JOHN FORD AND MONUMENT VALLEY

John Ford's MONUMENT VALLEY

The Famous Director's Use of the Navajo Landmark Rejuvenated Movie Westerns and Made a Star of John Wayne

Text by Jeb J. Rosebrook and Jeb Stuart Rosebrook

"My favorite location is Monument Valley. It has rivers, mountains, plains, desert, everything that land can offer. 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." -JOHN FORD, COSMOPOLITAN, MARCH, 1964 Somewhere within 1,500 miles of a land the Navajos call Tse Bii Ndzigaii, “clearing or plain among the rocks,” where prominent sandstone outcrops known as Ear of the Wind, Three Sisters, and Bear and Rabbit rise high above the arid landscape, the station wagon approaches a movie set and its waiting crew and actors. A small man with an accordion plays “Red River Valley.” Director John Ford, 44 years old, has arrived for a day day's work making movies in the place he calls “my lucky spot” — Monument Valley. It is 1938.

"You're ten years too late," a Hollywood studio executive had told Ford in 1937, referring to the death of Western films in the talkie era. “People don't make Westerns anymore.” Two years before, Ford won his first Academy Award for The Informer, a story of the 1922 Irish rebellion. Now Ford had a vision for a Western film, based on the Colliers' magazine story “Stage to Lordsburg” by Ernest Haycox. Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nichols expanded the tale of a stage traveling from Tonto, Arizona, to Lordsburg, New Mexico, through hostile Apache country. They shaped it into the story of a disparate group of characters: the crooked banker, an Army officer's pregnant young wife, the vain, failed Southern aristocrat, the whiskey salesman, the prostitute with a heart of gold, and the escaped prisoner-gunfighter facing a showdown in Lordsburg. Ford titled it simply Stagecoach.

The director shopped the screenplay at nearly every studio, and was rejected. Ford's luck changed when Stagecoach found a home with producer Walter Wanger and independent United Artists Films. And his luck would continue.

In late September, 1938, Harry and Leone “Mike” Goulding, owners of a struggling trading post in Monument Valley between Kayenta and Medicine Hat, heard on the radio that a major Western film by John Ford was in preproduction. The Gouldings had come to Monument Valley as newly-weds in 1924. They were aware portions of two Western films, Zane Grey's The Vanishing American (1925) and Lone Star Ranger (1929), had been filmed there. The Gouldings and their neighbors, the Navajos, many of whom faced starvation, were desperately trying to survive the Great Depression. Using their last $60, and armed with photographs of Monument Valley, Harry and Mike drove to Hollywood to convince Ford to use theirbeloved landscape as the location for his film.

John Ford's MONUMENT VALLEY

When the determined couple arrived at Ford's office, a secretary attempted to put them off. In Linda Upton's unpublished history, Monument Valley Stories from Goulding's Trading Post, Mike Goulding recalled what happened next: “Well,” Harry said, “I've got plenty of time to wait, just like any old Navajo. Why, I've wintered in littler places than this. I'll just go and get my bedroll and bed down right here.” With Mike remaining in the lobby, Harry Goulding met John Ford, spreading out dramatic photographs of the valley before the director. Upton wrote: “The slow-talking trader gave the sales pitch of his life.” Before the Gouldings drove home, the inspired Ford flew to Monument Valley and, moved by the stark but magnificent landscape, he made his decision to film there. By early October, makeshift tents were set up near the trading post to house extras and the crew. The cast stayed at what nearby accommodations could be found. Navajos were hired (together with their horses) at Hollywood wages as extras, wranglers, and stuntmen. Some Navajos, like the Bradley brothers, acted as interpreters to the mostly nonEnglish speaking Indians while the Stanley brothers and Son of Many Mules would become regulars as actors in Ford's Monument Valley films.

Another Navajo, a medicine man called Hastiin Tso, would get the director's attention in a most unusual way. Harry Goulding claimed Tso could summon up any weather Ford needed. Legend has it Ford challenged Goulding by asking for snow. The next morning, snow graced the valley. From then on, Hastiin Tso was on Ford's Monument Valley payroll as his “weather man.” Ford said if he could believe in “the little people of Ireland,” there was no reason for him to ever doubt Hastiin Tso.

Stagecoach previewed in Los Angeles on February 2, 1939. Made for $531,374, it grossed $1 million its first year. Against competition from Gone With the Wind and the Wizard of Oz, the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Director. The popular Western won for music and Best Supporting Actor, Thomas Mitchell. More importantly, Stagecoach began a personal and professional relationship with Monument Valley that would impact John Ford's life as well as the Gouldings and hundreds of Navajo families for the next 25 years. And change the career of 31year-old B-Western star John Wayne. Like Ford, Wayne would become forever identified with Monument Valley.

