John Ford and Monument Valley

John Ford...the Duke...

The dust swirled - thousands of millions of tiny red-hued grains - as Hollywood director John Ford readied his cameras for the day's filming. The sun was rising hot in the sky, and Ford could hardly guess at what was ahead. The motion picture he was preparing, called Stagecoach, later would be hailed as the classic Western. It would propel a budding actor named John Wayne to stardom; and there would be talk about Academy Awards. But Academy Awards were not on John Ford's mind this day. He had been at work since 4:00 a.m. on the script of a short story by Ernest Haycox called Stage to Lordsburg, and the sun was only now beginning to rise to a respect-able height in the sky. Ford pumped out a few orders in half-finished sentences - sometimes gruffly, always crisply, occasionally openly con-temptuous. A well-chewed, unlit cigar was clamped in one side of his mouth.

“We turn left here,” my wife, Linda, said, and my mind snapped back to the present as we crossed the Utah border from Arizona and turned into the en-trance to Goulding's Trading Post and Lodge. This was our first visit to John Ford-John Wayne Country, and it was - and still is - easy to slip into that Hollywood fantasy world that actually becomes reality in this remote spot. For the great dream of the American West was created here and lived here for 25 years, when Ford filmed his last Monu-ment Valley Western. And little has changed in the years that have passed. Monument Valley is an ancient salt seabed peppered with red-rocked prod-ucts of eons. Time has come to a halt here, and the acts of mortal man - such as the passing of a stagecoach across the desert floor - are reduced to insig-nificance. But this spot that bewitches visitors to the Southwest today is the same dusty-trailed, red-sanded desert of our movie dreams - dreams of cowboys and Indians, the U.S. Cavalry, and the heroes and villains who populated the Wild West.

We saw John Wayne time and again, six-gun or saber at his side, ride through the great expanse of rock and sand on the Navajo Indian Reservation. We saw Henry Fonda, Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond, and a host of others names nearly as big as the Valley itself - pitted against the West's most famous backdrop. And we came to know characters rich in the symbolism of the American West: the Ringo Kid, Captain Kirby York, and Ethan Edwards among them.

Mostly, however, we came to know something of John Ford who is responsible for bringing Monument Valley out of obscurity and into the motion picture theaters of America and the world.

Ford's films - and his unique vision of the West and the men and women who settled it, fought for it, and died for it gave us our first looks at Monument Valley's impressive landscape. Stagecoach, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Searchers - all filmed on location here were among the Western films we loved to watch at the local Bijou.

In all, Ford brought his studio charges to the Valley nine times to film his Western sagas, beginning with Stagecoach a film still regarded by many critics as the finest Western ever made and for a final time in 1964 to make Cheyenne Autumn. Through those films, Ford made us believe that the entire American West looked like Monument Valley: sagebrush and red sand below, lonely rock spires towering above blue sky and puffy white clouds. He set the Tombstone territory against this backdrop, along with a hundred other small towns and Cavalry outposts and forts. Perhaps that is why it is so strange to learn that Ford's stage for Indian uprisings, gunplay, and Army heroics, is confined to a stretch of country that creeps upon you where U.S. highway 160 turns north at U.S. 163 and begins to weave its way through the rock, the brush, and the sand.

Dusk silhouettes the rock formations past sunset faces and objects staring back across the desert. There are no Indian warriors attacking the unwary traveler from the sides of the mesa tonight, as we enter the Valley area. There are only a few other cars off in the distance, their headlights gleaming between the monoliths that line a seemingly endless horizon.

But in the morning, as the sun strikes the rock, we see for the first time, a Technicolor scene that has been familiar since childhood one viewed a hundred times in Ford's Westerns.

Others also recognize the feeling. The West German traveler and his wife, making their first visit to the United States, know it. He says between mouthfuls of scrambled eggs and sausage at Goulding's the next morning: “I have been here many times from the Western pictures.” John Ford began making motion pictures in 1917 and is recognized today as one of the true geniuses of the American cinema. He denied, until his death eight years ago, that there was any art connected with his work, and yet, his best pictures are filled with a strength and beauty and character that already have proven him wrong.

