The SlickOn the Navajo Nation, the List of Mystery Wells Continues to Grow

On a warm evening in early June, Loretta Johnson pointed her white Chevy Silverado with a Navajo blanket-patterned steering wheel cover south on the main road leading out of Shiprock, New Mexico, and hit the accelerator — lightly.

The retired nurse drove herself and a friend on the plumb-straight road and weaved stories as mile-wide dust storms tumbled across a landscape that inspired the Road Runner cartoons. And as the stories picked up in her rolling cadence, the speedometer ticked down. She was on a mission and she tackled it at her own pace, so the occasional driver on the road pulled around and passed her with no honking or lights flashing.

Johnson and her friend (who did not want to be identified over concerns for his job) are Diné, as the Navajo people call themselves. She grew up in a small house in a small valley near a small town several miles from where she’s driving on the nation’s biggest Native American reservation.

On the treeless horizon to the west stands the iconic stone peak Shiprock, and ahead is a water well that played a pivotal role in her life. Not so many years ago, before poor health kept her husband at home, Johnson and he would come to this well to fill a pair of 55-gallon barrels with water they would haul to their cattle in Red Valley, 30 miles away.

“Someone told me it was saltwater. But the cows, they drank it,” she said as she pulled up to the site. What she didn’t know then has since become clear.

An unmarked fence surrounds the spot, and truck traffic has turned the entry into a muddy bog. The well’s history is murky; it was drilled decades ago, and has few existing records. The wellhead itself is a six-inch pipe a little over four feet tall and crusted in rust and white deposits. A takeoff line runs along the ground to a nearby elevated tank where people still drive in to fill up.

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