Santa Fe Living Treasures – Elder Stories

Dwight Wagner was in the steel business. "The company owned a lot of flat land along the Ohio River" on which they planned to build mills, Sallie said. "There were a lot of mounds on that land. I persuaded my father to have the company sponsor a dig on one of the mounds, and the Pennsylvania Museum did a dig one summer. I think I was about fourteen years old, but they let me dig anyway," and the anthropologists suggested to Sallie that she consider attending the University of Chicago. After completing boarding school in Washington, D.C., Sallie went to Chicago and began her studies. She returned to Santa Fe during the summers.    Sallie met William Lippincott at college. "He got a job with the National Park Service. We got married in 1936," she said. While working at Canyon de Chelly, William decided to leave government employment. The couple bought Wide Ruins Trading Post in 1938.

"Wide Ruins was seventeen miles north of Chambers," Arizona, said Sallie. "The nearest town was Gallup and it was seventy miles away." Wide Ruins was a general store, and William and Sallie sold "everything from wagons to lollipops," she said. "I don't think there are any trading posts anymore. It's all based on a cash economy now." Sallie and her husband were in the trading post business for thirteen years, and during that time she persuaded Navajo rug makers to use vegetable dyes.

Please see Volume 1 for complete text.
Photo ©1997 by Joanne Rijmes