Hosteen Klah: Navaho Medicine Man and Sand Painter

Franc Johnson Newcomb's Hosteen Klah is the biography of one of the most influential Navajo figures of his era, a celebrated medicine man, sandpainter, and weaver born in 1867, the year before the treaty that established the Navajo Reservation. Klah bridged the world of the Long Walk and Bosque Redondo with the difficult decades of adjustment that followed, and his life touches nearly two centuries of Navajo history through his great-grandfather, the war chief Narbona.

Newcomb lived twenty-five years near Klah at her husband's trading post, becoming his neighbor and friend, and collected more than four hundred of his sandpainting designs, many of them later woven into the tapestries that form the nucleus of what became the Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe. Published by the University of Oklahoma Press as Volume 73 of its Civilization of the American Indian Series, this copy retains its bright yellow pictorial dust jacket and preserves a sympathetic, firsthand record of a vanishing ceremonial tradition.