BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Commerce

For more than a century, trading posts in the American Southwest tied the U.S. economy and culture to those of American Indian peoples—and in this capacity, Hubbell Trading Post, founded in 1878 in Ganado, Arizona, had no parallel. This book tells the story of the Hubbell family, its Navajo neighbors and clients, and what the changing relationship between them reveals about the history of Navajo trading.

The story of banking in twentieth-century Oklahoma is also the story of the Sooner State’s first hundred years, as Michael J. Hightower’s new book demonstrates. Oklahoma statehood coincided with the Panic of 1907, and both events signaled seismic shifts in state banking practices. Much as Oklahoma banks shed their frontier persona to become more tightly integrated in the national economy, so, too, was decentralized banking revealed as an anachronism, utterly unsuited to an increasingly global economy.

Thomas Varker Keam owned and operated a trading post in Keams Canyon, Arizona Territory, from 1874 to 1902. He was the first trader to develop American Indian arts and crafts as part of his business and the first to suggest that Native artists modify their techniques to increase sales. Keam had a major impact on the evolution of Hopi pottery.

From the Bents and St. Vrain to modern vendors selling jewelry and groceries to tourists, the traders of New Mexico and Arizona have been the bridge between cultures. Based on interviews, letters, and unpublished documents, The Indian Traders helps complete the history of the Southwest.

This lively book takes Oklahoma history into the world of Wild West capitalism. It begins with a useful survey of banking from the early days of the American republic until commercial patterns coalesced in the East. It then follows the course of American expansion westward, tracing the evolution of commerce and banking in Oklahoma from their genesis to the eve of statehood in 1907.