44 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BuU. 188 



and to Inscription House ruin in Navajo Canyon. To accommodate 

 anticipated tourist travel, the Richardson family, traders at Kaibito, 

 built guest lodges at the head of the Rainbow Bridge trail on the 

 south slope of Navajo Mountain, and at the head of the Inscription 

 House trail. The Rainbow Lodge burned out in 1951, and overland 

 trips to Rainbow Bridge have since been operated by Navajo Momi- 

 tain Trading Post, on the east slope of the mountain. Smce the in- 

 auguration of summer boat trips on the San Juan River, Rainbow 

 Bridge National Monument has been drawing several hundred visi- 

 tors a year. The national monument, having no staff of its own, is 

 under the jurisdiction of the superintendent at Betatakin. 



Anticipated tourist travel at Inscription House never materialized, 

 but the original lodge survives in the form of the present Inscrip- 

 tion House Trading Post. Guest facilities have not been maintained 

 for many years. 



GOVEBNMENT DEVELOPMENT 



The first school ever operated for western Navahos was a tiny day 

 school in Blue Canyon, some 20 miles south of Red Lake. Its fomida- 

 tions are still visible at the site, which is now almost inaccessible. It 

 began operation in 1895 and was abandoned in 1904, when the present 

 Tuba City boarding school was opened (Van Valkenburgh, 1941 p. 13) . 



The Western Navaho Indian Reservation was formally constituted 

 in 1906, with Tuba City as its agency. Two years earlier the large 

 Tuba City boarding school — still extant — ^liad been opened to Navaho 

 and Hopi children from the first to the sixth grades. Establisliment 

 of the Tuba City agency brought the usual additional institutions : a 

 court of Indian offenses and jail staffed by a couple of Indian police, 

 a tiny and imderequipped hospital, a "Government farmer" or ex- 

 tension agent, a small group of administrative and clerical offices, and 

 the inevitable mission. 



For nearly '30 years after 1906, Tuba City presented the typical 

 sleepy appearance of Indian agencies throughout the West, with its 

 dusty, tree-lined streets running between rows of barrackslike stone 

 dormitories and school buildings. Developments on the western 

 Navaho outside Tuba City itself were few and far between. It was 

 the "agency era" in Indian administration, and Indians who had 

 any business with the Wliite man were expected to find their way to 

 the agency as best they could. 



The comfortable guardianship which inaugurated this era in Nav- 

 aho administration become increasingly uncomfortable as the years 

 went by, and flocks and population multiplied out of all anticipated 

 proportion. Finally, in the early 1930's, the era came to an abrupt 

 end with the coming of the Collier administration and the "Indian 

 New Deal." The five independent Navaho reservations were con- 



