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<\/a>Liza Doran, left, with one of the many friends she has made over 40 years at the Cow Canyon Trading Post.<\/p><\/div>\n
As a child, Liza Doran fell in love with the souks of Arabia. As a young woman, she fell for the textile traditions of Belgium. Then she was seduced by photographs of a beat-up stone building in Bluff, Utah. For the next 40 years, she learned what it means to run a trading post.<\/p>\n
“I grew up in the souks of Arabia. I know it sounds weird, but I really did,” Doran says from inside Cow Canyon Trading Post.\u00a0 Under heavy wooden beams, Navajo rugs, pottery, jewelry and photographs are arranged with the restraint of a gallery, but the worn floors, rocking chairs and bookshelves make the place feel like a home. Her father worked in construction and the family lived in Jeddah, the Red Sea port city near Mecca. Doran remembers it as a cosmopolitan place, filled with people arriving from around the world. And a safe place. Her mother allowed the children to take taxis into downtown Jeddah on their own. “I was just fascinated by markets and commerce,” she says. “Even as a child, you know, I wanted to be in the souks. That’s what I thought was wonderful.”<\/p>\n
Doran eventually returned to the United States to study at the University of New Mexico. A work-study job at the university’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology introduced her to Jim Ostler, an artist and author she would later marry. But first Doran fell in love with a Belgian artist and moved to Ghent, where she lived for five years and studied textiles and weaving.<\/p>\n
Then strange photographs began arriving.<\/p>\n
“I started getting unidentified photographs of this beat-up stone building in Utah,” she says. Ostler eventually told her, “Come to the States. Check it out.”<\/p>\n
She did. “It was July and it was hot as hell,” she says. Bluff is a small, sandy town along the San Juan River, where cottonwoods gather near the water and massive sandstone bluffs rise beyond it. It has a history of boom and retreat. Settled in 1880 by the Mormon pioneers of the famous Hole-in-the-Rock expedition, the town dwindled as farming along the unpredictable San Juan River proved difficult. By the 1930s its population had fallen to roughly 70, before uranium brought prospectors, miners and money back to southeastern Utah in the middle of the century.<\/p>\n Cow Canyon Trading Post dates to that revival. Built around 1949 by Rusty and Lillie Musselman, its rock walls incorporated stone salvaged from a deteriorating pioneer house elsewhere in Bluff. The location made sense for a trading post: where the main north-south highway through southeastern Utah meets a road following the San Juan River east toward the Navajo Nation. Simpson ran a gas station there, trading gasoline and oil for Navajo rugs, baskets and jewelry. By the 1980s, the building was deteriorating again, but those old stone walls remained. They were enough to seduce Doran.<\/p>\n “I said, ‘I’m in. I’ll do it as a partner.'” The new Cow Canyon Trading Post opened August 1, 1986, with four original partners, Ostler among them. Doran is the last one standing.<\/p>\n The Bluff Doran arrived in was still “remote,” she says. “It was fun.” The town was seeing another resurgence. The completion of Glen Canyon Dam in the 1960s and the growth of recreation on Lake Powell and the San Juan River brought more visitors into southeastern Utah. By the ’80s, Bluff had a few hotels and a modest tourism economy built around river trips, archaeology, geology and rock art.<\/p>\n In 1987, Doran opened a restaurant on Cow Canyon’s glassed-in porch. Groups traveling with organizations such as Southwest Seminars returned year after year. The restaurant attracted enough attention to land in publications including Sunset and Travel + Leisure. She would run it for 23 years.<\/p>\n The trading business she learned as she went. “I was pretty green,” she says. Doran knew something about textiles, but little about the network of auctions, artists, families and traders that moved work through the Four Corners. Early on she discovered the Crownpoint Rug Auction in New Mexico, where weavers brought rugs and buyers bid on them. “I went to that once, and it got around town that, ‘Hey, there’s a buyer.'”<\/p>\n Soon, people began coming to her. In those days, the work generally came from within a roughly 300-mile radius. Doran purchased items rather than take them on consignment. A weaver might walk in with a rug and a very specific number in mind. “They’d say, ‘I want $493.23 for that.’ And I said, ‘Is that your car payment?’ They go, ‘Yeah.'”<\/p>\n Over time, transactions became relationships. Doran might buy rugs from a woman for years, then watch her teach a daughter or granddaughter to weave and eventually buy the younger weaver’s first rug. “There’s kind of a loyalty thing,” she says. “If you treat people well, they will return and they’ll bring other people. That part feeds into what I learned about etiquette in the Middle East. That’s how some of the older weavers felt really comfortable with me. When they’d come in, I’d make tea right away.” Doran remembers a weaver friend paying her what she took to be a considerable compliment: “Liza, you’re the most Navajo white person I’ve ever met.”<\/p>\n For Doran, trading was never simply moving an object from a maker to a buyer. Years ago, when someone wanted copy for a brochure, she wrote her own definition: “Trading posts are about people, their interactions, influences, support, and our interdependence. This one’s real. Come be a part of it.”<\/p>\n Historically, of course, a trading post was also considerably more prosaic. “When I think of an old-timey trading post, that’s where you came in and you could buy an ax handle and coffee,” Doran says. “Got your mail, got\u2014like, whatever. That was the community.” Cow Canyon had once been just such a place. A Desert Magazine writer who visited in 1960 found the store stocked with horse collars, kerosene lamps, washboards, irons and other necessities of rural life. Wool might be currency, Doran remarks. People came from far enough away that they stayed awhile. Doran talks about people tying horses outside, about traders keeping firewood so visitors could make a fire and stay out back.<\/p>\n By the time she arrived in 1986, much of that world had already changed. Over the next four decades, she watched it change further. “I miss, I gotta say, I so miss the old gals,” she says of the older Navajo weavers who once came regularly through Cow Canyon. “They’re gone.” She remembers them coming in wearing velvet blouses, sitting down and staying. No reason to hurry away. The basic economic equation that once made a trading post essential has changed as well. An artist in a remote part of the Four Corners no longer necessarily needs a trader in Bluff to reach collectors. “For one thing, because of the internet \u2026 a lot of weavers, they don’t need me,” Doran says. “They don’t need the trading post anymore.”<\/p>\n Cow Canyon has changed with that world. It is more compound than storefront. Alongside the old trading post is another building, now home to a coffee shop run by younger tenants who lease the space. Next door, a former mechanic’s garage has become an artist studio. Together with the yard and gathering spaces between them, the property has the feel of a small creative outpost.<\/p>\n Doran has become increasingly interested in finding older textiles and historical pieces. “I love the job,” she says. “That harks back to my learning about textiles in my early days and just so admiring the artistry of that.” Sometimes younger weavers come through the trading post and encounter those older works. “Wow, how old is that?” they ask.<\/p>\n And if the trader is no longer always necessary as a middleman, Doran still sees a role for someone who knows where things come from. A customer once brought in a bracelet he had purchased on the side of the road and asked Doran to look at it. He had paid $600. “You’ve gotta be shitting me,” she told him. “I wouldn’t pay $100 for that. That’s from the Philippines. It’s not even real turquoise, and I’m sorry, but you just got ripped off.”<\/p>\n At Cow Canyon, she says, buyers can enter “a place that’s curated and you can trust.” The name of the maker stays with the object. Sell a pair of earrings and Cow Canyon can tell you who made them, where they came from and something about the tradition behind them.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n