“There are some great artists in this business,” Ford said shortly before he died. “I am not one of them.” He also said at one point: “To be quite blunt, I make pictures for money to pay the rent.” And yet, few other directors have had Ford's scope, flair, vision, range, or his ability to communicate a scene on celluloid. Another genius of the American screen, Orson Welles, said in an interview with Playboy magazine in March, 1967, that he studied and appreciated the old masters of film, “by which I “I love it here,” he would say when asked why he lived so far from population centers such as Phoenix, Tucson, and even Flagstaff. “There's something about this place — you really don't want for anything here.” In 1939 Goulding went to Hollywood, trying to sell the idea that the Valley would make an ideal setting for motion pictures. He believed that Hollywood money would help pull the hardHit Navajos out of the Great Depression that had blitzed the nation and had particularly rocked the vast Indian reservation.

Visitors normally were the lifeblood coming into the reservation and Monument Valley. But, at this point, they were few and far between for the most part; and those who did come were appalled by the economic conditions that existed.

But one such passerby, bringing greetings to the Gouldings from Mike's oldest brother in California, told them a remarkable thing: Hollywood was moving out of the back lots and on location, with a Western being planned by the United Artists studio at that very moment.

The visitor soon moved on, but Goulding took his words to heart: If ever a location for a Western movie

had been devised by God or man, he reasoned, then Monument Valley was the very place. And if he could attract Hollywood here, the Great Depression would soon be a thing of the past.

The determined Goulding then talked to his friend, noted photographer Josef Muench, who suggested taking along a selection of black and white photos featuring the magnificent buttes and rock formations of the Valley. Muench then supplied the Trader with part of the eventual stock of photos Goulding would take with him to United Artists in Hollywood. Goulding's next moves were to gather up every dollar he owned (about $60), pack up his wife and a few possessions, and head for Hollywood. When the pair arrived in Tinsel Town, Goulding left his wife with her brother, gathered up his photographs and a Navajo blanket, and marched with a Scenically incomparable, Monument Valley's incredible landscape was unknown to Hollywood moviemakers - and to most of the world - until 1939, when Indian Trader Harry Goulding sold John Ford on the idea of using the Valley as a movie location. Kathleen Norris Cook purpose through the front door of United Artists.

"What is it?" the receptionist asked without much interest.

Goulding explained his mission: He knew that a Western movie was being planned, and he happened to know the ideal location for it.

"Do you have an appointment?" the receptionist asked next, probably somewhat taken back by Goulding's colorful dress, speech, and mannerisms.

"Well, no, I don't have an appointmentment," Goulding replied.

"Do you know anyone in the studio?" the receptionist queried next, doubtless well-rehearsed in her job.

And again Goulding replied that he didn't.

"Sorry you have to have an appointment or know somebody," he was told, as though that were that. Harry Goulding was not a man to be brushed aside by a receptionist, however, and he again patiently explained why he was there and from where he had come, occasionally tossing in descriptions of the Valley and what life was like on the reservation. "Surely I can talk with someone," he asked at last.

The receptionist, by now wearing down at Goulding's insistence, placed a call to one of the inner offices and explained in a few short sentences that a rather unique man in the lobby wanted to discuss locations for the impending Western. Then she listened for a few seconds before placing the receiver back on its cradle.

"Sorry," she said for the second time that day. But again Goulding would not be put off.

"Back on the reservation we always have lots of time," he told the receptionist. "And we're never too busy to see anyone who drops in to talk with us. So, if you don't mind, I'll just make myself at home and wait. I brought along my bedroll just in case." And with that, he spread out the blanket and began to make himself comfortable."

"But you can't stay," the exasperated receptionist told him.

"Don't know why not," Goulding replied.

Now at a complete loss, the receptionist placed another call to the studio's inner sanctum. This call resulted in a personal visit from a location directora man determined to show Harry Goulding that you have to know someone in order to get through the doors at United Artists.

The location director a short man, Goulding would recall later boomed through the door but then stopped in a flustered halt when he saw Harry Goulding. He didn't quite know what to make of this tall stranger. His hesitation gave Goulding the opening he needed. He spread out the selection of Valley photos received from Muench, other photographers, and friends and waited for a reaction.

The location director took a long look at the photographs, relaxed, and then even smiled a bit.

"What are those pictures of?" he asked.

