.    3. Arizona—Biography.    4. Navajo Indians—Trading posts.    5. Indians of North America—Arizona—Trading posts.    I. Rulon, Philip Reed.

II. Title.

E99.N3R53    1986        979.1′00497    [B]           86-11443

Cloth ISBN 0-8165-0963-8

Paper ISBN 0-8165-1262-0

ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-4594-0 (electronic)

To the memory of my mother

Susan Annabelle Meador Richardson

one of the first white women to pioneer

the Navajo Mountain country

Contents

Illustrations

Foreword, Barry Goldwater

Preface, Philip Reed Rulon

Old Houck Trading Post

Pine Springs

Dynasty of Traders

Navajo Mountain

The Rainbow Trail

Redbud Pass and Rainbow Lodge

Tuba City

Shonto

Navajo Country

Inscription House

Kaibito

The Big Snow

Sunrise

Cameron

Gold and Dudes

The Witchcrafters

Mysterious People, Mysterious Land

Changing Times

The Last Stop

Books by Gladwell Richardson

Suggested Readings

Index

Illustrations

Gladwell Toney Richardson, c. 1939

Dancers preparing for a Navajo healing ceremony

A young Navajo woman at a healing ceremony

Old Houck Trading Post, established in 1874

A medicine man

Genealogy chart of the Richardson family

Redlake Trading Post

S. I. Richardson, Toney’s father

Navajo blankets and turquoise jewelry

Blue Canyon Trading Post

Navajo Mountain

Navajo girls with lambs

Navajo patriarch John Daw

Redbud Pass

Entrance to trading post at Rainbow Lodge

The ruined city of Betatakin

A Navajo baby on a cradleboard

Navajo Canyon

Lambs in a brush corral

Toney Richardson in front of Inscription House Trading Post

Interior of trading post at Inscription House

Navajo wealth was evident in the good quality of jewelry, blankets, and horses

The Richardson family on Christmas Day, 1928

Navajo girl’s clothing

Sunrise Trading Post in the early 1930s

A young Navajo girl with hand-woven blankets

A Navajo woman weaving a large rug on an outdoor loom

Stanton and Idamae Borum

Loading a wagon at Cameron Trading Post

Cigarettes in a sacred basket

Wo’chan, an old Paiute woman

Wool carding

Hubert Richardson with life-long Navajo friends

Navajo children

MAPS

Map of the Navajo Country

The Navajo Mountain Area

Foreword

From as far back as 1878, when Lorenzo Hubbell, the first trader at Ganado, journeyed out from the East to that isolated post on the Navajo Reservation, traders and their trading posts have been the primary contact between Indians and whites. The traders exchanged merchandise and food that the Indians wanted for rugs, jewelry, and other handicrafts. The first trade items were coffee, salt, and sugar. Later on, the Indians became interested in vegetables, other food items, clothing, and kerosene. The trading posts themselves slowly changed from places with dirt floors to modern stores almost like supermarkets.

The Richardson family, important to me, was of major significance in the history of Arizona trading. The first time I met any of the Richardsons was in the early 1920s, when I drove to Cameron, on the way to Tuba City, and over to the Hopi villages to watch a snake dance. Hubert Richardson, an uncle of the author of this book, built the Cameron Trading Post in 1916. By 1986 that small post, with its handful of tents and huts, had become a substantial community serving the approaches to the Grand Canyon, Page, Lake Powell, the road to Tuba City, and on up to Monument Valley.

It was the Richardson family whose fortitude and perseverance made possible the establishment of Rainbow Lodge and Trading Post, in which I acquired a share in connection with Hubert’s son, Jack Richardson, and brother-in-law, Bill Wilson. The fifth chapter in this book describes in wonderful, close detail the construction of the Rainbow Trail road. Certainly it is a challenge to convey in words the experience of driving that torturous trail as it was in those days. No one ever dared to drive it at night for fear of winding up in the bottom of a canyon.

