Hubbell Trading Post

Ten years after the Navajo returned from the Long Walk — the forced march to Bosque Redondo that killed hundreds — a twenty-five-year-old trader from New Mexico bought a small adobe post at Ganado, in the heart of the reservation they had just been allowed to come home to. John Lorenzo Hubbell spent the next sixty years becoming the most important trader in Navajo country.

The Navajo called him 'Double Glasses' — Naakaii Sani, 'Old Mexican' — and he earned their trust the way few outsiders did: he learned the language, settled disputes, buried their dead during the smallpox years, and insisted that their weaving and silverwork be made well enough to sell to the East. The rugs that came through Ganado set the standard; the 'Ganado red' pattern is named for the district he worked. At its height his family ran twenty-four trading posts, a wholesale house in Winslow, stage and freight lines — an empire built on wool and trust.

His daughter-in-law Dorothy ran the post until 1967, when the National Park Service bought it — not to make it a museum, but to keep it operating. Hubbell Trading Post is still a working trading post, the oldest continuously operated business in northern Arizona, the only one in the National Park System where the commerce itself is the thing being preserved. The squeaky wooden floors, the bullpen counter, the sun-bleached steer skull over the door — it's all still in use.