Goulding replied that they were photographs of Monument Valley, the place where he lived.

"I can spare a few minutes to talk with you about your Monument Valley," the location director said in turn.

Minutes turned to an hour or more, and the location director eventuallysent for his boss, the dynamic John Ford. "He's working on a picture called Stagecoach," the location director explained.

When Ford saw the photographs of Monument Valley, he immediately began asking Goulding questions about the facilities available on the reservation, its proximity to a major highway, and what the weather was like. Then Ford sent for the film's producer, Walter Wanger, and he, too, saw Muench's pictures.

Goulding would recall later: "First I was Mr. Goulding, but we got to where I was Harry." He also recalled that after six or more hours with the location director, Ford, and Wanger and not having had much food on the way out from the Valley - he was feeling extremely hungry. Goulding finallyasked for a cup of coffee and a cold piece of apple pie. “So the producer came down and handed me God! He had a whole pie with him.” Three days later John Ford was walking through Monument Valley for the first time, taking in every feature, every potential shot, with his one good eye. Ford had brought John Wayne and Ward Bond along with him both of them B-grade actors at the time and the remainder of his stock company and filming crew, more than 100 people in all.

Goulding's insistence and Ford's instinct for the location were correct: Stagecoach was a smash success that made a box office star of John Wayne, who played the role of the Ringo Kid with a flair that was to mark his later acting efforts.

It also made a star of Monument Valley.

“Stagecoach was a typical Western: lots of emotion, lots of action, although at the time it was slightly out of line,” Ford told Walter Wagner, who later used the interview in his book You Must Remember This. He continued: “I mean, the girl [in the story]... was a prostitute. The boy John Wayne was an escaped convict. In those days you didn't do that sort of thing. But it had a happy ending, and that's probably why I liked it. As it turned out, I received no criticism because I broke new ground with Stagecoach. But I got lots of followers.” One of them was film star Henry Fonda. He said in an interview for Sight and Sound magazine, in the spring of 1973: “Ford is a director who doesn't Monument Valley became a John Ford trademark, a dynamic entity against which his three great Cavalry epics were filmed: Fort Apache, 1948; She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, 1949; and Rio Grande, 1950. Jerry Jacka talk much. In fact, he shies away from it. If an actor comes to him and wants to talk about a scene, he will change the subject or tell him to shut up. He doesn't even talk to his assistants or his script supervisors; they never know what he's going to do next. But back inside, Ford is working all the time. He likes to be mysterious....” Another follower was actor Jimmy Stewart, who worked for the director in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Cheyenne Autumn. He once commented about the director: “Take everything you've heard, everything you've ever heard... and multiply it by a hundred times and you still won't have a picture of John Ford.” Stewart also said in April, 1966, in Films in Acting: “He loves to tear pages out of scripts. He likes to cut sentences down to phrases and phrases to words. He'll spend an hour getting the wind at the right force so that it blows the sand in the background just right. But if you don't have the dialogue right immediately [when] he is ready, he is completely impatient.” Ford's love affair with the Western was interrupted by World War II, but he returned to the Valley in 1946 and built a replica of the town of Tombstone there, for the filming of My Darling Clementine with Fonda. This was one of several versions of the film story of the Earp brothers and the famed shoot-out at the OK Corral; critics agree that it also was the best of the many movies made about this slice of the Wild West.

One of the reasons was its authenticity, a Ford trademark. “I try to make [them] true to life,” he said of his Westerns. But Ford also knew Wyatt Earp personally; the famed gunfighter/sher-iff visited Ford and his wife, Mary, many times in their California home and often told the story of the OK Corral while sipping fine Irish whiskey. Ford put it on film that way.

The three great Cavalry epics followed: Fort Apache, with Wayne and Fonda in 1948; She Wore a Yellow Ribbon in 1949, with Wayne again, this time as Captain Kirby York (this film also marked the first time Ford used color in the Valley); Rio Grande in 1950, with Wayne once more, this time teaming with Maureen O'Hara.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon continues to be a late-show staple; it also was one text continued on page 34

Some of the Photos That Sold Monument Valley

He's known worldwide for his land-Iscape photography. But hardly anyone knows about the role Josef Muench and his camera played in making Monument Valley a key Hollywood location set and a mecca for thou-sands of tourists annually.