The role of the Navajo trader in the lives of the Indians was, most of the time, fundamental and many times humane. Whether providing white-man’s medicine or an understanding ear, he tended to be there when needed. Traders developed the pawn to enable Indians to buy things they needed without cash by leaving their jewelry with the trader. This pawn had a very strong meaning for the trader—he would rarely sell any of it to anyone; in fact, I know of no trader in those early days who ever did that. Traders even buried the dead of the Navajos on many occasions. Because of belief in a malevolent spirit surrounding the dead during a four-day period, the Indians would often ask the traders to perform the burial. Several times in my life I participated—knocking out the west wall of a hogan, removing the body, and depositing it in a grave along with that person’s earthly possessions, jewelry, fine saddles, and all.

The traders were often kind and generous people, and they are fun to remember. I will never forget one trader named McSparron who lived at Chinle. Every New Year’s Eve, McSparron would shoot an arrow into the ceiling of his house so he could count the arrows and find out how many years he had lived there. Many traders were not only gracious and generous, but had an attitude toward living that enabled them and the Indian people to trust each other.

Being part of the trading-post life will stay with me always. I know that Gladwell Richardson’s book, telling so much about the traders’ lives, full of color and adventure, will be treasured by people who have known that life and by those who, until now, could only imagine it.

BARRY GOLDWATER

Preface

Americans never cease to be fascinated by the hold that stories of the Great West have on the European imagination. Not just a product of radio, films, and television, this phenomenon goes back to the tales of James Fenimore Cooper and to the appeal of the noble savage in eighteenth-century France. Gladwell Grady Toney Richardson,¹ the narrator of Navajo Trader, was one of the most prolific writers in the first half of the twentieth century about the American Southwest, range adventures, and Indians. His voluminous literary output, mostly published in magazines, achieved book production in England. Many novels were subsequently translated into Polish, Czechoslovakian, German, Spanish, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages for consumption on the continent. Ironically, Richardson had only one cloth-bound manuscript published in the United States—some forty years along in his writing career.

Although Toney was born in Texas, his ancestors were Arizonans—a veritable dynasty of traders to the Navajos with a history of succession from uncle to nephew for four generations until it came to Toney, who followed his father, S. I. Richardson, to the trading posts in northern Arizona in 1918. Fascinated with the closing of the frontier, Richardson is estimated to have published about three hundred novels and perhaps as many as a thousand short stories and historical articles during his lifetime. The short works were printed in a wide variety of local, state, and national journals and magazines in the U.S. Most of the books were published in London for marketing in the British Isles and eastern and western Europe.

Richardson, so as not to saturate the market for which he wrote, employed a number of noms de plume, including Maurice Kildare (his most famous pseudonym), John R. Winslowe, John Winslowe, Calico Jones, Ormand Clarkson, George Blacksnake, Cary James, Frank Warner, Laramie Colson, Warren O’Riley, Buck Coleman, Grant Maxwell, Charles McAdams, I. M. Ford, Toney Richardson, Tony Richardson, and, probably, also John S. Haines, Pete Kent, Don Teton, Stuart Flagg, Jeff Corner, Frank Parker, and Rocky Benton. Sometimes Toney selected these names himself; on other occasions, a publisher bought manuscripts from a number of different authors and printed them under the anonymity of one fictitious identity—stock names, so to speak. The writers, including Richardson, did not like this procedure; however, as a general rule they did not make enough money to make demands on the houses they served.

The Robert Thomas Hardy Agency in New York City sold many of Toney’s short stories to magazine publishers, but Richardson was not able to sell book manuscripts in the United States. Fortunately, however, Hardy also represented an English publishing firm, Curtiss Brown Limited, and the English-language foreign rights (except Canada) to his books were sold in great quantities. On the average Toney received from two hundred fifty to three hundred fifty dollars per book.

It is difficult to determine whether it was a mistake for Toney to get so deeply involved with Curtiss Brown and, later, with Ward Lock. In selling the books to English publishing houses, Richardson had to take a flat fee as opposed to royalties, for the latter option would have meant that he had to pay twenty-five percent of the royalties to the British government in taxes. And, on the other hand, American publishers lost interest in publishing his books because they lost potential income by not being able to sell the international rights themselves.

