Arizona, 1957. Window Rock, the capital of the Navajo Nation. A county tax notice is nailed to the door of a house that has been empty for eight months. The man who lives there has been in a VA hospital in Albuquerque since the previous winter. He does not know the notice is there. Nobody told him. The house sits on two acres of high desert on the eastern edge of the Defiance Plateau, 12 miles out side Window Rock on a dirt road that turns to mud in March and dust by May.
His grandfather, Thomas Running Water, broke the ground in 1909 with a borrowed mule and a hand plow. He built the house from sandstone blocks he cut himself from the canyon wall to the north, carrying each one down in a rope sling across his back. The blocks are the color of dried blood in the morning and orange at noon and almost purple when the sun drops behind the plateau in the evening.
Thomas died in that house in 1931. His son, George, inherited it and kept it until 1944, when his own son, Henry, left for the war and George’s heart began to fail. Henry Running Water was born in that house in 1921. He grew up speaking Diné Bizaad, the Navajo language, as his first tongue and learned English at a government boarding school 40 miles away.
He was 20 years old when the Marine Corps came to the reservation in 1942 looking for young men who could speak Navajo fluently in both directions. The code they built from Navajo words could not be broken by any means the Japanese cryptographers had at their disposal. They unravelled every other Allied cipher in the Pacific.
They never touched the Navajo code. There was nothing to touch. The code lived only inside the heads of the men who carried it. Henry transmitted troop movements, artillery coordinates, casualty counts, and ammunition requests across every major campaign in the Pacific from Guadalcanal in 1942 to Iwo Jima in 1945.
He was 23 years old at Iwo Jima. He transmitted for 72 consecutive hours during the first week of the landing. On the fourth day, a round of Japanese shrapnel opened his left shoulder from the collarbone to the blade. A corpsman packed it and wrapped it and Henry kept transmitting. The shoulder healed but not clean.
For the rest of his life, he could feel the weather in it two days before it changed. He came home in September of 1945 with a discharge paper and orders not to speak about what he had done. The program was classified. The men were told the classification could last for years.
Henry Running Water came home to his father’s house on the Defiance Plateau and said nothing. He fixed trucks at a trading post 8 miles up the road and paid the county property tax every November. $48 a year paid in cash at the Apache County Assessor’s Office in St. Johns, 60 miles east. He had done it 11 years without missing once.
In 1949, he married Clara Chee whose family ran sheep on the Chinle flatlands. They had two children. Robert, born in 1951. May, born in 1953. In the autumn of 1956, Henry began to tire in a way that was different from ordinary tiredness. By By he was coughing in a way that kept Clara awake at night. The Indian Health Service Clinic at Fort Defiance said it was tuberculosis.
They sent him to the VA hospital in Albuquerque in January of 1957. Clara took Robert and May to her mother’s house in Chinle to wait. The house on the Defiance Plateau went empty. Nobody drove to St. Johns in November of 1956 because Henry had been too sick to make the drive. Nobody drove in November of 1955 either because the clinic had told him to rest, and he had rested instead.
Two years unpaid. $96 at the base rate plus penalties prescribed by state statute and applied without exception. The total on the lien notice nailed to the sandstone door frame was $340. The notice gave 60 days. After 60 days, the county would seize the property and auction it. The minimum bid would be $340.
The two acres on the Defiance Plateau, the sandstone house built block by block in 1909, would go to whoever handed the assessor’s office $340 first. Clara did not have $340. She was in Chinle with two children and no income. She wrote to the VA hospital three times asking them to tell Henry. The third letter reached a nurse who brought it to his room on a Tuesday afternoon in March.
Henry read it in a bed with a window facing a parking lot. He had been in that bed since January. A man named Delbert Sosey ran a hardware store in Window Rock and had known Henry since they were boys in the government school together. He heard about the notice, drove out, and read it himself.
