Dr. Big

Nobody seemed to want the job of running the tiny Presbyterian mission on the Navajo reservation at Ganado, Ariz. Back on a year's furlough from a 13-year hitch on Hainan Island, off the South China coast, big, broad-shouldered Dr. Clarence Grant Salsbury finally told the Mission Board that he and his wife would keep things going at Ganado for a couple of months until the board could get a permanent man. A year later he notified the board that he would be happy to stay on indefinitely among the Navajos.

This week, 22 years later, Indians from all over the reservation were streaming into Ganado to celebrate the 64th birthday and mourn the impending retirement of Dr. Tso (Navajo for "big") and his trained-nurse wife. There was plenty of room for all who wanted to come; Dr. Big had built up the little settlement until it is now the largest Indian mission post in the U.S., with a $1,500,000 plant and 70 permanent buildings.

In the early years at Ganado, the going was not always easy. One of the Salsburys' first cases was a Navajo girl whose leg had been broken when her horse fell on her. Missionary Salsbury set the badly crushed bones and later operated, but the girl died of an embolism. Promptly a mob of angry Navajos assembled to kill the white doctor. At the last moment a medicine man stepped forward to say: "Go home. This man has not come to take, but to give. Even medicine men make mistakes."

Today Ganado's 200-acre campus is dotted with signs bearing such mottoes as: "I dressed his wound but God healed him" and "This is the center of the world--you can go anywhere from here." For Presbyterian Salsbury, religion is even more important than medicine. Says he: "If I had ever been faced at Ganado with the choice of closing either the hospital or the school, I would have locked the door of the hospital, because the ultimate salvation is Christian education . . ."

The Salsburys are looking forward to a year's terminal leave before Dr. Big reaches the retirement age of 65. But "Once you get the desert sand in your shoes," says Missionary Salsbury, "you never leave. We'll stay in the Southwest. But I expect to get back to work again sometime soon. It will continue to be medicine and the church."

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