Paul Sweitzer, a lifelong friend, on Richardson’s death on June 14, 1980, estimated that Toney had published in the realm of sixty million words. (He also left a number of unpublished manuscripts, such as Navajo Trader, Turquoise Woman, and The Life Of Henry Plummer.) It is possible that the ongoing research into the life of Richardson may one day reveal that he was the most prolific author of his age. In preparing this book, and in his other literary efforts as well, Toney was assisted by his wife, Millie, who was his personal editor and typist.

Millicent Margaret Green, the daughter of George E. and Maryann Davis Green, met her husband in Modesto, California; they were married in June 1925 and spent the next fifty-five years together. Their first daughter, Cecile, was born on March 1, 1926, and their second, Toni, on January 9, 1939. Millie survived her husband and lived in the family home in Flagstaff until 1983, when she moved to Augusta, Montana, to be near her two children, Cecile and Toni, and their families.

Gladwell Richardson was born on September 4, 1903, in Alvarado, Texas. He divided his childhood between Oklahoma and Arizona. Largely self-taught, Richardson did attend two institutions of higher education. He entered Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Oklahoma State University in Stillwater) on September 5, 1919, enrolling in math, English, drawing, woodwork, physical education, and military science. He had better than an eighty average his first semester and did slightly better the second, but he did not return the next year, even though he had been offered a scholarship to come back. In 1924 he registered for classes at the Northern Arizona Normal School (now Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff), but he left shortly thereafter.

In the fall of 1918 Toney went to Houck Trading Post, south of Window Rock and near Gallup, New Mexico. He worked on the reservation until 1920, when he journeyed to San Francisco to join the Marines. He was in uniform only a few months when the chaplain of his unit discovered that Toney was only seventeen and recommended that the boy be discharged. (S. I. Richardson, Toney’s father, had written to the chaplain to convey the information on his son’s age.) The younger Richardson, however, liked the military (almost as much as he loved the West), and he walked across the street and enlisted in the Navy after receiving his Marine discharge papers. This time his parents did not interfere and their son stayed on active duty with their consent until 1924. In the Navy he traveled extensively—to Guam, to Japan (where he witnessed the great earthquake of 1923), to Russia (to retrieve the dead bodies of two Americans), and to other strange and forbidding ports of call.

During World War II Richardson was recalled into military service after Pearl Harbor; this time he served in Arizona, Indiana, and the South Pacific. While in the islands, he became reacquainted with some Navajo young men that he had met at Inscription House Trading Post. These individuals later achieved fame and recognition as the fabled Navajo Code Talkers, whose Marine Corps messages could not be deciphered by the Japanese in the Pacific theatre.

When the Korean War began, Chief Journalist Richardson was on a cruise for the naval reserve; he was dispatched after a short leave directly for Seoul. Completing his tour in Korea, he spent several months in San Diego (commuting to Flagstaff on every other weekend) prior to being discharged from the regular navy.

In the winter of 1926, the year in which Cecile was born, Toney and Millie put together the writing team that would entertain and inform millions of readers around the world. One of their first purchases was an old, black Underwood typewriter. Toney worked at a cannery in Modesto, California, during the day; in the evenings and on weekends he would compose while Millie would edit and type. Their first book-length publication was sold three years later to Complete Novel Magazine by agent Robert Thomas Hardy.

Toney returned to Inscription House Trading Post on the Navajo Reservation in 1928, and in 1930 an annual Indian Pow-Wow was started in Flagstaff. Gladwell Richardson managed the celebration from 1935 to 1939 and was responsible for separating the rodeo from the evening dances. By 1936 seven thousand Native Americans came to the Pow-Wow, representing the following tribes: Navajo, Hopi, Apache, Supai, Papago, Yaqui, Ute, Yuma, Mojave, Kiowa, Walapai, Maricopa, Blackfoot, Cherokee, Shoshone, and Choctaw. Ten to twelve thousand people were expected for the 1937 Pow-Wow. Toney convinced a New York radio station to give play-by-play coverage, with Howard Pyle of Phoenix doing the announcing. According to a 1937 article in Every Week Magazine, Public-spirited citizens, and the leadership of Toney Richardson, made the Pow-Wow a major western celebration from the years the latter was associated with it.