Then spent eight days asking everyone he knew if they could help put together $340 for Clara Running Water. He raised $40. He could not get further. This was 1957 on the Navajo Nation, and $300 was the kind of money that did not sit idle anywhere. John Wayne was 50 years old in the spring of 1957. He had been coming to Monument Valley since John Ford brought him there for Stagecoach in 1938, and he knew the country the way a man knows land he has ridden over for 20 years.
He knew which trading posts had cold Coca-Cola in a working cooler. He knew the distances and which stretches went dead for 40 miles with nothing but the wind and the red rock and the occasional hawk on a fence post. On a Wednesday morning in late April, Wayne was driving south from Kayenta toward Gallup in a battered ranch truck with a film crew in two vehicles following behind.
He had a production meeting in Gallup at 4:00 in the afternoon. He took the longer road because the longer road went through country he liked to look at in the morning light. He stopped for gas at a trading post 12 miles east of Window Rock. The man behind the counter was a quiet Navajo man named Franklin, Albert Soosey’s cousin, who knew the circumstances of every family for 20 miles in any direction.
Wayne paid for the gas and bought two Coca-Colas from the cooler and asked about the road south toward Gallup. Franklin said the roads were clear. Then he told Wayne about Henry Running Water. He told him about the Pacific and the code that could not be broken. About the hospital in Albuquerque. About the 60-day notice and the $340, about Delbert Sosey asking around Window Rock for 8 days and coming up $40 short.
Wayne stood at the counter and did not say anything while Franklin talked. He had set his Coca-Cola down when Franklin started and did not pick it up again. When Franklin finished, Wayne looked at the counter for a moment. Then he looked at the calendar on the wall behind Franklin, a motor oil company calendar showing a canyon at sunset.
“Where is the assessor’s office?” he said. “St. Johns, 60 miles east.” He walked out to his truck. He went to the lead vehicle of his film crew and told the driver to take both vehicles on to Gallup and check in to the hotel. He would be there by 4:00. He drove 60 miles east on a two-lane highway through high desert the color of rust and pale sage.
He parked in front of the Apache County Courthouse in St. Johns at 11:20 in the morning and went inside. The assessor’s office was on the second floor at the end of a corridor that smelled of floor wax and old paper. A woman behind the counter looked up when he came in. She looked again. He gave her the name, Henry Running Water, Defiance Plateau address, outstanding tax lien.
She went to the files. She came back with a folder and read him the amount, $340 with the penalty accrued through that date. He took the long brown leather wallet from his back pocket and laid it open on the counter. He counted $340 in bills, slow and deliberate, the way a man counts in public when he wants the count to be witnessed and remembered.
He set the stack on the counter. The woman looked at the money. She looked at him. She picked up her pen and began writing the receipt. He asked her to add a line. He asked her to write that the property was clear of any outstanding lien as of that date and that no further action would be taken by Apache County against it.
She wrote it. She stamped the receipt with the county stamp. She handed the carbon across the counter. He asked if she could mail the original to the VA hospital in Albuquerque. Attention, Henry Running Water. She said she could send it through the county mail. He set another bill on the counter.
For the trouble, he said. She looked at the bill. It was more than the postage by a considerable margin. She put it in the drawer without commenting. He drove 60 miles back west and stopped at the trading post. Franklin was still behind the counter. Wayne laid the carbon copy of the receipt on the wood between them.
He told Franklin to get it to Clara Running Water in Chinle. Franklin picked up the receipt and read it. When he looked up, something had shifted in his face. “Those men,” Wayne said, “in the Pacific, the code.” He did not finish the sentence. He was not a man who made speeches about things he considered settled.
He picked up his Coca-Cola from the counter. It had gone warm. He drank it anyway. He set the bottle in the case and walked out to his truck and drove south toward Gallup and arrived at 12 minutes before 4:00. Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments below. I want to see how far this story reaches.
Henry Running Water came home from Albuquerque in September of 1957. He was thin and moved carefully and the doctors told him to rest for 6 months. Clara and the children came home from Chinle. They opened the house on the Defiance Plateau. The morning light came through the east windows the way Thomas had built them to face in 1909.
