p>County of wagon: Navajo County
Location of Attraction: Between Burger King and Hampton Inn along side US 160, near turnoff to Kayenta, AZ
Erected Attraction: Navajo Nation
Nearby Attractions: Navajo Code Talker Museum inside Burger King
I was there in January of 2009. Traveling home from San Diego CA where my son had just graduated from the Marine Corps Boot Camp- we were headed home on his Boot leave before leaving for Japan.
I was a Communications and Recon Marine. I worked with many Navajo and Apache Marines. So this site had a lot of emotion for me. We served in Vietnam.
Marker text:
WAGONS
Into the late 1930's, few Navajos around the Kayenta area had wagons. Washes, canyons, mesas and mountain ranges in the western region of the reservation typically made road building difficult. The vast interior of the reservation remained accessible only by horseback, the riders using familiar trails. Navajos started to prosper with more and more sheep from the sale of lambs, wool and rugs. More sheep also meant more children and more material wealth increasing a demand for wagons. Additionally, the construction of bridges and roads started to increase the demand for wagons. Wagons for the Navajos meant the difference between confinement to a spring of some primary source of water or living where you wanted because with a wagon you could haul 55 gallon drums of water.
At the turn of the century, Navajos and Anglos rarely intermixed, the San Juan River constituting one of the major barriers to contact between the races. The Anglos living on the northern side of the river and the Navajos in the south. In 1904, a footbridge was complete at Farmington, New Mexico. Five years later, 1909, a wagon bridge was opened at Mexican Hat, Utah, and in 1910, at Shiprock, New Mexico. A flood destroyed all of the bridges in October 1911. The Mexican Hat and Shiprock bridges were soon rebuilt.
With the replacement of the reservation bridges in 1915, a new dirt road from Shiprock to Gallup was also completed. In 1929, the state of Arizona along with money from the Indian Service, completed a dirt road through the western region of the reservation connecting Kayenta to Shiprock, New Mexico. to the north and to Cameron, Arizona to the south. In the western region, Navajos living along this new dirt road were first to purchase new wagons.
The US Government was the major supplier of wagons from 1920 to 1930. The Navajos could buy wagons on credit at the wholesale price with a $50.00 down-payment. The price of a wagon in 1925 was $145.61, and the Indian Service introduced a reimbursable plan to pay with wagons instead of wages. Wagons were acquired first by Navajos from the eastern portion of the reservation (New Mexico) and gradually moved to the western reservation area (Tuba City through Kayenta). Even before wagons came into universal use in the western portion of the reservation, well-to-do Navajos in New Mexico were tarting to purchase automobiles. The Shiprock-Gallup highway was paved in 1927 whereas the road linking Tuba City to Shiprock wasn't paved until 1960.