Author’s note: I grouped these books together because although each includes scenes set in Hillerman’s favorite locations, much of their action takes place outside the usual Chee/Leaphorn landscape. Believing most people already have an idea of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., we focused on the Southwestern elements here.
The Ghostway
The Story: A mysterious death, an enigmatic photograph, and a Navajo girl missing from boarding school send Officer Jim Chee on an odyssey that takes him from Shiprock to the underside of Los Angeles and back to a curing ceremony on the Navajo reservation. On the way, Chee encounters a chilling villain and gets important clues from an old white man in a retirement village.
Of Interest: This book and Talking God take the story farthest from the Navajo Nation. Ghostway was the third novel and final novel to feature only Jim Chee. Hillerman did three drafts of the first chapter before deciding to open the book with the pivotal murder at the laundromat. It is the last novel to feature Chee’s girlfriend, Mary Landon, although her memory and letters linger for several more books.
Tony Hillerman’s Comments: “The trigger for this book was a roofless stone hogan with adjoining shed in a little spring-fed pocket on Mesa Gigante, which dominates the Cañoncito Navajo Reservation. I happened across it one autumn afternoon, noticed a hole had been knocked in its north wall, the traditional exit route for the body when death has infected the hogan. But why had the dying person not been moved outside before he died, so the chindi [ghost] could escape?
“From this the story grew. The dead person becomes a wounded fugitive from the mafia who had come to the home of his Granddad to die. But Chee notices this poor fellow had been given only part of the burial ritual and denied other parts, and that the old man who abandoned the hogan left behind his Four Mountains Bundle, the sacred objects that traditional Navajo collect from the reservation’s Four Holy Mountains. Of course the FBI neither knows these oddities are crucial nor how to explain them. Chee does, and thus I have my chance to lead readers through some of the margins of Navajo culture.”
Talking God
The Story: While Officer Jim Chee tracks an illusive part-Navajo activist, Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn investigates the strange case of an unidentified toothless man found dead with the name of a respected Navajo woman in his pocket. The crimes reunite Leaphorn and Chee and take them to cold, rainy Washington, D.C., where they encounter one of the series’ most chilling antagonists. Much of the action unfolds at the Smithsonian in busy Washington, D.C. Navajo country settings include Fort Wingate, New Mexico, Fort Defiance and Window Rock, Arizona, and the area between, in, and around Ganado and Greasewood, Arizona.
Of Interest: In a review in The New York Times, Timothy Foote, an editor at Smithsonian Magazine, had special praise for the book and even its hit man. He called Hillerman’s ruthless killer “a curiously winsome Dickensian character, an urban hit man who knifes his victims with surgical skill but spends his off-duty hours trying desperately to find a nursing home willing to keep his savagely obstreperous mother.”
Tony Hillerman’s Comments: “A book modified by coincidences. While writing chapter 3, I stop because it’s time for Sunday Mass. But the problem stays with me during the ceremony, how to describe a corpse found beside the railroad outside Gallup. I notice an elderly Hispano usher with an aristocratic face dressed in an expensive but well-worn suit. He becomes the victim. But such a man refuses to fit my gang murder plot and turns the book into a Central American political conspiracy assassination. Next, old writing friend Bill Buchanan (Shining Season, Execution Eve, etc.) mentions a man responding to Bill’s refrigerator sale want-ad was not a potential buyer but a lonely fellow needing to exchange words with a fellow human. That, too, sticks in my mind. I use it. It turns my assassin into a terribly lonely man and provides a much better ending. The first chapter was no problem at all. I have an urban wannabe Navajo send a Smithsonian official a box of her ancestor’s bones, dug from an ancient Episcopal graveyard, for her to display along with the bones of his ancestors. I received ‘good-for-you’ applause from about twenty tribesmen for that one.”
The Sinister Pig
The Story: Bernadette Manuelito, formerly an officer with the Navajo Tribal Police and now an agent with the U.S. Border Patrol, comes across suspicious activity at a rich man’s big-game ranch along the New Mexico–Mexico border. Her work converges with the unsolved murder of an undercover agent that Officer Jim Chee and private detective Joe Leaphorn are working on back home on the Navajo reservation. Is there a link to billions of dollars diverted from tribal trust funds? Greed, oil pipelines, cross-border trade in drugs and illegal aliens and even romance add to the plot’s complications.