It all began in 1938, when Josef first met Valley Indian trader Harry Gould-ing and his wife Mike. The Gouldings were determined to travel to Hollywood and lure moviemakers to their splendid - but virtually unknown valley of monuments. For the Gouldings, it was a move designed to lessen the economic plight of the Depression-wracked Navajos, their friends and neighbors.

Harry reasoned that words alone would turn the trick with the movie moguls. But his new friend Josef Muench disagreed and suggested a somewhat different approach. (It would prove later to be a decisive element in the game for big movie bucks and much more.) "You would just use your words to express the country?" Muench asked Harry.

by Virginia Greene

You have nothing to show your backyard, the way you feel about it?" (Josef was thinking about the hundreds of black and white photos of the Valley he had made in prior years.) "How about if I make you up... I called it an album. I glued two pictures back to back 24 in all punched holes for a spiral just like the typical school note-book, and put a plastic cover on it so you could see, at once, the first pictures." His wife Joyce added captions.

Harry and Mike went to Hollywood that year, as planned, showed Joe's pictures, among a host of others, to John Ford at United Artists and the rest is history.

Until Goulding spread out his collection of Valley photos in Ford's plush Hollywood office, Monument Valley had been a well-kept secret. But Stage-coach, Ford's first film shot there, changed all that, virtually overnight.

In a very short time it became a favored movie location and a setting familiar to people across the world.

In the wake of the movie caravans, visitors also started to arrive, to see for themselves the magnificent buttes and colorful background shown so clearly in Muench's photographs and on theatre screens. And, as Harry Gould-ing had hoped, everyone on the reser-vation profited from the work on the movie productions and from the tourist trade.

visitors also started to arrive, to see for themselves the magnificent buttes and colorful background shown so clearly in Muench's photographs and on theatre screens. And, as Harry Gould-ing had hoped, everyone on the reser-vation profited from the work on the movie productions and from the tourist trade.

That was 43 years ago. But Josef Muench still comes to Monument Valley, to its desertscape and to its people. His latest trip makes it 184 times in all.

Like Muench's own genius, Monument Valley evolved over a long period of time. Stone structures and excep-tional men are like that: always chang-ing, never finished.

In a future issue, we'll explore more fully Joe's role in popularizing Monument Valley, and his long relationship with, and intriguing insights into the land and the people of the Valley the Navajos call "The Land of the Sleeping Rainbow."

text continued from page 31 of Wayne's favorite films. "I think it's the best thing I've ever done," he said in a TV special in the early 1970s.

Ford returned to Monument Valley six years later to make The Searchers - a film that perhaps best depicted the stunning locations offered here. This film also marked a change in Wayne's roles in the winning of the West. He portrayed Ethan Edwards, whose fiveyear search for a niece captured by Indians was filled with violence, hatred, and bitterness.

Wayne called the film "a story of the harsh reality of the West, where you faced a real enemy." But it was a role the Duke enjoyed so much that he named one of his sons Ethan, after the character.

Records from the early films show that Ford always hired many of the Indians living in or near Monument Valley for his films. In The Searchers, for example, the credits listed a number of Navajo with colorful names, playing the roles of Comanche braves: Away Luna, Billy Yellow, Bob Many Mules, Percy Shooting Star, Pete Grey Eyes, and Smile White Sheep among them.

Ford also used Hollywood's Indian actors in his movies. Chief John Big Tree, a full-blooded Seneca, who posed for the portrait on the Indian-head nickel in 1912, portrayed Pony-ThatWalks in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, coming out of retirement to work for his old friend. Chief Big Tree was a Hollywood veteran who began appearing in films in 1915. His first work for Ford was in 1924 in The Iron Horse, the director's silent film about conquering the West - and joining the nation - by rail. Big Tree also did some stunt work in Stagecoach.

But his biggest role for Ford came in the 1939 feature Drums Along the Mo-hawk, when he played the role of Blue Back, the Christian Indian with the top hat. His cries of "Hallelujah!" in this film would be echoed 10 years later in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, when he said to Wayne, who had come to seek his help in stopping an all-out war: "Too late, Nathan. You and me - hunt buffalo together, smoke many pipes together. Hallelujah!"

hawk, when he played the role of Blue Back, the Christian Indian with the top hat. His cries of "Hallelujah!" in this film would be echoed 10 years later in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, when he said to Wayne, who had come to seek his help in stopping an all-out war: "Too late, Nathan. You and me - hunt buffalo together, smoke many pipes together. Hallelujah!"

