Alabama Hills: Four Hundred Films, One Valley, Two Histories

The rocks you are looking at have been standing in for the American West since approximately nineteen twenty.

The Alabama Hills, the rounded granite formations west of Lone Pine on the alluvial fan below Mount Whitney, were first noticed by film scouts from Los Angeles who needed a landscape that could pass for anywhere rugged and sun-bleached and spare. The Sierra Nevada rising behind the formations, the Joshua trees, the ochre light: it worked. By various counts, more than four hundred films and television productions have used these hills as their backdrop. "High Sierra" with Humphrey Bogart. "How the West Was Won." "Gunga Din." Gene Autry serials, one after another, through the nineteen thirties and forties. More recently, "Iron Man" and "Django Unchained." The Lone Pine Film History Museum has kept the count.

The hills have an ironic name. They are called the Alabama Hills because they were named in the eighteen sixties by prospectors who were Confederate sympathizers, honoring the CSS Alabama, a Confederate commerce-raider cruiser. The mine directly across the valley was named the Union Mine, by the other side, at roughly the same time.

The mythology of the West was filmed here during the same years that what was actually happening in the valley was something else entirely. Roy Rogers was shooting Saturday serials in the Alabama Hills during the same years that Japanese Americans were imprisoned at Manzanar, ten miles north. The landscape that became the symbol of the open frontier was, in the same decade, home to ten thousand people confined behind barbed wire.

The hills have been playing a role for a century. The actual story of this valley was always happening in the same frame.