TAYLORSVILLE — Step inside Dru and Leslie Drury’s store on Redwood Road, take a deep breath, squint just a little, and you might as well be riding a pinto pony on a wind-swept, grass-covered prairie, nothing but wide open space in every direction, with the smell of sweet sage wafting through the air.
So it goes every day at the Native American Trading Post, where each morning someone — usually Leslie or the resident medicine man, Jules Chavez — lights a sprig of sage and ceremonially smudges the premises, getting rid of negative influences and energies while enhancing the atmosphere.
And lest you think this might be merely a marketing gimmick — just another way to take advantage of this land’s original inhabitants by luring them into a place to relieve them of their money — wait’ll you meet Dru and Leslie.
Two bigger fans of Native Americans, you’d be hard-pressed to find.
Dru, 70, grew up on a farm near Preston, Idaho, where as a kid he watched families of Zuni or Navajo drop by every year to thin and weed the sugar beets, while Leslie, 71, was raised in the Duchesne County town of Myton, in the heart of the Ute Reservation, where she had as many native classmates as Anglos.
These childhoods bred an affection for all things Indian — the term Dru and Leslie respectfully called the native population back then and, as long as the politically correct police aren’t lurking, continue to use to this day.
No one’s protesting, that’s for sure, least of all the Indians. Few places offer a more complete Native American inventory than what sits under the roof of the Drury’s 8,000-square-foot trading post. Of the 35,000 Native Americans living in Utah, it’s a good bet a majority of them have stepped inside at one time or another.
“Our customers tell us there’s nothing like it in the United States — and we know that,” says Dru. “Anything they can find on the reservation, it’s here, and more.”
The shelves are filled with grinding stones, herbs, medicines, ceremonial wedding baskets, cradle boards, native style moccasins, hides, native-made sterling silver jewelry, paintings, crafts, more beads than you can count, robes, headdresses, dream-catchers, rugs, blankets and all sorts of native food, including Bluebird Flour (the flour for fry bread) trucked in by the trailer-full from Cortez, Colorado, and an item called ach'íí, which consists of a sheep’s intestines wrapped in fat that is about the size of a hotdog and sells for $5.
Try finding that in Walmart.
Like many businesses that look around one day and discover they’ve carved a popular niche that wasn’t there before, the trading post started out as a work in progress. In 1987, Dru was working as a traveling salesman, selling technical automotive manuals to mechanics shops throughout the West.
At a sales call in Blanding in southeastern Utah, he noticed a back room full of Indian pottery. On a whim, he bought all of the seconds for $400 and hauled them back to Salt Lake, where he sold them to his friends.
Until one day someone asked if he’d ever thought about setting up a stall at the swap meet held every weekend at the Redwood Drive-In.
He brought his pottery and laid it out on the sidewalk as native drum music played in the background.
Not only was there substantial interest in the pottery, people also wanted to know where they could buy the music.
“That’s how our business has been built,” says Dru. “Getting people what they want.”
In 2001, they moved into a building near the drive-in and opened full time. In 2004, they moved to their current location at 3971 S. Redwood Road.
In the beginning, the trading post’s clientele was mostly Anglos; today it’s two-thirds Native Americans.
The end result is a slice of authentic America in the heart of urban America, a place where the old meets the new, where red meets white (and where, oddly enough, the big seller for Anglo Americans is native-made rugs and the big seller for Native Americans is factory-made Pendleton blankets).
The trading post has become a clearinghouse for all things Indian. There’s a bulletin board advertising benefits, programs, meetings and events. And Dru and Leslie are involved in any number of Native American causes, from promoting education, to participating in the adopt-a-native-elder program, to making periodic food runs to the Navajo Nation.
“It’s more than a business for us, it’s a passion,” says Dru. “We don’t have to come to work. We get to come to work. We love who we meet and we love what we do.”
Lee Benson's About Utah column runs Mondays. Got a great Utah story? Please send email to: benson@deseretnews.com