In its vast isolation a 10-hour drive from Flagstaff often over treacherous dirt roads Monument Valley became an ironic yet perfect complement to Ford, who, by virtue of his Maine childhood, close by the Atlantic, was a man of the sea. Born Sean Aloysius O'Feeney in 1895, he was the 11th and last child of immigrants John, a saloonkeeper, and Barbara O'Feeney. Young Sean, a scrapper, was never one to back down from a fight. But he also

loved reading, especially American history, and possessed a near-photographic memory. Turning down an athletic scholarship to the University of Maine, he followed his older brother Francis, an actor, across the country to the Pacific and a moving-picture boomtown called Hollywood. The brothers Americanized O'Feeney to Ford. Sean became John or "Jack" and found a champion rodeo cowboy, Nebraskan Hoot Gibson, for a roommate. By 1920 Francis had acted in nearly 400 silent Westerns, while Jack, rising from stuntman-actor to writer-director was under contact to Universal, making Westerns with Gibson and, later, Tom Mix.

By 1934, as his older brother's career slowed, Jack Ford was directing some of Hollywood's biggest stars. His success earned him his beloved seagoing yacht, Araner, named for the islands off Ireland's coast. But in Monument Valley, Ford had discovered another ocean, remote and stunning, away from Hollywood, with one skipper in command. "For Ford, Monument Valley was not only a location," producer-agent Martin Jurow told a writer, "it was his dream of the America he loved."

By 1946, after having won two more Academy Awards (The Grapes of Wrath in 1940 and How Green Was My Valley, 1941) and serving with distinction in the Navy during World War II - during which he filmed the Japanese attack on Midway Island Ford returned to his favorite valley to film My Darling Clementine. The story of Tombstone and the legendary gunfight at the O.K. Corral starred Henry Fonda, one of Ford's favorite leading men (Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939, Drums Along the Mohawk, 1939, The Grapes of Wrath), as Wyatt Earp.

"I saw Tombstone pop out of the desert like a rabbit from its hole," Mike Goulding recalled. Twentieth Century Fox spent $250,000 re-creating 1881 Tombstone. According to author Upton, "the 47 buildings constructed for the film doubled as warehouses, work rooms, dining halls and housing for approximately 600 of the cast and crew." Additionally, the Navajos were paid to supply 1,500 head of cattle to be used in the filming. To the Gouldings, the cast, crew, and Navajos, "Tombstone" was dubbed "Fordville."

By 1950 Ford directed four more films in Monument Valley, his cavalry trilogy, starring John Wayne: Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (his first to show the valley in color), and Rio Grande, as well as portions of Wagonmaster, the westward tale of a Mormon wagon train. Ford's films now featured an ensemble cast that included Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond, Harry

John Ford's MONUMENT VALLEY

(LEFT) In She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Wayne comforts costar Joanne Dru, who plays the vulnerable Eastern woman gone West.

(TOP) Ford demanded this John Wayne scene from She Wore a Yellow Ribbon be filmed in fading light at day's end, and photography director Winton Hoch shot it under protest. Nonetheless, the movie earned Hoch an Oscar for cinematography. (CENTER) She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, released in 1949, was Ford's fourth Monument Valley film and featured an ensemble cast of the director's favorites, including Harry Carey Jr.

Carey Jr., Ben Johnson, and the director's brother Francis, Through his years in Monument Valley, Ford left no doubt who was in charge. Called "Mr. Jack" by Harry Goulding and characterized by his slouch hat, the dark glasses, the inevitable chewing on his handkerchief, and the cigars, Ford constantly pushed his actors to the limit to achieve the performances he expected of them.

At Goulding's Trading Post, there was assigned table seating, with Ford at the head table. Mike Goulding related to Upton that after dinner the Ford company often "danced to old-fashioned waltzes, and the chink of silver dollars punctuated Ford's lively card games with Jobu Wayne, Ward Bond, and others,"

Wayne's son Michael recalls the tightly card games while spending time on location with his father. They played pitch, hi-lo, jack-in-the-boot." Ford made sure he won, because he would change the rules as they played. One Halloween the director suggested a costume party to Mike, which he attended dressed as an Irish policeman. Ford's patriarchal monarchy did 710t rest on Sundays, when he brought in a priest to say Mass for everyone, regardless of religion, with all all expected to contribute to the collection.

