Navajo Trading : University of New Mexico Press : 9780826323224 : 0826323227 : 30 Nov 2002 : Beginning in the 1870s peddlers began to travel by wagon onto the Navajo Reservation to barter their wares for wool, a few sheep, a rug, or a piece of silver jewelry. By the early years of the twentieth century, barter developed into an exchange of culture and services: in addition to serving as a place where Navajo jewelry and rugs changed hands, trading posts acted as grocery stores, banks, post offices, and railroad hiring offices. Traders were the link between Anglo-American culture and the Navajo people. At first agents of change, by 1950 they had become maintainers of tradition and hence obstacles to modernization. Today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, trading posts are obsolete. This overview of Navajo trading is the first to examine trading in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when changes in both cultures led to the investigation of trading practices by the Federal