‘BIG INDIAN’ AND THE CASA DEL NAVAJO
By Ernie Bulow
Photos courtesy of Shirley Newcomb
Gallup owns way more than its fair and proper share of characters and crazy stories. Bordertown, railroad stop, mining center, frontier outpost – even though Native Americans and historic Hispanic families dominate the citizenry, certainly in sheer numbers, even the “Anglo” element has been composed largely of immigrants and outcasts.
B.I. Staples, the Big Indian, toured the East with his Navajo friends.
According to tradition, B. I. Staples, the most looming of local figures for a time, was carried into New Mexico on a stretcher – literally. He was so weak he couldn’t even knock on Death’s door. Staples, born in Vermont, had been a successful businessman in the East and seemed to have plenty of money, but he wasn’t expected to live to spend it.
From his arrival in 1912 Staples’s life is the stuff of legend. When the high desert air had put life back in the gangly, somewhat effete Easterner, he immediately began to reinvent himself as the quintessential “local.” His given name was Berton (a rare few friends may have called him Bert), but he always went in public by B. I. and C. N. Cotton, once said his initials stood for “Big Indian” and is supposed to have remarked that, “Staples knows more about Indians than they know about themselves.”
That’s the sort of assertion that always makes me flinch, but Staples became an almost instant authority on the Red Man, and spent half of each year touring the East with a small contingent of Navajos, giving speeches and demonstrations. His troupe of weavers, silversmiths and medicine men varied over the years.
Somewhere between 1924 and 1926 (there are lots of versions of his story) he started construction on one of the most remarkable buildings in the area. He called his tiny “trading post” Crafts del Navajo and the sprawling “hotel” and museum joined to it was known as Casa del Navajo. It was supposedly designed after the original Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe and would eventually feature three rooms of an ample twenty-five by fifty feet, and they became the living room, rug room and museum. There was also a post office on the premises. Surrounding two well-planted courtyards, with viga-ed porticos, and more than one hundred exterior doors, the building was nearly two hundred feet long and seventy deep. The place sported eleven fireplaces, which burned a lot of piñon in the winter.
Drawing of Casa del Navajo by John Havens
The Gallup area boasts nearly as many nearby ghost towns as ghosts – with at least twelve place-names in the Zuni Mountains and almost that many scattered over the coal fields just north of town. Staples built his dream house in a town that lasted just over fifty years – a goodly stretch by local standards. It started out as Bacon Spring, was renamed Crane (later Crane’s Station), then Coolidge for a railroad official. It was renamed Dewey and then Guam (which may have been the name of a nearby village). When Staples showed up he renamed it Coolidge, for the American President, not the railroad magnate.
A cluster of buildings that made up Bacon Springs pre-existed the railroad and was apparently a hotbed of sin – serving the needs, liquid and otherwise of the Fort Wingate soldiers just a few miles away. Big brown beer bottles are still found where they were discarded along the trail in Wingate Valley. By 1882 the new railroad had built what amounted to a division point, which included a roundhouse, water tank, coal chute, eating house and other facilities. It was only a few years before Gallup got the facility moved a few miles farther west.
The legend of B. I Staples begins with his miraculous recovery and grows considerably with his kindness to an unfortunate Navajo boy. Somewhere in Colorado, Berton happened to be handy when the Indian lad was run over by the train and lost both his legs. The train workers didn’t even notice and went on down the tracks. Staples gave the boy what comfort and aid he could. It didn’t do the young man much good and he died anyway.
But the skinny Easterner (his nickname was Chizzy Nez – Tall Stick) had won the respect and affection of the boy’s father, a powerful medicine man who immediately wanted to make Staples a blood brother. The initiation ceremony lasted nine days and nights (the length of a major chantway) and drew a crowd of nearly two thousand Navajos. Staples’s out-of-pocket costs must have been formidable. According to a Vermont news article, Berton was only the third white man to ever receive the honor of Navajo citizenship.
The same news article quotes Mr. Staples: “The Tribe believed I was born a Navajo, but had been retained in the East by the Palefaces and they had taken me into their tribe because I was a good fighter.” He clearly believed the story himself.