In 1940 Toney served as a census taker on the reservation. His familiarity with the Navajos made it possible for him to compile the most accurate population statistics to that date, and some of the events that occurred during that time are recorded in this book. In later years, whenever Toney and Millie visited their children and grandchildren in Montana, they were always alert to documents and stories en route that could be written for magazine publication. A number of trips were taken, too, to New Mexico, where Toney visited many of the Pueblo Indians, sharing with them stories of his early days in Arizona as an Indian trader. In the 1950s and 1960s Toney’s literary career, including the treasure stories he was writing at the time, brought hundreds of visitors, telephone calls, and letters to Two Guns Trading Post and then to the last home that he and Millie bought in Flagstaff.

The garage, converted to a library, in the Richardsons’ Flagstaff home held a tremendous amount of important material. Not only were the shelves filled with Toney’s articles and books and the top of the shelves stacked with documents, but there were also file drawer after file drawer and large, brown, paste-board boxes in the middle of the floor. These files and boxes contained thousands of rare photographs of life on the reservation and in the military, as well as newspaper clippings about the Southwest, research notes that Toney had kept on old manuscripts and notes that he had never rewritten in narrative form, programs of the Pow-Wows held in Flagstaff, huge folders of personal correspondence with his friends and fans—all mementos of a dedicated writer who had been both a part of the Old West and a part of a disappearing breed of men who kept the West alive through stories and novels.

It was from this material that I secured a copy of Navajo Trader, one of the few manuscripts that Toney Richardson ever rewrote. He meant for the book to be just right, for the pages that follow not only cover his own journey through life, but they also tell the dramatic story of two divergent cultures—the Navajos and the men and women who traded with them—as they met in a strange and desolate land that others had shunned. Navajo Trader, then, is an eye-witness account of America’s last real continental frontier.

Life on the Navajo Reservation was difficult for both the traders and the Indians. The lack of communication and the difficulty of transportation meant that two groups often had to develop their own means of handling financial matters, treatment of the sick and burial of the dead, sending and receiving messages, and observing religious ceremonies. Trading posts, then—as did monasteries in the Middle Ages—served as bank, hospital, post office, school, church, restaurant, inn, tavern, and community center. Because they played such an integral part in the lives of both Navajos and traders, probably no institution in America has had a more colorful history than the trading posts covered in this narrative.

---

1 Richardson was called Toney (high-toned or fashionable) by his friends because of the colorful garb he wore.

Acknowledgments

Some of the descriptions and events narrated in this book appeared, in earlier versions, in popular American periodicals. Although all sections have been substantially revised, I would like to acknowledge the cooperation of the following individuals and sources: Paul Schott (Arizona Days and Ways); Mrs. Cecil Wells (Science Southwest); Ed Doherty (Real West); St. George Phil Cooke III (The Press of the Territorian, Santa Fe); Don Dedera and Richard Stahl (Arizona Highways); Marion Stevens (The West); Stanley Weston (Golden West); Joe Small (True West and Frontier Times); Desert Magazine; Big West; Adventure; and Jim Dullenty (Old West and True West).

Many people have assisted in beginning the process of obtaining some of the recognition Gladwell Grady Richardson so richly deserves, including Platt Cline, Flagstaff newspaper man and friend of Toney’s for more than forty years; friend and writer Paul Sweitzer; Bonnie Greer, who is cataloging much of the Richardson material for preservation by the Pioneer Historical Society; Pamela Mendoza, Vincent Biles, and Wanda Warner, valued research assistants to the editor; Mrs. Nancy Warden, who performed volunteer bibliographic work; June Koelker of the Arizona Research Information Center in Tucson; Katharine Bartlett and Mary Jansen of the Museum of Northern Arizona Research Center Library; Elma Peterson and Jean Lewis of the Flagstaff Public Library; and Luther Diehl and others from the Northern Arizona University libraries. Gayle Tyler and Marge Maston ably assisted with manuscript production. Martha Blue, a talented writer herself, advised the editor on several matters. Cynthia Leach, Julianne Lungren, and Yvonne Kudray each contributed vital bibliographic research. Finally, my heaviest debts are owed to two delightful ladies: first, to Millicent Richardson, who is a skilled counselor, editor, researcher, and writer; and second, to Becky Staples, a talented Tucson editor who lifted more burdens from my shoulders than I should publicly admit.

