JB Tanner and the Navajo Shopping Center Transform Gallup Economy
by Ernie Bulow
In the mid fifties, the north end of Gamerco sported some run-down corrals and a barn and outbuilding, abandoned when the livestock sale house there went under. The Gamerco Coal Company was willing to lease the place at a bargain price. In 1957, JB, who already had plenty of trading post experience and spoke fluent Navajo, had the idea to try something entirely new: a Navajo cash business.
Of course there were still plenty of trading posts where the Navajos could pawn, and trade their sheep, wool and blankets for “hard goods” and food, but business was done almost entirely on the barter system. Before World War II there had been almost no cash money on the reservation and silver coins were instantly turned into jewelry.
JB, the eldest of Ruel Lehi Tanner’s seven boys and a girl, had been born prematurely in Phoenix and his mother said later, “He would fit in a shoe box. We fed him with an eye-dropper.” When Chunky Tanner first laid eyes on his firstborn he is reported to have said, “Damn, I was going to call him Joseph Baldwin, after grandpa. He’ll never be big enough to carry a name like that; we’ll just call him JB.
And that was his given name; two letters, no periods, just JB. He grew up in what his mother recalls was the “grandest house in Kirtland.” He didn’t much care for class work and when he got kicked out of high school for drinking, his dad said it was time for him to make his own way. He hitchhiked to Gallup. He ran the remote Steamboat post on his own for a few years, then joined the air force. After the War he spent a short while in Las Vegas.
JB at the old Aneth Trading Post.
He soon made the obligatory trek to Aneth, Utah, which was owned at the time by his dad and Uncle Ralph, the handwalker.
Nobody seemed to stick it out very long at Aneth, which was probably one reason the local Navajos called it the Devil’s Place – Dabii Chindi. He stuck it out for three years and then, with brothers Don and Bob, he bought the trading post at Ganado from Art Lee. They also had another remote post at Nazlini. Ganado was one of the locations for mother Stella’s restaurant. The boys were forced into bankruptcy and Griswold got Nazlini and Art Lee got his now-refurbished Ganado post back.
Their maternal uncle Bill McGee sent the boys out to Pinon, another hardship post in the middle of nowhere in those days. It was there that JB bought the biggest rug of his career. Nobody remembers just how big it was, but it must have been a monster. It took the weaver two weeks to trade it out.
The practice at the time was for a Navajo to bring in, say, a bracelet to sell. When they settled on a price the amount was written on a paper sack. Then the person began trading, reducing the amount by a single item at each transaction. The traders had plenty of time on their hands and that was how it was done.
JB Tanner with Navajo customers.
It took two weeks to complete the transaction on the rug and JB flirted some with the weaver. Of course all the locals knew that he came from “The Devil’s Place,” so she called him Nahadani (ladies’ man) from the Devil’s Place. That nickname stuck.
When JB got the idea for a new kind of store in Gamerco, brothers Ellis and Ricky were still in school. The other members of the family, including Joe and mother Stella all bought in. D. J. Elkins was the only outsider and he owned ten percent of the operation. The next few years were frenzied, to say the least.
The boys remodeled the barn and built their own shelves and displays. The customers could walk the aisles and pick out what they wanted. There was no longer a “bull pen” -type counter separating them from the goods. They paid cash.
The cash usually came into their hands in a different part of the store. Out back, for example, young Ellis worked with the livestock. Like today, there was pretty much a going price for a lamb, a fat ewe, a yearling steer or a saddle-broke horse that was sound. The Navajo got cash on the spot.
Don was in charge of the groceries, Bob took care of the pawn, Joe bought the arts and crafts and Stella had her restaurant in a different building. Virgie Chavez got her start in the restaurant business when she took over Stella’s operation.
Don, JB and Bob behind the counter at Navajo Shopping Center. Notice the CASH signs on the wall above.
Grandpa J. B. Tanner, as already recorded, had business dealings all over four states and he never got involved with Navajo Shopping Center. In fact, he passed away soon after the store opened.
It was pretty much an instant success. If there was a fly in the ointment, it was that the operation grew too fast, involved too many people, and sucked up a fabulous amount of cash. Cash was the whole premise of the place. It was the first and only place a Navajo could do all of his shopping, even up to a new car, at the same place and all in cash money.
Charlie Williams (with his GM line) and Clair Gurley (with his Fords) even had a presence out in Gamerco. At one point, besides the partners, the shopping center had fifty employees, not counting some side deals.
Ed Lee Natay, the first Navajo to cut an album of Native songs, and the first album issued by the specialty company Canyon Records, was a prominent citizen of Gallup in those days. He started the original “Navajo Hour” on KGAK. JB would join him in the studio and, speaking fluent Navajo, tell the people why they should come shop at Navajo Shopping Center.
It worked so well he spun off his own version of the Navajo Hour and brought in a Navajo named Robert E. Lee. Robert’s wife, Mary E. Lee was a famous weaver of the era. JB had known Robert from his days at Pinon, Low Mountain and that area. Lee had been their main stockman. Robert E. Lee and JB had their radio show for some time. Years later JB teamed up with the Navajo singer, artist, rodeo star and bullfighter, “Bronco” Martinez. His Sunday show was widely popular on the Navajo reservation.
