Business: Treasure for the Tribes

From Houston and Albuquerque, El Paso and Denver, tough-trading oilmen from every major company have been converging on the Four Corners area of Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico to get in on one of the biggest oil rushes in U.S. history. The sellers: the Navajo Indians, who are fast learning to play what oilmen call "grunt and groan." As the bids for oil lands are announced, the tribesmen merely grunt, and as the prices soar higher, the oilmen groan.

Last week the groans were rising to a new crescendo. In the first 230,000-acre...

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