32 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 188 



persons, originally a Mormon farming colony, is the principal admin- 

 istrative center for the western Navaho area, and includes the area's 

 only hospital, court, and jail, as well as its largest Indian school and 

 numerous other facilities. 



Beyond Tuba City an inferior graded road continues northwest- 

 AA'ard for 75 miles, skirting the northern scarp of Black Mesa and 

 passing through the narrow defile of Marsh Pass, until it reaches 

 Kayenta, the crossroads of the northern Navaho country (maps 1 and 

 2) . This community, founded by John and Louisa Wetherill in 1909 

 and subsequently made famous by them (cf. Gillmor and WetherilL, 

 1934) , is the site of a large new Navaho boarding school, which opened 

 in 1954 and is rapidly gaining importance on the strength of recent 

 uranium developments to the north and east. Its present population 

 numbers nearly one hundred. 



GEOGRAPHY 



Northward from the Tuba City -Kayenta "highway" (as it is locally 

 termed) to the San Juan and Colorado Rivers, the far northwest 

 corner of the Navaho Reservation is formed of a connected series of 

 wooded, deeply eroded highlands, variously known as Skeleton Mesa, 

 Paiute Mesa, Shonto (or Shato) Plateau, and Rainbow Plateau. 

 Comprising an enormous upwarp of Navajo Sandstone and under- 

 lying formations, these highlands rise continuously from an elevation 

 of 5,600 feet in Klethla Valley, at the foot of Black Mesa, to about 

 8,000 feet at the Arizona-Utah line. Here they are terminated 

 abruptly by a series of gigantic and impassable cliffs, ranging above 

 2,000 feet in height. Beyond, a broken series of much lower mesas 

 skirts the San Juan River to the north. (For extended discussion 

 of the geography and geology of the entire region, see Gregory, 1916, 

 1917.) 



Because of its uptilted nature, drainage from the whole highland 

 area, which may be termed collectively the Shonto Plateau, is almost 

 exclusively to the south. A parallel series of deep canyons carries 

 runoff to the foot of Black Mesa, whence it reaches the Little Colorado 

 via Moencopi Wash and the San Juan via Laguna (Tyende) Creek. 

 Farther north, other canyons have cut into the northern scarp of the 

 plateau at their extreme upper ends and carry runoff from the scarp 

 itself directly to the San Juan. 



The series of canyons and cliffs, impassable in many places, serve 

 to subdivide the northwestern Navaho country into a number of well- 

 defined geographical units, and in many cases break up Navaho settle- 

 ment and movement accordingly. Within the present century, trad- 

 ing posts have been established in each of these restricted areas, and 

 around them regular trading communities have developed, whose 

 boundaries are defined more often than not by geographic barriers. 