Clara told him that night at the kitchen table with the stamped receipt from Apache County lying between them. She had received it in May, forwarded from the hospital through three different addresses before it found her in Chinle. She had not told him in her letters because she wanted to see his face when she said it.
He read the receipt. He read it twice. He looked at the county stamp and the date and the line that said the property was clear. He set it down. He was quiet for a long moment. Clara told him the name. She had gotten it from Franklin. Henry looked at the receipt again. He said, “I know who that is.
” He said it quietly without surprise, the way a man says something he has been carrying for a while and has been waiting for a reason to set down. He had seen the photographs in the Trading Post magazine since he was young. He knew the face. He knew the pictures from Monument Valley, 40 miles north of his own land.
Then he said, “He was there.” He meant the Pacific. He did not know the specific islands or the dates or what Wayne had done in the war years. He meant it as recognition. A time, a theater, a generation of men who had all been somewhere inside the same enormous thing and had all come home from it and had mostly not spoken of it since.
He never wrote to John Wayne. He had no address and no way to find one. He went back to fixing trucks in October, a month before the doctors had cleared him because the wages were needed. He drove to St. John’s in November and paid the property tax, $48 in an envelope with his name on it, the way he had always done it.
Robert Running Water grew up in the sandstone house on the Defiance Plateau. He was 6 years old when his father came home from the hospital. He understood from fragments of conversation over the years that his father had done something in the war that nobody was permitted to talk about. The code talker program was declassified in 1968.
Henry told Robert the full story on a July evening in 1969, sitting on the front porch while the light went purple on the plateau. He told it once, in order, without embellishment. Robert listened without interrupting. When his father finished, they sat in the dark for a while and then went inside.
Robert studied law at the University of New Mexico and returned to work for the Navajo Nation’s legal office. In 1971, he drafted the first formal petition to Congress requesting official recognition of the Navajo code talkers. It was received, filed, and did not move. He submitted a second in 1974, a third in 1977. In 1982, the Department of Defense issued a certificate of recognition to the original 29 code talkers.
Henry received his at a ceremony outside the Navajo Nation Council building in Window Rock in August of that year. He was 61. Robert stood beside him. May drove up from Albuquerque, where she was working as a surgical nurse. Clara had died in 1978 and did not see it. Henry Running Water died in 1994 in the room with the east windows in the house his grandfather had built.
The land was clear. No mortgage, no lien, no outstanding tax, and had not been since a Wednesday in April of 1957. In 2001, Congress awarded the Congressional Gold Medal to the original 29 Navajo Code Talkers. Robert accepted his father’s medal in Washington. He carried the carbon copy of the Apache County tax receipt in his inside coat pocket during the ceremony.
He had found it in the kitchen after Henry died, folded inside a sheet of notebook paper on which Henry had written in Navajo a single word. The word translates as paid. Robert donated the receipt to the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock in 2002. It sits in a glass case along the east wall of the main exhibition hall.
Beside it are Henry’s discharge papers from 1945, his certificate of recognition from 1982, a photograph of the house taken by May in 1975 with Clara sitting on the front step, and the east windows bright behind her. And a hand-drawn survey of the 2-acre parcel in pencil on a folded sheet of paper. The placard beside the case reads, “Henry Thomas Runningwater, 1921 to 1994.
Navajo Code Talker. United States Marine Corps, 1942 to 1945. Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Guam, Iwo Jima. This land was his grandfather’s. It is his son’s now. It was never for sale. The land is still in the family. The house is still standing. The sandstone blocks are the color Thomas Runningwater chose when he carried them down from the canyon wall in 1909, a block at a time, in a rope sling across his back.
Dried blood in the morning, orange at noon, almost purple when the light goes behind the plateau in the evening. If this story reached you, pass it on. Share it with a veteran in your life. Hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already. There are more stories coming and unfortunately, they don’t make men like John Wayne anymore.
