The Story: Navajo Tribal Police Officer Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn hunts for a suspect on the Navajo reservation, following a trail of kinship, mysticism, and murder. He saves the life of the novel’s central character, Bergen McKee, a friend and college professor who has come to the reservation to research Navajo witchcraft. Settings include Kam Bimghi (Kah Bihghi) Valley, Beautiful Valley, Ceniza Mesa, Lukachukai Mountains, Chuska Mountains, Agua Sal Valley, and Los Gigantes Buttes.
Of Interest: The novel that introduced Joe Leaphorn was a finalist for the Best First Mystery Novel Edgar Award in 1971, losing to The Anderson Tapes by Lawrence Sanders. The American Library Association named it one of the notable books of 1970.
Reviewers reacted favorably, including a mention in The New York Times Book Review that praised Joe Leaphorn as a more interesting character than Bergen McKee. Hillerman agreed; McKee appears no more.
Tony Hillerman’s Comments: “I used the word jubilation a moment ago, and I will use it again to describe the time the Harper & Row business rep came through Albuquerque with a copy of The Blessing Way dust jacket in his briefcase. And a third time as I opened a package [editor] Joan Kahn sent me and pulled out a copy of the actual book. After writing for more than a quarter century I was now, formally, officially, and incontestably an author.”
The Hubbell Trading Post, a National Historic Site, is the oldest continuously operated business on the Navajo Nation.
NAVAJO TRADING POSTS
Bergen McKee had spent most of the afternoon in the canvas chair beside the front door in Shoemaker’s [Trading Post]. It was a slow day for trading and only a few of The People had come in. But McKee had collected witchcraft rumors from three of them, and had managed to extract the names of two Navajos who might know more about it. It was, he felt, a good beginning.
He glanced at Leaphorn. Joe was leaning against the counter, listening patiently to another of the endless stories of Old Man Shoemaker.
[CHAPTER 4]
ABOUT NAVAJO TRADING POSTS AND THE HUBBELL TRADING POST
Shoemaker’s Trading Post was a product of Dad’s imagination, drawn from insights gleaned as a visitor at dozens of trading posts throughout the Navajo Nation. In later books he created Short Mountain Trading Post, and also used real trading posts such as Two Grey Hills, Teec Nos Pos, and Toadlena. He never set a story at the Hubbell, but we use it here because it is one of my favorites and highly photogenic.
Trading posts came to Navajoland in 1868 when The People returned from their confinement at Bosque Redondo with an appreciation for Anglo-American goods. The first posts went up near Fort Defiance, the first U.S. Army base in Arizona, but they quickly spread throughout the reservation and along its borders. In The Blessing Way Leaphorn’s visit to Shoemaker’s Trading Post provides an opportunity to make initial contact with the villain, a coincidence that ultimately helps him solve the crime.
Hubbell Trading Post is the longest continuously operating trading post on the Navajo Nation. It now does business as a National Historic Site. The Hubbell’s authentic ambiance recalls the days when Navajos exchanged wool, hides, lambs, rugs, jewelry, and baskets for Arbuckle’s coffee, sugar, flour, and farm tools. Nearly everyone of note in the nineteenth century who passed through northeastern Arizona stopped here, often as guests of the legendary proprietor John Lorenzo Hubbell. President Theodore Roosevelt, author and New Mexico governor Lew Wallace, and prolific mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart were among the many visitors. Artist E. A. Burbank spent several months in the Hubbell home; many of his paintings and drawings hang on the walls today. The curious can peek inside the historic house on guided tours.
Hubbell Trading Post is one mile west of Ganado, Arizona, and fifty-five miles northwest of Gallup, New Mexico. The visitor center features demonstrations of Navajo weaving and an assortment of books, including Dad’s novels. Dad and Mom enjoyed stopping here, and I recommend it to you.
BEAUTIFUL VALLEY
They had passed Chinle now, Leaphorn driving the white carryall at a steady seventy. The highway skirted the immense lifeless depression which falls away into the Biz-E-Ahi and Nazalini washes. It was lit now by the sunset, a fantastic jumble of eroded geological formations. The white man sees the desolation and calls it a desert, McKee thought, but the Navajo name for it means “Beautiful Valley.”
[CHAPTER 4]
ABOUT BEAUTIFUL VALLEY
This lowland area in Apache County, Arizona, stretches some twenty miles south from Chinle, comprising the southern end of the Chinle Valley. The rich colors of the soft, easily eroded Chinle Formation sandstone here match those as you’ll see in the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest.
After spending most of the afternoon at Hubble Trading Post, Don and I headed north on U.S. 191 toward Chinle. We’d been focusing on the beautiful baskets and jewelry in the museum shop and then on the classic nineteenth-century art in the Hubble home. The broad vistas now left us breathless. We pulled off the road when we found a place to take a memorable photo of Beautiful Valley to the east and the bulk of Black Mesa hugging the horizon to the west. We sat silently, soaking in the colors. What a gift! I imagined Dad driving here, saying to Mom, “Would you look at that?”
Earlier that day, we had lunch with Navajo Nation President Dr. Joe Shirley, Jr., at a restaurant in St. Michael’s, Arizona. President Shirley was on his way in to work at Window Rock from his home in Chinle. He drives past Beautiful Valley coming and going, one of the world’s most beautiful commutes. Dad admired Shirley and the feeling was mutual. President Shirley represented the Navajo Nation in 2004 when the Albuquerque Museum honored Dad as a “Notable New Mexican.”