It is a pleasure to extend my gratitude to all of these co-workers.

PHILIP REED RULON

Old Houck Trading Post

It proved to be a regrettable error taking rubberneck tourists to the yeibetchai (a Navajo healing ceremony). They had bought several expensive blankets from the trader at Houck Trading Post, and when they asked about the Navajo ceremony, he felt obligingly generous enough to tell me to take them. The Navajo woman sat in the west end of the medicine hogan near the chanters. As was customary, she appeared for treatment naked to the waist. One of the white women tittered and spoke loudly to the man sitting on the ground next to her. The visitors continued their comments concerning the patient. Three times I politely cautioned them that this happened to be the Navajos’ most devout healing ceremony, asking them please not to make rude remarks.

In a pause between chants one of the few Navajos who understood English addressed Windsinger, the medicine man conducting the yeibetchai. He repeated the whites’ coarse remarks in Navajo loud enough for every Indian present to hear. In sudden and deep embarrassment the woman pulled a shawl about her upper body; the stupid tourists had made her ceremonial nakedness obscene. Windsinger said to me in his own tongue, Will you take your friends away, my younger brother?

Ashamed that billakonas (Anglos) had acted so atrociously, I apologized to him and the people present. They were not my friends, I explained, and were there because they had asked to attend. When I informed the tourists that we had been asked to leave, they objected. My friend Frank Walker, a Navajo-Mexican, interpreted our exchange in whispers to Windsinger. Since he would support my position, it wasn’t necessary to say more, and I walked out of the hogan. As I had expected, Windsinger, without raising his voice, gave the order: Remove them. From that night on I would never again sponsor strangers at any Navajo ceremony.

Outside I waited in night shadows under the cedar trees. The tourist women appeared, considerably alarmed, followed by three white men. One wheeled abruptly to poke his fist into the face of a Navajo in the gathering crowd behind them. The sorry fight didn’t last long. The Indians clobbered the visitors street-gang style, and I set off, walking the three miles to the trading post. The March night was cold, especially at two o’clock in the morning, and late winter snow had crystallized in muddy patches under the cedar and piñon trees.

Image: Dancers preparing for a Navajo healing ceremony.

Dancers preparing for a Navajo healing ceremony.

Houck Trading Post, called maitoh (coyote water) by the Navajos, was built by James D. Houck in the southeastern part of the Navajo Reservation. It was known as Houck’s Tanks until the Atlantic and Pacific, forerunner of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, passed close by, just north of the Rio Puerco in 1881. Jim Houck had originally carried mail as an express rider between Fort Apache and Fort Whipple. In 1874 he built the main section of the Houck post, an oblong red sandstone building put together with mud and mortar. In 1885 he disposed of his business and moved south to the Mogollon Mountains. Various traders operated the Houck post until about 1910 when my great-uncle George McAdams bought it. He enlarged the store and built a square stone dwelling nearby.

The Rio Puerco separated the post from the railroad depot and steel water tanks on the north side. Old Trails Highway, which later became U.S. Highway 66, followed wagon roads across northern Arizona. Crossing to the south side of the railroad at Navajo, it came on east to Houck, recrossed the Rio Puerco over a dugway, and followed the river and railroad thirty-three miles to Gallup, New Mexico.

I arrived at Houck in the fall of 1918. I had been hired only to clerk by the man who had bought the post from my great-uncle George McAdams, but almost immediately the entire business was shoved onto me. The trader’s numerous in-laws, including his wife’s father and mother and her two brothers