Parts of Ford's film Wagon Master, made in 1950 with Ward Bond and Ben Johnson, also were shot in Monument Valley. But the landscape shown in this epic, depicting a Mormon community's long journey to the West, detailed lessfamiliar areas of the Valley; the backdrop for Stagecoach and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon were gone. There were no familiar Mittens poking their way through the lofty clouds; the land was rocky, barren, flat. Parts of this film also were shot on location in nearby Mystery Valley, in Professor Valley, Utah, and at Mexican Hat, another favorite Ford location, along the San Juan River.

Sergeant Rutledge in 1960, with Jeffrey Hunter and Woody Strode in the lead roles, and Cheyenne Autumn in 1964, which featured Richard Widmark and Edward G. Robinson, closed Ford's look at one of America's most impressive filming spots. The former was his last look at the Cavalry, the latter was his apology to the American Indian.

About Cheyenne Autumn, Ford told film director Peter Bogdanovich: "There are two sides to every story, but I wanted to show [the Indians'] point of view for a change. Let's face it - we've treated them very badly. It's a blot on our shield. We've cheated and robbed, killed, murdered, massacred, and everything else. But they kill one white man, and God! out come the troops."

John Ford died in 1973, never able to fulfill a promise he once made to the Gouldings to build a house near their lodge and make his permanent home in Monument Valley.

But Ford's death also marked the rebirth of the Valley as a setting for motion pictures, simply because no other director dared to use it while Ford was alive; it had been mostly idle for nine years.

Now filmmakers, some not even from the traditional Hollywood mold, have begun to move quietly in, record something of Ford's setting for the American West, and then, almost gingerly, retreat. Films such as The Eiger Sanction, White Line Fever, Once Upon a Time in the West (shot by an Italian production company), The Villain, a Western spoof, and even Superman used some Monument Valley locales.

A number of commercial pitches, including a recent one for a car rental agency and for the Chrysler Corporation, and various Road Runner cartoons, also have helped to make the Valley recognizable to almost everyone in the world who owns a TV set.

Ford and Wayne are gone now, but everything that Ford gave us on the screen is there today, including Goulding's original lodge building, which appeared more than once in the Westerns. Its exterior, for example, is seen in the early moments of Fort Apache, when the stagecoach carries Henry Fonda and Shirley Temple to a new outpost; not much has changed in the 21 years since the film was made. In the dining hall at Goulding's, Victor McLaglen also fought it out with a half-dozen or soof his Cavalry mates in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. The interior of Goulding's Trading Post also tells some stories about Hollywood's long association with the Valley. On its walls are framed pictures from many of the Ford films shot on location here: John Wayne with Ward Bond and Jeffrey Hunter in a scene from The Searchers, massing Indians from Stagecoach, the Cavalry in formation from She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. There also is a copy of a call sheet used during the filming of Cheyenne Autumn, telling the actors what time they were expected to report on the set that day. Wayne and Ford are seen together in another photograph, this one taken during a break in the filming of Fort Apache. Several shots of the Gouldings also are on display.Mostly what remains, however, is the land itself land that Ford called his favorite location, “everything that land can offer,” he once said. The cinnamon-red buttes, the solitary monooliths, the seas of formations in stone with names like Eagle Mesa, the King on his Throne, the Stagecoach all are a part of the view from Goulding's front door today.Ford said in an interview with Cosmopolitan magazine in March, 1964: “I think you can say that the real star of my Westerns has always been the land. . . . My favorite location is Monument Valley; it has rivers, mountains, plains, desert. . . I feel at peace there. I have been all over the world, but I consider this the most complete, beautiful, and peaceful place on Earth. . . .” When you visit here it is almost impossible not to hear the bugle and the Cavalry's charge, or to see the massing of the Indians on the side of a hill as an Army column sweeps past.

And at night you can almost hear, if you listen very closely, John Wayne's voice barking commands to his troops. We can thank John Ford and Harry Goulding for all that.