American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The San Juan River was still running deep that July of 1943. The cottonwood leaves trembled slightly in the midday heat, with an occasional breeze snaking its way along the dirt road that ran beside the red rock bluffs north of the river. Ada Benally remembers shading her eyes and looking across the brown, roiling water at the approaching dust cloud that billowed above the far bank. The hum of vehicle engines stopped, the opening and closing of truck doors sounded in the distance, and the dust began to settle. Ada wondered what was happening. The sights and sounds came from a section along the river where Navajos and Utes had traditionally picked sumac berries, wild spinach, and herbs. Perhaps these people had come for that purpose. She decided to wait and see, since the river was too high, too fast, and there was no boat to take her across. Had Ada been able to ford the river, she would have witnessed the establishment of the Saint Christopher’s Mission, located two miles outside of Bluff, Utah. Ada would also later be counted as one among several hundred of the mission’s future baptized members. But that was in the future. At this point, the cassocked Father H. (Harold) Baxter Liebler, the director of this Episcopalian mission, stepped out of his vehicle to begin his life-long work among the Navajo. He had come from Old Greenwich, Connecticut, leaving behind a well-established parish to pursue a boyhood vision he considered his destiny. At the age of fifty-three, Father Liebler set out to fulfill his dream of a mission to the Navajo. He selected an isolated part of their reservation known as the Utah Strip with the hope of finding a group of people least touched by earlier inroads of Christianity. Saint Christopher’s was the ideal spot for this undertaking. The site was geographically central to the Utah Navajo population living on the northern boundary of the reservation. The vast majority of the people lived in hogans south of the river and came across on horseback or in wagons occasionally to trade; a general store and a twenty-home Mormon community comprised the city of Bluff.