El Rancho Hotel, Gallup: Hollywood Came to the Trading Post Capital

Gallup called itself the Indian Capital of the World during the Route Sixty-Six era, and the description was commercially accurate if culturally imprecise. The city was surrounded by Navajo Nation, Zuni Pueblo, and Acoma Pueblo territory, and the trading-post economy that moved Navajo rugs, Zuni jewelry, and Hopi kachinas to Eastern collectors and dealers ran through Gallup's main street. The El Rancho Hotel on Route Sixty-Six was where the people doing business in that economy stayed.

And then Hollywood arrived. Beginning in the nineteen thirties, the canyon country surrounding Gallup became a location for Western films. The light was right, the rocks were spectacular, and the logistics of filming in New Mexico were easier than the logistics of filming in more remote Southwest locations. John Wayne stayed at the El Rancho. Humphrey Bogart did. Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Ronald Reagan, Kirk Douglas, and several dozen more. The hotel's guest registry is one of the more unusual documents in Route Sixty-Six history: a list of the celebrities who came to film the mythological American West in the actual American West, staying at a hotel on the actual Route Sixty-Six.

The El Rancho is still a working hotel. The lobby retains the decor of the film era: wooden beams, Western art, the wall display of signed photographs. The dining room is open to non-guests. The rooms have the names of the stars who stayed in them.

What the hotel's star-name registry does not include is the names of the Navajo, Zuni, and Hopi people whose labor and cultural objects made the trading-post economy that surrounded it possible. That is a different list, and it is not on the wall.