B. I. went to work for the A. B. McGaffey lumber enterprise in Thoreau, but shortly opened his own Indian store. Staples was soon caught up with promoting Indian arts and crafts and is said to have paid higher prices to artists who were willing to do superior or more complex work. As a Republican and a Mason, Staples rose quickly in the Gallup business society.
He held various offices in the fledgling Ceremonial organization and only retired as its president a short time before his death. He was obviously a man of taste (one story has him designing clothes in New York City) and he is associated with one of the most important Navajo weavings in history.
Casa del Navajo interior. The living room was a museum in itself.
In the late 1880s Lorenzo Hubbell had either commissioned or simply purchased a giant two-faced rug, a uniquely Navajo product. The design on each side is completely different, not just reversed like the twilled saddle blanket, or a Pendleton. The huge rug is seen hanging in the background of the famous photo of Hubbell inspecting a large weaving in front of his Ganado store.
Lorenzo owed his former partner, C. N. Cotton, a lot of money at one point and the weaving passed to him in Gallup. It was in the possession of Staples when an early writer on Navajo blankets described and photographed the piece. His “museum” – he called it the Wayside Museum of Archeology – got international attention during the period and famous folks flocked to what was promoted as an oasis of culture in the Southwest desert.
Staples’s guests may have been paying customers, but his guestbook was as richly autographed as the one at Hubbell’s as writers, artists, photographers, archeologists, ethnologists and people famous for being famous trooped through. Several books were written there, including Erna Fergusson’s classic Dancing Gods.
Anna Ickes, the wife of Roosevelt’s notorious Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, had her own personal hogan on the Casa del Navajo property and spent summers there, writing her famous book Mesa Land: The History and Romance of the American Southwest. Another resident writer, Gouverneur Morris (author of many books and several films, as well as short stories in major magazines) stayed on with the Newcombs when they took over the place and became a virtual member of the family.
When the United Indian Traders Association was organized in 1931, Staples became the first president and served in that position for the rest of his life. His wife Rebecca died in 1937 and Berton followed in less than a year. They had two adopted children. Staples’s car went off the road into a thirty-foot deep arroyo. There were rumors that Staples wasn’t able to get past the death of his wife and the car wreck that killed him might not have been an accident. This is unlikely because he had his pet dog and a Navajo hitchhiker in the car with him.
Pallbearers and honorary pallbearers included a who’s who of Indian arts, and most of the prominent men in Gallup. Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes and Indian Commissioner John Collier both sent moving tributes for Staples. Both men had known B. I. before rising to prominent positions in the government.
Soon after Staples’s death the Casa del Navajo was purchased by Charlie and Madge Newcomb who had been traders at Naschitti, Crystal, Prewitt and elsewhere. Famous guests continued to find a congenial welcome in Coolidge and Joel McCrea was one of many actors who starred in a movie in the area. The film, Colorado Territory, co-starred Virginia Mayo. The only change that needed to be made to the set was signage, the building was perfect.
John Havens, the son of Gallup photographer Pete Havens, made some excellent drawings and ground plans of the rancho which give a better picture of the place than any photo was able to capture. Pete and John are members of the extended Newcomb family.
There were several fires over the years (eleven fireplaces might contribute to that), but the whole place tragically burned down in 1955. Not long before the fire, the Newcombs had sold the place to Hazel Pruett. The town of Pruett was named for her brother-in-law. Fire was apparently in Hazel’s destiny – she died a few years later in a blaze she had started accidentally while smoking in bed.
When Casa del Navajo went up in smoke the town of Coolidge was already long gone and Shirley Newcomb Kelsey says there is hardly a mark to show where it once stood. Luckily, Shirley and her father were avid photographers and the magnificent place is well documented.
CORRECTION
Zuni Housing employee Linda Luna caught a couple of errors in the piece last month on the Zuni Housing Fair. The crowd was served oven bread as part of the traditional meal, no tortillas. More importantly, I gave credit to Costco for the wonderful generosity of the local Wal-Mart and I apologize.