Of Interest: Hillerman noted that a true story, the continuing scandal over the government’s mismanagement of funds due Southwest Indian tribes for oil, gas, and coal taken from their reservations under Federal auspices, sparked this book.
Publishers Weekly wrote, “With his usual up-front approach to issues concerning Native Americans, such as endlessly overlapping jurisdictions, Hillerman delivers a masterful tale that both entertains and educates.” Booklist noted, “As always with Hillerman, an intricate pattern of ingenious detective work, comic romance, tribal customs, and desert atmosphere provide multifaceted reading pleasure.” And Library Journal said, “This outing ventures beyond the Navajo landscape that Hillerman’s fans expect, but they—and general readers—should enjoy the broader geographical and social canvas just as well, in this tale of ordinary people unraveling knots of fraud and skullduggery.”
Tony Hillerman’s Comments: “Part of the idea came from thinking about my brother who at one time had a job as a well logger. He recorded what kinds of rocks the oil rigs were drilling through. He knew about how pigs cleaned the pipelines. I thought that was interesting.
“Then, I ran into a woman who worked for the bureau of public lands who was checking into abandoned pipelines, especially the ones that cross state lines and into Canada and Mexico. She told me that this would be a wonderful way to smuggle drugs into the country, because the pigs (pipeline inspection gauges) are hollow.”
Canyon de Chelly, a special place in Dinétah, is home to deities central to Navajo creation stories.
THE NAVAJO HOMELAND: DINÉ BIKÉYAH
From Flagstaff, near the western edge of the Navajo Big Reservation to Shiprock, near its northern border is about 230 miles if you take the most direct route through Tuba City. Chee took that route, checking out of his motel before sunrise and stopping briefly at Gray Mountain to call Largo….
Outside the Gray Mountain store Chee stretched…the snowcapped shape of the San Francisco Peaks twenty miles to the south looked close enough to touch in the clear, high altitude air…The only clouds this morning were high altitude cirrus so thin that the blue showed through them. Beautiful to Chee. He was back in Diné Bikéyah, back between the Sacred Mountains and he felt easy again—at home in a remembered landscape.
[CHAPTER 22, The Ghostway]
ABOUT THE NAVAJO HOMELAND
Whenever Dad needed inspiration to spur along a lagging plot or clarify his thoughts, he and Mom would drive out to Indian country, usually the Navajo reservation.
The modern Navajo Nation’s land covers more than seventeen million acres, much of it stark and beautiful, between the mountains of southern Colorado and northeastern Utah and the low deserts of northeast Arizona and northwestern New Mexico. Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Monument Valley, Rainbow Bridge National Monument, and Ship Rock are among its scenic attractions. This vast area, the largest Indian reservation in the United States, is about the size of the state of West Virginia. Some 250,000 people live here, according to the Nation’s 2000 census estimate. (West Virginia’s population was 1.8 million in 2006.)
The Diné traditional and spiritual homeland, Diné Bikéyah, includes a larger area that encompasses their four sacred mountains—Mount Taylor in New Mexico, the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona, and Blanca Peak and Mount Hesperus in Colorado. The landscape stretches to cool, deep canyons, colorful mesas, imposing deserts, and a photographer’s dream of amazing, expansive views. In addition to its natural beauty, the Navajo Nation is the site of thousands of ancient Pueblo Indian ruins and rich deposits of oil, coal, and uranium. The seat of tribal government is in Window Rock, Arizona.
As some explain it, for the traditional Navajo, the land is their religion, their temple, their cathedral. It is home to their deities and the place for sacred ceremonies. The mesas, mountains, and plateaus come with stories. Some are petrified bodies of monsters who inhabited the earth before the Hero Twins made it safe for humans.
The Southwest’s Indian country landscape has little in common with the tidy, green, water-blessed farming country of central Oklahoma where Dad grew up. The Chee/Leaphorn books reflect his passionate affection for the Navajo landscape and its people. “Mostly they’re country folks,” he said of the Navajo. “They remind me of the people I grew up with.” When asked which of the honors he received meant the most to him, Dad always spoke of his joy when the Navajo Nation named him a Special Friend of the Diné.
On the walls of his Albuquerque home he hung two photographs of Ship Rock, one by Don and one by Navajo photographer LeRoy DeJolie. Like the Navajo, he felt at home in the land that the Hero Twins made safe.
ST. CATHERINE INDIAN SCHOOL
Largo walked to the window and stood, back to Chee, inspecting the weather in the parking lot.