SILVER HAT BANDS
The Big Navajo had taken a silver concho band from his hip pocket. He let it hang over his wrist while he handed Shoemaker the bills and waited for his change. The metal glowed softly—hammered discs bigger than silver dollars. McKee guessed the conchos would bring $200 in pawn. He looked at the big man with new interest. The Navajo was slipping the silver band down over the crown of his hat…
“Can you tell me why that man would lie about somebody stealing his hat?” Leaphorn asked. His face was intent with the puzzle. “Or if he wasn’t lying, who would steal an old felt hat and leave that silver band behind?”
[CHAPTER 4]
Beautiful Valley, Arizona
Conchos get their name from the Spanish word for shell. Navajo jewelers often use the design on belts and hatbands. (From Richardson’s Trading Post, Gallup, New Mexico)
ABOUT NAVAJO JEWELRY
The Navajo were the earliest American Indians in the Southwest to master the art of silversmithing. Researchers believe Atsidi Sani, the first Navajo silversmith, learned from a Mexican craftsman and began working with silver between 1853 and 1858. He taught the art to his four sons who, in turn, taught others. After their release from the tragic Bosque Redondo incarceration, Navajo artists began to create beautiful silver jewelry in earnest and never stopped.
The first silver probably came from coins acquired from soldiers at Fort Defiance and Fort Wingate and from Mexican traders. Silversmiths sometimes rounded the coins into buttons or beads. Sometimes, they melted the metal and poured it into hand-carved molds to create a design or form a thin sheet of silver. By the 1880s, the silverwork often included turquoise. Jewelry, easy to carry and good to barter, became an important part of the Navajo lifestyle.
Conchos, elliptical or round disks, may have a radiating center, punched holes, incised or stamped designs, and a scalloped edge. The jeweler might add insets of turquoise, coral, or other stones. Navajo artists use the concho style of silverwork Dad incorporates in The Blessing Way on belts, bridles, pins, and bolo ties as well as hatbands.
LUKACHUKAI MOUNTAINS
Behind [Old Woman Gray Rocks], the foothills of the Lukachukais shimmered in the blinding sun—gray mesquite and creosote bush, gray-green scrub cedar and the paler gray of the eroded gullies and above the grayness the blue-green of the higher slopes shaded now by an embryo early-afternoon thundercloud. By sundown, McKee thought, the cloud would be producing lightning and those frail curtains of rain which would, in arid-country fashion, evaporate high above the ground.
[CHAPTER 7]
ABOUT THE LUKACHUKAI MOUNTAINS
Rising east of Navajo 12 and U.S. 191, the Lukachukai Mountains form a high ridge that stretches for approximately sixty miles, straddling the Arizona–New Mexico state line. Roof Butte, 9,835 feet, stands as their high point.
The Lukachukais are the site of the Diné Bikéyah Oil Field, the largest producing oil field in Arizona. Mining companies extracted large amounts of uranium from the northern Lukachukais in the 1950s. Several species of wild orchids grow here. Traditional Navajo weavers in the Lukachukai, Upper Greasewood, and Round Rock area create a unique rug type, Lukachukai Yei, that depicts representations of the Navajo spirit beings. In addition to The Blessing Way, Dad uses these mountains as a backdrop of the unfolding stories in The Ghostway, Skinwalkers, and The Wailing Wind. He always loved the poetic rhythm of their Navajo name.
The Lukachukai Mountains
Kira at the Salmon Ruins near Bloomfield, New Mexico
ANASAZI RUINS
[Bergen McKee] sat motionless for a second, perplexed by the dim light and the blank wall before him. Then full consciousness flooded back and with it the awareness that he was sitting, cold and stiff, on the dusty floor of a room in the Anasazi cliff dwelling…
…It had been built either as a communal meeting place for one of the Pueblo’s warrior secret societies or as a storeroom for grain—three stone walls built out from the face of the cliff and, like the cliff, sloping slightly inward at the top. The only way out was the way they had come in—through a crawl hole in the roof where the wall joined the cliff.
[CHAPTER 16]
ABOUT THE ANASAZI
The ancestral Pueblo people, commonly known as the Anasazi when Dad wrote The Blessing Way, lived in the Southwest from about the sixth through thirteenth centuries. They abandoned an impressive legacy of artifacts and acres of adobe and stone ruins, some built in inaccessible places like the spot in which the bad guys imprison Bergen McKee and Ellen Leon. Some of the best-known early Pueblo ruins are preserved at Mesa Verde in Colorado, Chaco Canyon and Pecos National Monument in New Mexico, in Monument Valley, Utah, and in Canyon de Chelly and Navajo National Monument in Arizona.
First Ruin at Canyon de Chelly, home of the ancestral Pueblo people
One of my favorite spots is the visitor-friendly Salmon Ruins. This small stone city sits just west of Bloomfield, New Mexico. Indians occupied the village, an outlier of the important Chaco Canyon complex, during the eleventh century. The families abandoned the Salmon pueblo around 1265 A.D. The buildings reflect several masonry styles, among them construction that used a rubble core sandwiched between elegant facings of beautiful sandstone. The masons cut each stone to fit, creating a smooth style that looks sophisticated even today. I love the contrast between the bulk of the massive buildings and the delicate, intricate stonework.
The Anasazi were long gone by the time the Navajo settled in Dinetah, but intriguing signs of their presence remain. In The Blessing Way, the cliff-side ruins provided a scenic place to stow kidnap victims, and offered Dad the opportunity to share some information about the Pueblo culture.
Mountain lion warning sign at the Grand Canyon