Sheep came in by the truckload every day and were penned out back. Navajo ladies from all over the reservation, dressed in their velveteen blouses and layered calico skirts, with all their jewelry on, of course, would catch the sheep in a runway out back, cut their throats and butcher them on the spot. As payment, they got to keep the head, the blood and all the innards.
Each woman butchered one or two animals as they needed and then turned over her space to the next lady. They had some cold storage in the store, but as Joe says, “They were going out the front door as fast as they came in the back.” Eventually they had to start buying back the small intestine – achee – and the liver because there was a demand for both in the butcher shop.
B & B Mercantile, Bolacca and Bernaby, supplied the wholesale groceries and took their pay in flour, another Tanner enterprise. B & B had taken the place of Cotton and Progressive Mercantile in the wholesale market. For a while the store received certain commodities, like coffee, by the train-car load.
Bernie Vanderwagen had his own ranch, plus some leased land and he took most of the sheep to fatten up for resale. One year more than fifty thousand lambs passed through Navajo Shopping Center. D. J. Elkins, one of the partners, took care of most of the cattle and other livestock. The Elkins clan had ranch land over towards Grants.
Transactions were pretty routine and understood by all parties. A weaver would bring in a rug and put it on the counter. Joe would evaluate the rug, place cash on the counter next to it. The woman would count the money and then choose. She could take the bills, or pick up the rug and take her chances somewhere else.
At the time Joe said that the Kirk family was taking all the saddle blankets and less expensive rugs and Gil Maxwell (who wrote the book on buying Navajo weaving) would take all the high-end stuff.
Some colorful characters were involved in the short life of Tanners’ Navajo Shopping Center. A man they knew well, and who spoke fluent Navajo, came in and asked them for a job one day. Phillip “Hooch” Lee was well-known in those days and his nickname wasn’t an accident. He had been working for three years at the trading post at Red Mesa, another out-of-the-way spot. “In the last three years,” he said, “I’ve used up three wives and four cars and I reckon it’s time to get back to civilization.”
Another little known piece of Gallup history was the car dealer Charlie Williams’s experiment with hydroponic gardening. In his greenhouse he could mature wheat in a matter of weeks, rather than months. A government man, Jerry Crow, had the unenviable job of stock reduction on the reservation and he happened to mention to the Tanners one day that he had twenty-two hundred kids to dispose of, and nobody wanted to buy a baby goat.
Joe asked Charlie Williams if his hydroponic garden would grow enough greens to fatten up two thousand kids. Charlie answered he could do it. Joe went back and asked Jerry if he’d take a thousand for the lot. When the animals were ready for market the Tanners split them with Williams.
Bank credit hit the limit at a certain point and, though the Market was doing well and the basic idea had proven successful, the Tanners had to sell out to the Elkinses. “We had made Navajo Shopping Center a destination,” Joe recalls. “The Navajos would come into town just to visit the place. At night there would be campfires all around the north end of Gamerco.”
In the late fifties a lot of Navajos and Zunis didn’t bother to file their income taxes. Some didn’t know how and some didn’t have any idea how much they had coming. On short-term, high paying jobs like the railroad, the taxes were computed on the weekly check. At the end of the year they were owed most of it back.
Navajo Shopping Center as it looked in the late fifties.
The system that JB came up with gave them money to spend, and Gallup was where they spent it. Art’s son Lynn and Joe were in charge of the tax business. The idea spread, but currently Ellis and T & R are the big boys, doing more than thirty thousand returns a year. As brother Joe says, “JB was a warehouse of ideas.”
By the time most Navajos had transportation and the old trading posts had been put out of business on the reservation, the Tanners had already established Gallup as the border town of choice.
All the Tanner boys went their separate ways, still in the Indian trading business. JB eventually located north of Gallup at Ya Ta Hay. He developed the water there, another Tanner habit, and promoted himself inventively, even having his own brand of flour. At different times he had three stores in Santa Fe, including Candelario’s old “Original Trading Post” on San Francisco St.
In the early seventies it was rumored that every man, woman and child in the Twin Lakes, Mexican Springs, Coyote Spring area worked for him doing what was called piecework. It worked like an assembly line. A family would be issued enough stone and silver to make one hundred rings of the same design. One would cut and shape bezel around the stone, the next would fabricate leaves or flowers or balls, the next would solder on the ring shank the one after that file the piece down, and the beginners would learn to buff without dropping the piece or burning their fingers.
One innovation JB imported was a stamping mill that would shape and decorate a concho in a single operation. He had several different stamps with different designs. One person would position the silver blank, the other would trip the hydraulic hammer and mash out a concho that just needed a ring soldered to the back and buffing up.
Once JB and his assistant got their timing off and JB hit the button too soon, completely smashing one of the man’s fingers. As he was telling the story later, one listener asked in horror, “The whole finger?” to which the fellow replied, “No, the one next to it.”
Once considered junk, those concho belts are collectors’ items today. And when JB passed recently the whole Indian jewelry business was saddened. In so many ways he had carried on the good will established by the grandfather whose name he wasn’t considered big enough to carry.
