The Babbitt Brothers and Northern Arizona's Trading Empire

The Babbitt family arrived in northern Arizona in the eighteen eighties and proceeded to make themselves the most consequential commercial dynasty in the region's history. They came from Cincinnati, brothers operating together, and they started with cattle. In the eighteen eighties they opened the CO Bar Ranch for cattle operations north of Flagstaff, and from that base they expanded into trading posts that served the Navajo and Hopi reservations, into general merchandise stores, into banking, and into anything else the growing territory needed.

The Babbitt Brothers Trading Company became the dominant commercial presence across a vast stretch of the Colorado Plateau. Their trading posts on the Navajo Nation were economic lifelines for reservation communities, offering manufactured goods, food staples, and credit in exchange for wool, rugs, livestock, and turquoise. The relationship between trading post operators and reservation communities was not always equitable by modern standards, and the terms of exchange frequently favored the traders. The historical record on the specifics of the Babbitt operations is limited in available sources, and characterizing the full nature of those exchanges would require archival research beyond what is documented here.

What is documented is their civic influence. When Route Sixty Six came through Flagstaff in nineteen twenty-six, the Babbitts were among the town's most prominent business families. The family remained in northern Arizona politics for generations. Bruce Babbitt, a direct descendant, served as Governor of Arizona and later as Secretary of the Interior under President Clinton.