The Wigwam Motel: Kitsch as Cultural Document

Frank Redford built the first Wigwam Village in Horse Cave, Kentucky, in nineteen thirty-three: a cluster of concrete units shaped like wigwams, arranged around a central service building. He thought Americans driving west wanted something unusual to sleep in, and he was right. He franchised the design to seven locations across the country.

Three of those seven survive today. One is in Cave City, Kentucky, another in San Bernardino, California, and the third is here in Holbrook, Arizona, the Number Six unit, which opened in nineteen fifty and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand two.

The wigwam shape had no relationship to any Indigenous architectural tradition of the American Southwest. The peoples of this region lived in hogans, pueblos, and wickiups, depending on the nation and the season. The wigwam was an Eastern Woodlands structure associated with Algonquian peoples, which is itself distinct from the tipi of the Great Plains nations that Hollywood preferred. What Redford built in the nineteen thirties and forties was a simulacrum drawn from movies and dime-novel illustrations and applied to concrete sleeping capsules for families driving west.

That gap between the branding and the reality is not incidental. It is the document. The Wigwam Motel in Holbrook tells you something precise about what Route Sixty-Six tourism was selling: an idea of American Indianness borrowed from Hollywood and franchised along the highway through country where actual Native nations lived and had always lived. The peoples whose land the highway crossed were rendered as decoration. The Holbrook motel is now a functioning historic landmark. The concrete wigwams are fully booked most summer nights.