Thunder Mountain Monument: One Man's Vision in the Nevada Desert

Off Interstate Eighty in Imlay, Nevada, stands one of the most unusual folk art environments in the American West. Thunder Mountain Monument, also called Thunder Mountain or the Indian City, was built by Frank Van Zant, a World War Two veteran who believed himself Creek who changed his name to Rolling Mountain Thunder. Beginning in nineteen sixty-nine, he gathered discarded cars, bottles, concrete, and salvage from the surrounding desert and shaped them into a sprawling compound of towers, figures, and structures covering several acres.

Rolling Mountain Thunder said he was building a monument to protest the mistreatment of Native Americans and to create a spiritual home. He lived here with family and followers for years. He died in nineteen eighty-nine. The state later designated it a historic site, and his children care for it. It remains one of the stranger roadside stops in the Nevada desert, country where strange things tend to happen.