“We’ve got a girl missing from St. Catherine Indian School.” Largo said. “Probably a runaway. Probably nothing much.” The captain exercised the storyteller’s pause for effect. “She’s the granddaughter of Hosteen Begay. Told a friend she was worried about him. The nuns at St. Catherine called the police there at Santa Fe because they said she wasn’t the type that runs away. Whatever type that is….”
[CHAPTER 5, The Ghostway]
ABOUT SANTA FE’S ST. CATHERINE INDIAN SCHOOL
Founded by Katherine Drexel in 1887 as St. Catherine’s Industrial Indian School, this school became a Santa Fe landmark and a respected institution, especially among its many alumni. The religious order Mother Drexel founded, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People, operated St. Catherine’s for more than 100 years. Mother Drexel also started another Indian school in the Southwest, St. Michael’s Boarding School near Window Rock, in 1902. In 2000, she became the second American canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.
St. Catherine Indian School, Sante Fe
Mural by Edwin O’Brien in the administration building
Graves of Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament who taught at St. Catherine’s
St. Catherine’s campus, a mile northwest of the Santa Fe Plaza, included more than a dozen buildings, among them the largest two-story adobe building in New Mexico. Some buildings were made from stone quarried in the Lamy, New Mexico area, just like the rock used for the Cathedral Basilica in Santa Fe. Masons who oversaw the construction of St. Francis Cathedral for Bishop Jean Lamy also worked here. Lamy personally blessed the school’s cornerstone.
When my siblings and I were growing up in Santa Fe, only Native American students could go to St. Catherine’s. In the 1990s, the policy changed to admit non-Indians. The expansion couldn’t save the school, however, and the sisters closed it because of financial difficulties in 1998. In 2001, the New Mexico Registrar of Cultural Properties added the school to its list. As I write this, the property stands vacant except for the nuns buried in its cemetery and on-site security guard.
In The Ghostway, Chee unexpectedly encounters his runaway at the abandoned hogan of her dead grandfather. Margaret Sosi, like the real-life girls who attended the Santa Fe school for Indians, knows how to think on her feet, outwitting Chee and prompting his trip to the underside of Los Angeles. Margaret is safe at the end of the book, getting ready to return to the world of St. Catherine’s.
Bridge over the San Juan River at Shiprock, New Mexico
SHIPROCK, NEW MEXICO
Chee rolled his patrol car southward across the San Juan bridge with the north wind chasing him, then west toward Arizona, and then south again across the dry slopes of snakeweed and buffalo grass toward the towering black spire of basalt that gave the town of Shiprock its name. It was the landmark of Chee’s childhood—jutting on the eastern horizon from his mother’s place south of Kayenta, and a great black thumb stuck into the northern sky during the endless lonely winters he spent at Two Grey Hills boarding school.
[CHAPTER 7, The Ghostway]
ABOUT SHIPROCK, NEW MEXICO
Located in northwestern New Mexico, Shiprock sits along the San Juan River at the junction of U.S. Highways 64 and 491 (known as 666 in the Chee/Leaphorn books). The community began as a ranching and farming center. The town gets its name from the rocky pinnacle that rises to the southwest. The spelling differs from the rock’s two-word name because of an old post office regulation that discouraged two-word names for towns.
In 1903, the U.S. government established a post office, boarding school, and Northern Navajo agency here. Shiprock had a brief boom spurred by uranium milling activity and helium gas processing. The Shiprock Fair, the town’s biggest event, began in 1909 and continues annually the first week of October. When weather allows, a weekend flea market draws customers from miles away. In 2007, with a population of about 8,000, Shiprock was the largest community on New Mexico’s Navajo reservation.
The Ghostway opens in Shiprock in the parking lot of a coin-operated laundry. An old Navajo man attempts to explain to the driver of a new car—obviously a tourist—that he doesn’t know the person in a photograph because he “don’t live in here with all these people.” Don and I stopped for green chili stew and Navajo fry bread at Shiprock’s That’s A Burger on our way to Farmington, and then passed a coin-op laundry reminiscent of the one in the book.
The Shiprock flea market features healing herbs, T-shirts, garage sale items, and fresh produce.
THE SANDIA MOUNTAINS
Jimmie Yellow’s place…seemed to have been selected more for the view than for convenience. It perched near the rim of the mesa, looking down into the great empty breaks that fell away to the Rio Puerco. To the west, across the Laguna Reservation, the snowy ridges of Turquoise Mountain reflected the light of the rising moon. To the east, the humped ridge of the Sandia Mountains rose against the horizon, their base lit by the glowing lights of Albuquerque. To the north, another line of white marked the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and the bright smudge of yellow light below them was Santa Fe, one hundred miles away.
