Navajo Administrative History

Despite the activities of Richard Wetherill and other explorers, the four corners area remained remote. The Navajo reservation dominated the region, and even as railroads were constructed and places such as the Grand Canyon began to attract the attention of American travelers, the amenities that brought American visitors skirted the boundaries of the reservation. The northeastern corner of the Arizona Territory remained out of the mainstream. Archeological work continued, but it remained one of the few places in the continental U.S. that had not been surveyed. Well into the first decade of the new century, few people had any idea what was out there among the sandstone mesas.

But commercial culture began to make inroads into even the most remote areas of the Navajo reservation. In the years following 1880, trading posts started to emerge on the reservation, offering Navajos a new way to survive. After the return from Bosque Redondo in 1868, the Navajo subsistence economy narrowed. Raiding other tribes and the New Mexico Territory were forbidden, and the American military stood by to enforce its edict. Soon after, another Navajo subsistence method, hunting wild game, ceased to be effective. Tremendous growth in the number of livestock eliminated much wild range, and without it, Navajos needed another source of sustenance to protect against crop failure. Traders who paid for Navajo rugs and blankets provided a final measure of protection against failure of other methods of survival. [7]

Among the traders who engaged in this commerce with the Navajo were Richard Wetherill's brother John, his wife Louisa Wade Wetherill, and their partner, Clyde Colville. In March 1906, they established a trading post near Oljato, Utah, after a feast John Wetherill prepared to assuage the fears of Old Hoskininni and his son Hoskininni-Begay, the acknowledged leaders of the Navajo people in the immediate area east of Navajo Mountain. From the door of their "jacal" home of posts and mud and adjacent one-room trading post, it was more than 150 roadless miles to the nearest railway stop in Gallup, New Mexico, and nearly as far to Flagstaff, Arizona. [8] This enterprise was an outpost, far from any ties to industrial society.

Nor was the experience new to John and Louisa Wade Wetherill or Clyde Colville. The Wetherills had opened their own trading post a few years before at Ojo Alamo, a few miles north of Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. There Louisa Wade Wetherill began to befriend the Navajo people and learn their language. Clyde Colville arrived from the East, broke, in search of adventure, and crowned with a derby hat. The tall, thin, and quiet man worked as a clerk at Ojo Alamo, and he and the Wetherills became partners for life. [9]

Because of the distance between Oljato and the nearest trading posts, all more than sixty miles away, the trading post allowed the Wetherills time to pursue their interests. Like the rest of the Wetherill clan, John Wetherill was consumed with prehistory. The Anasazi and their abandoned communities continued to be uppermost in his mind. The people around them, the Navajo, remained the fascination of Louisa Wade Wetherill, who by 1906 spoke their language fluently. They each had their area of expertise, and neither would cross the other. Even their children knew to respect the staked-out claim of their mother. [10]