Monument Valley: The West That John Ford Built
Near Kayenta, Arizona
Monument Valley sits on the Arizona-Utah border about twenty-five miles north of Kayenta, and for most Americans its silhouette is the American West: two flat-topped mesas trailing spires of red sandstone against a cloudless sky. What you are looking at took three hundred million years to make.
The valley rests on ancient marine sediments laid down when this entire region lay beneath a shallow sea. Over immense spans of time the seabed lifted, then wind and water went to work. The result is a layered formation: Organ Rock Shale at the base, deep-red de Chelly Sandstone in the middle, and the Moenkopi Formation on top, capped by a hard layer of Shinarump Conglomerate. Where that resistant cap survives, the softer rock beneath erodes away on all sides, leaving behind isolated towers called buttes. East and West Mitten Buttes rise roughly one thousand feet above the valley floor. The slender Totem Pole formation, barely wide enough to cast a shadow, is one of the most eroded surviving spires on Earth.
The valley became the image of the American West largely because of one man. In nineteen thirty-eight, a local trader named Harry Goulding drove to Hollywood carrying a portfolio of photographs. He convinced director John Ford to film there, and Ford, needing a remote location free from studio interference, agreed. Stagecoach, released in nineteen thirty-nine, introduced Monument Valley to the world. Ford returned again and again over the next two decades, shooting Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, and others. The films defined what decades of moviegoers picture when they imagine the American West.
The irony is hard to miss. The landscape Hollywood used to tell stories of conquest belonged to the very people being displaced in those films. Monument Valley lies fully within the Navajo Nation. The Navajo government manages it as a tribal park, not a federal one, controlling access, setting the rules, and keeping all entrance revenue. Around one hundred Navajo families still live inside the park boundaries, herding sheep and maintaining traditional lives within the valley Ford made famous. The land was never abandoned. It was simply claimed by cinema before the rest of America caught up to who was already here.