[CHAPTER 25, The Ghostway]
The Sandia Mountains are a favorite of rock climbers and hang glider pilots.
The Sandia Mountains, a central New Mexico landmark and Albuquerque’s signature
ABOUT THE SANDIA MOUNTAINS
Dad loved the view of the Sandias from his kitchen window. The crystal beauty of winter snow against their rugged purple cliffs always delighted him. Dad and I often watched the summer thunderheads build over the Sandia Crest as we solved the world’s problems over cups of Mom’s good coffee.
Sitting in Albuquerque’s backyard, the Sandias are central New Mexico’s landmark and the state’s most visited mountain range. Their iconic blue bulk lies immediately northeast of Albuquerque. The Sandia Peak Tramway, the longest tram of its kind in the United States, ascends to the crest through four different biological life zones and over the site of a 1955 plane crash. At the 10,678-foot summit, the view encompasses the Rio Grande Valley, glittering Albuquerque, and ancient volcanoes rising to the west. The massive blue bulk of Mount Taylor, about seventy miles beyond this cool summit, looms on the horizon. When the air is clear you can almost see the shimmer of its aspen forest. I especially enjoy standing here at dusk, when the air smells like pine trees and the glow of sunset mixes with the diamond shimmer of Albuquerque’s lights.
The Sandias don’t play much of a role in The Ghostway or any of the Chee/Leaphorn novels, but I included them because they were Dad’s marker of home. On our last big trip together, we flew to Dallas in 2005 for a reunion of the 103rd Division, Company C, 401st Infantry, the graying remainders of the young men he’d served with during World War II. He enjoyed the weekend, but it left him exhausted. When we saw the Sandias below us from the plane window, he squeezed my hand. “Would you look at that view?” he said. “I’m glad to be home.”
Blanca Peak, the sacred mountain of the East
BLANCA PEAK
The [medicine] bundle represented weeks of work, a pilgrimage to each of the four sacred mountains to collect from each the herbs and minerals prescribed by the Holy People…Mount Taylor and the San Francisco Peaks had been easy enough, thanks to access roads to Forest Service fire lookouts on both of their summits. But Blanca Peak in the Sangre de Cristos and Hesperus Peak in the Las Platas had been a different matter.
[CHAPTER 22, The Ghostway]
ABOUT BLANCA PEAK
This 14,345-foot mountain, the sacred Navajo mountain of the east created by First Woman and First Man, is known as Sisnaajiní. The fourth highest mountain in Colorado, Blanca Peak rises in the Sangre de Cristo Mountain range about twenty miles east of Alamosa. The pinnacle of Blanca Peak is only eighty-eight feet lower than that of Colorado’s highest, Mount Elbert. As Chee indicates, hikers rate the trail to the summit of the Blanca Peak as one of Colorado’s toughest climbs. Ghostway is the only Chee/Leaphorn book in which I found Blanca Peak mentioned.
BABY ROCKS MESA
And so, for the past four hours Chee had been at the Agnes Tsosie place waiting for Henry Highhawk to arrive at this Yeibichai ceremonial so that he could arrest him. Chee was good at waiting. He waited at his favorite lurking point near Baby Rocks Mesa for the endless empty miles of U.S. 160 to provoke drivers into speeding.
[CHAPTER 4, Talking God]
ABOUT BABY ROCKS MESA AND U.S. 160
It’s hard to beat U.S. 160 north from Kayenta to Teec Nos Pos, Arizona, for scenery on the road. I understood, again, why Dad would come to Navajo country when he needed inspiration. As he often said, looking at this huge and beautiful world put his own petty problems in perspective. A weekend, or even just a day surrounded by this landscape helped set stalled projects back on track.
East from Kayenta—home of a Navajo Cultural Center that gives tribute to the code talkers inside a unique Burger King restaurant—the landscape opens to an amazing collection of formations. Church Rock and Agathla Peak, like Ship Rock, are volcanic plugs, towering reminders of the force of molten rock and the power of eons of erosion. Beyond them, the dune-shaped formation of Comb Ridge, a monocline of pink, orange, and gray Navajo sandstone, extends seventy miles, all the way to Blanding, Utah. Baby Rocks, an assortment of spires and knobs, sits south of Highway 160, eleven miles east of Kayenta. The name comes from an eye-catching collection of small spires. According to a Navajo story, one rock is a little girl whom supernatural forces punished for fighting and selfishness by turning her to stone.
