Kayenta: The Trading Post at the Edge of the Monument

Kayenta is the largest community on this stretch of the Navajo Nation, home to roughly forty-seven hundred people and the main gateway for visitors heading into Monument Valley. It sits at the junction of United States Routes One Sixty and One Sixty-Three, about twenty-five miles south of the valley.

It began in nineteen oh nine when trader John Wetherill and his partner Clyde Colville established a post here in the remote Four Corners country. Wetherill was already legendary in the region. He and his wife Louisa spoke Navajo fluently, and the local people called him Hosteen John, a term of deep respect. That same year, President Taft designated nearby Navajo National Monument and appointed Wetherill its first caretaker at a salary of one dollar a month.

The name Kayenta comes from a Navajo word that government officials adopted when they set up the post office. The Navajo themselves called the place Toh Dinneh Shzhee, meaning where water comes out of the hill like fingers. Kayenta is unusual in Navajo governance: it holds the status of the only official township under Navajo Nation law, established in nineteen eighty-six. Every Fourth of July the town hosts a rodeo that runs from the first through the fourth, and the All Indian Rodeo Cowboys Association has named it Rodeo of the Year six times. Alcohol sales are illegal here, as on the rest of the Navajo Nation.