Spin a Silver Dollar

By Alberta Hannum

IN 1938 a young couple called Lippincott undertook an unusual venture. They bought, the Navajo Indian trading post at Wide Ruins and ran it on a. “gentleman farmer” basis. They built a badminton court and a swimming pool, imported a cook from the East, trained a Navajo girl as maid and put her into a uniform, and generally established a mode of life which, when one associates it with the Navajo Reservation, rocks the mind.

They seem to have been a perceptive and pleasant pair. Spin a Silver Dollar tells a lively tale of the results of their undertaking. They ran their trading post with the same earnestness many gentlemen put into their farming, intent on showing at least a technical credit on their books. Inevitably. they developed the interlocking relationship with the Indian community which is the greatest reward of the trader’s life. They acquired real perception of the Indians.

The book is loaded with incidents, some grave enough, some truly hilarious, which lead one to keep nodding and saying. “Yes, that’s the way the Navajos are; that’s the way things happen with them,”

When they first arrived, they made the acquaintance of Beatien Begay, otherwise Jimmy, a little boy with a passion for drawing. With rare understanding, they encouraged his drawing, provided him with materials, and made no suggestions. Following his natural bent, the child developed in the course of the years into an artist of genuine talent. His curious, introverted, charming personality and the evolution of his art are warm threads running through the story. Twelve of his pictures are reproduced as illustrations. Some of them are merely cute; some are brilliant with promise; most have an individuality and quality entirely their own.

Evidently the author and the Lippincotts regard Beatien Begay’s evolution as one of the most important products of their venture. In this they are right. One can only pray that the boy will continue to benefit from the guidance, and above all the restraint from guidance, which these people gave him. He stands now at the dividing line which, so far, almost no Indian artist has been able to cross. We have seen so many of them develop from the promising, crude “primitive" to the skilled craftsman, only, in the fullest bud of their promise, to degenerate into wholesale illustrators turning out picturesque curios for the tourist trade. Perhaps this one will be the exception who will go forward on the harder road.

One would like to know more about Miss Hannum, the author. Her story is written with such intimacy that it seems almost as it the Lippincotts themselves had written it — except that at moments it contains a note of adulation of these two nice young people which they themselves would surely not have let creep in.

The story, too, is marred by innumerable shallow inaccuracies concerning the Indians and almost everything else. We have an old man, strong and active in 1941. who was a warrior against Kit Carson — which is to say, that he was an adult in 1866. We have P-38’s being flown in 1939; the varsoviana. which was introduced to New Mexico in the late 1860’s, is described as having been brought over bythe the Conquistadores, and there is a passage on the great Don Lorenzo Hubbell and his house at Ganado which is pure folklore.

The book is, nonetheless, good fun and informative. The thread of Beatien Begay’s story running through it, and his remarkable pictures, would by themselves make the book worth while,

OLIVER LA FARGE