Just past the junction with U.S. 191, the road to Bluff, Utah, Red Mesa dominates the view to the north. This lonely-looking, stunningly beautiful formation is a classic flat-topped table created during the dinosaur era with Jurassic sediment in reds, browns, and grays.
We spent several hours driving these seventy-two miles. When he climbed a ridge to catch the perfect photograph, I stood quietly, stunned by the stark and gorgeous landscape. I pictured Dad standing here as he did his research for The Ghostway. Even his words seemed too small to capture this magnificence.
Baby Rocks on Highway 160, about 30 miles from the Utah border
Charcoal rock art drawing of three Yeibichai figures from southern Colorado, circa early 1800s
YEIBICHAI
Talking God led a row of masked Yei, moving slowly with the intricate, mincing, dragging step of the spirit dancers. The sound of the crowd died away. Chee could hear the tinkle of the bells on the dancers’ legs, hear the yei singing in sounds no human could understand. The row of stiff eagle feathers atop Talking God’s white mask riffled in the gusty breeze. Dust whipped around the naked legs of the dancers, moving their kilts.
[CHAPTER 4, Talking God]
ABOUT THE YEIBICHAI
Traditional Navajo honor Talking God, the teacher of other gods, in Yeibichai ceremonies. The hataalii or “medicine man” invites Talking God and several other spiritual beings, or yeis, to cure a serious illness in a nine-day prayer called a Yeibichai. The ceremony is usually a family affair held in cold weather when the snakes hibernate and there is little threat of lightning. Navajo artists sometimes depict Yeibichai spirits in paintings, rug designs, and in sand paintings.
Dad’s Navajo friend Austin Sam invited him to witness a Yeibichai ceremony in the Cañoncito area of the reservation, the same general area where Chee waits for his suspect at a similar dance. “It was cold out there and I was the only white man,” Dad said. In addition to the dancing and chanting, he was impressed with the way cooks prepared great chunks of mutton for the assembled crowd. He describes a Yeibichai in vivid detail in Talking God to show one of the character’s obsession with the Navajo culture.
The Little Hatchet Mountains of New Mexico’s boot heel
THE NEW MEXICO BOOT HEEL
They had been bumping along the absolute southernmost bottom of New Mexico’s so-called boot heel. For hours Bernie had been mostly silent. She’d seen no evidence of human existence except the steel fence posts and three (sometimes two) strands of barbed wire stretched between them. Dry, ragged mountains to the south in the Sonora, northward in New Mexico, the same ahead, same behind…. This landscape was interesting as well as hostile. Various variety of cacti, with little herds of javelina browsing on the pods of some of them, clumps of gray and tan desert grasses waving their autumn stems, the orderly scattering of creosote brush, and species of mesquite new to her and swarming with bees attracted by the honey in the flowers, and brush with more thorns than leaves.
[CHAPTER 3, The Sinister Pig]
[Jim Chee] stopped on the ridge, got out his binoculars, and checked…. Mountain ridges in every direction, but dry mountains here. Far to the east the Little Floridas and to the west, the Big and Little Hachets. Far beyond them, and blue with distance, the ragged shapes of the Animas and the Peloncillos. Chee was comfortable with the emptiness of his tribe’s Four Corners country, but here all he could see seemed to be a lifeless total vacuum.
[CHAPTER 12, The Sinister Pig]
ABOUT NEW MEXICO’S BOOT HEEL: SOUTHERN NEW MEXICO AND ITS MOUNTAINS
New Mexicans commonly refer to the extreme southwestern corner of the state as the “boot heel” because of the way it juts into Mexico. Interstate Highway 10 passes into Arizona here, following the route of the Butterfield Trail stagecoach road.
This is the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, stretching far south into Mexico. Miners, ranchers, and railroad pioneers who settled this land had to be as tough as the desert plants. Annual precipitation averages only nine inches, most of which comes in intense thunderstorms between July and September.
Dad spoke fondly of the trip he and Mom made to research settings for The Sinister Pig. They timed their driving adventure to coincide with snowy weather at their home in Albuquerque, and raved about the blooming desert plants, migratory birds, and temperatures in the sixties.
Yucca, New Mexico’s state flower, with the Animas Mountains on the horizon