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Horse Happenings Travel United States

Twenty-five Unnatural Wonders of the Western Roadside: Chief Yellow Horse Trading Post (Lupton, Arizona)

Nestled against a red-rock butte near the New Mexico border along Route 40, Chief Yellow Horse Trading Post has everything… and everything MUST GO!: 50 percent off ten thousand pairs of moccasins, 67 percent off Indian jewelry, 75 percent off Navajo sand paintings and kachina dolls, and –if you play cards right- 90 percent of some others things, One of the several building that comprise this huge trading complex is covered entirely in cattle skulls; another, when we passed through in 1992, was named Dances with Wolves, for the Kevin Costner movie. What’s most amazing about it all is the exterior: the roof s and the russet bluffs behind the buildings are occupied by lifesize plaster effigies of buffalo, horses, mules, antelope, grizzly bear, and a ghostly Indian driving a buckboard, while all the facades and signs arte painted shades of red and yellow so extreme that they literally imprint themselves on you retinas and will tint everything you see for miles down the road.

Stern, M. & Stern, J. (1993). Way Out West. New York, NY: Harper Collins.

Photo Credit: http://www.pbase.com/robert_kreutzmann/profile

 

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