Although he won his fourth Oscar with The Quiet Man in 1952 Ford was, within three short years, badly in need of his "lucky spot," Moriament Valley. "I think I'm going blind," Ford wrote a friend in 1953, after filming Mogambo in Africa. The resultant cataract surgery caused permanent weakness in one eye, forcing him to wear an eye patch. In 1954, due to illness and creative differences with star and longtime friend Henry Fonda, he was replaced on Mister Roberts. There was a gall-bladder operation, His beloved home was razed to enlarge a parking lot for the Hollywood Bowl. Once again, Ford was in need of a change of luck.

Then there was a novel by Alan LeMay, The Searchers.

Now 60, John Ford returned to Mom ment Valley. He approached filming The Searchers with a seriousness none had seen in him before. If he believed his career was on the line he said nothing. But "it was a different movie than anything I'd seen Ford, do," Harry Carey Jr., a veteran of many Ford films, said in his autobiography, Com pany of Heroes. "From the first day of shoot ing, it had a mood about it."

It also was a family affair. Ford's son Patrick served as associate producer, and Wayne's son Patrick (also Ford's godson), was part of the cast.

With medicine man Hastiin Tso once more acting as Weather Provider, Ford filmed throughout the summer in sand storms and temperatures that soared to 115 F Released in 1956, The Searchers was halled by critics as a "visttal masterpiece." John Ford, in concert with John Wayne, had brought forth an American classic. Ac cording to Michael Wayne, rock and roll legend Buddy Holly was inspired to pen his classic song "That'll Be the Day" after hearing John Wayne's signature line in The Searchers. In Hastiin Tso's third decade working with Ford, the film also proved to be his finest moment. He would die many years later.

Ford returned to Momment Valley to make two more films. Both were, in his mind, to right wrongs of the West he loved. In Sergeant Rutledge (1960), Ford set out to tell the story of the African-American Buffalo Soldiers, to be followed in three years by what he believed would be the final, closing chapter of his Westerns.

Cheyenne Autumn, based on. Mari Sandoz's book, told the plight of 300 Northern Cheyenne Indians who fled an Oklahoma reservation in an attempt to return to their ancestral lands in the Dakotas. "Tve killed more Indians than Custer, Beecher, and Chivington put together," Ford told direc tor Peter Bogdanovich. "There are two sides to every story, and I wanted to show thedr the Indians, side for a change."

"It was a subject I had long wanted to do," says Richard Widmark, the film's star, who had approached Ford with a similar project some years before. But according to Widmark, the director "didn't want to do it at the time."

Unfortunately the author of John Ford's career had arrived.

With the road to Monument Valley now paved, its spectacular buttes bad become a magnet for tourists. Isolation was a thing of the past. The rigorous location schedule of 18-hour days, six days a week challenged Ford's age and stamina. Skies were often overcast, compounded by windstorms and unseasonable rain. Ford fell behind schedule. He became ill with chills and fever. John F. Kennedy, an IrishCatholic president, was assassinated. Ward Bond had died of a heart attack two years before. In one telling moment, Ford told actor George O'Brien, whom he had known since silent picture days: "It's just no fon anymore."

Despite the difficulties of the production, Widmark, who played a cavalry officer, remembers Ford as "vigorous and [he] had many future plans." Widmark also remembers the good times at Goulding's Lodge. "We were like an extended family. We had dinner with Ford and the group in the lodge every night. It was a close relationship, with Ford as "Daddy"

Similarly, in her autobiography Baby Doll, Carroll Baker, who played a Quaker schoolteacher in Cheyenne Auturns, also has fond memories of Ford. "I felt that he thought of me as a daughter, and I knew that I was his pet on the film wait. While we were on location, I always ate lunch and dinner by his side. He used to watch my plate and never allow me dessert or bread and butter or potatoes."

Unfortunately, critics greeting Cheyenne Autumn' were generally unkind, even cruel. At 76, Ford found the strength to return to his "lucky spot" one last time, in 1971to appear in director Peter. Bogdanovich's documentary Directed by John Ford. His greatest tribute from this valley he loved came from his friends and working companions, the Navajos. On the Fouth of July 1955, during filming of The Searchers, he was presented with a sacred deerskin and made a member of the Navajo tribe. He was given the name Natani Nez, meaning "tall soldier."

This message was inscribed on the deer skin: "In your travels may there be beauty behind you, beauty on both sides of you, and beauty ahead of you."

John Ford died of cancer at his home in Palm Springs, August 31, 1973, He was 78. "Again, I'm sorry to say "adios," he once wrote in the Gouldings guest book, "My thanks to Hastlia Tso, who gave us such wonderful weather."

But there will never be an "adios" to the personal legacy the Tall Soldier left to the Navajos and to Monument Valley