Adams] SHONTO : ROLE OF NAVAHO TRADER 167 



personalities involved. Some traders at Shonto have maintained no 

 social relations of any kind with either the school or Betatakin. In 

 1955, however, fairly frequent reciprocal visiting and dining relations 

 exsited between the national monument people and both the school- 

 teachers and the traders. These groups exchanged dinners about every 

 2 weeks. Much less frequent visiting relations existed between the 

 traders and the teachers, and at no time did all three groups get to- 

 gether for a purely social occasion. Fairly frequent visiting relation- 

 ships also existed between all three groups and the traders at Red 

 Lake, and between the traders at Shonto and those at Inscription 

 House (who are the father- and mother-in-law of Shonto's owner). 



It is notable that there is associated with each of the three White 

 institutions in Shonto community a distinctive social life of its own. 

 The schoolteachers are regularly visited by various Bureau of In- 

 dian Affairs officials — particularly the building- and utility-main- 

 tenance crew from Tuba City. Navajo National Monument receives 

 a steady stream of tourists throughout the summer, many of whom are 

 annual visitors and have become personally acquainted with the super- 

 intendent and his family. The latter are, in fact, the only Shonto 

 residents who extend hospitality to tourists. 



Shonto Trading Post has perhaps the most extensive home social 

 life of all. The store is visited throughout the year by a succession 

 of salesmen, truckers, hide and rug buyers, and government and tribal 

 officials of all sorts. Hospitality is extended to all of these as a matter 

 of course and policy, and several of them have made Shonto a regular 

 overnight stop for years. The result is that throughout the year the 

 trader has dinner and overnight guests on an average of once or twice 

 a week. 



TRADING POST ECONOMICS 



In most respects the modern Navaho trading post is not, as it has 

 sometimes been called, a "remaining example of frontier commerce" 

 (Kluckliohn and Leighton, 1946, p. 41). Purely as a retail operation 

 it belongs properly to the general store era, which followed the 

 trading-post period in American retail development and was particu- 

 larly characteristic of much of the 19th century (cf. Nystrom, 1930, 

 p. 70). In its physical plant, its systems of transaction and account- 

 ing, and many other aspects of operation the Navaho trading post 

 of today is inescapably reminiscent of the old rural general store 

 (see especially Atherton, 1939, and Carson, 1954) . 



In other respects, however, the trading post of today has no his- 

 torical precedent. While its consumer market remains characteristic 

 of an earlier era, the wholesale markets in which inventories must 

 be purchased and commodities exchanged have undergone sweeping 

 changes in the present century. In tying the semisubsistence economy 



