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Everything that happened in this community, say, of a radius of twenty miles or so, this was the hub. It all came into the trading post, and everybody met there, things were done. And you dealt, whether or not she had a rug to sell or to barter with, or they had an account already established with the trader previous to you. They would bring in their rugs to pay the account. Or they would sell a cow. You would be in there, and someone would say, "Well, Sam Begay has got a cow out here." So you go out to the corral and you would weigh or buy or look at--different methods of doing it--the cow, and then you would go in and he would take out pawn pay on his account, etc. This happened over and over.... If it was in wool season when they were shearing the sheep, then they would bring the wool in. Or lamb season, they would bring lambs in. Or if they ran out of food, they would bring lamb in to trade for merchandise... they would need flour and things they didn't have, like lard, baking powder, sugar, salt, stuff like this... And any products that they produced, whether it was farm products, livestock they raised, piñon nuts that they [gathered] if there was a piñon crop that year, rugs, saddle blankets, anything that they had... we furnished a market for it. It didn't matter... They met friends there, they made arrangements to have ceremonies or stuff like that. They would lots of time find the medicine man there. So they would hire him. This was the hub... And this was basically what we did, and we was there to take care of anything that they wanted, or if we didn't have it, we could get it.
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