I had an interesting morning, sitting in on the SW Traders conference at the Cortez Cultural Center. The present Hubbell Trading Post NHS supt. was there, as well as her predecessor and former HUTR trader Bill Malone, plus quite a few other people I've known from past experience in the Four Corners. Long-time acquaintance and Mancos Valley resident Frank Lister organized the conference, as he did the first one, held last year.
Part trade association meeting, part fraternity gathering, part family reunion, this bunch represents so many interties and crisscrossed trails that it would be almost impossible for an outsider to keep them straight.
I tried to assemble five separate photos into a single panorama, but no matter what I tried, two guys in the middle disappeared when the software stitched them together. So, here's the group in two shots ... they're easier to see this way anyway! The upper photo is the left side of the group; the lower shot is the righthand portion.
Facing the audience in the front row are Claudia and Elijah Blair, with John Kennedy and his dad, John Kennedy (96!) to their left.
In the back row, from left, are Joe Wright, Jim Blair (Claudia and Elijah's son), Bruce and Virginia Burnham, Frank Pyle, Steve Getzweiler, Joe Tanner, Bill Malone, Steve and Georgiana (Kennedy) Simpson, Robert Hosler, Mark Winter, Jackson Clark, Larry Bloomfield McGee and Greg Leighton.
How many years of trading experience are represented in that bunch? Six hundred would probably be a low number ... several of those folks grew up in trading posts. Bruce Burnham is a fourth-generation trader and most of them are at least second-generation traders. Tanner, McGee, Pyle and Bloomfield are old names in the trading occupation around the Four Corners, names associated with any number of trading posts around the Navajo and Ute reservations. As Georgiana said, the smell of "lanolin and sumac" in the trading post wareroom (from wool and baskets) is something that calls them back, like it's in their blood.
Some of the yarns they told about themselves, and on each other, just in the course of their introductions, were fascinating. Young John Kennedy told about going to Polacca Trading Post (Hopi) with his father, finding the trading post just crammed with Hopi pots. Old John Kennedy bought them all at $1 per pot; it took three station wagon trips to carry them all back to their store!
The senior Kennedy has long specialized in piñon nuts as a trade item, handling 200-700,000 pounds of them annually ... that's a lotta pine nuts! In 1936, he recalled, they anticipated a huge crop, maybe four million pounds. It turned out to be 8,000,000 pounds, and it took him four years to get rid of them all!
Trading is its own way of thinking. Young John Kennedy related that he wanted a horse. The owner would take hay for it in trade. So Kennedy traded cabinets replaced during his home remodel for saddles, then traded the saddles for jewelry, traded the jewelry for hay, with which he got the horse with no cash outlay on his part. I may have not tracked all of his products and trades properly, but it was a fascinating way of knowing where to go with what to reach his end result. tv
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