El Rancho Hotel, Gallup
Near Gallup, New Mexico
The El Rancho Hotel in Gallup, New Mexico, opened in nineteen thirty-seven and quickly became the preferred stopping point for Hollywood productions shooting Westerns in the surrounding red-rock landscape. Its guest registry reads like a golden-age film roll call: John Wayne, Katharine Hepburn, Ronald Reagan, Kirk Douglas, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, and scores of others stayed here while filming in the Navajo and Zuni country nearby. The lobby is decorated with their signed portraits and with the heavy timber and Southwestern masonry style the owner, R.
E. Griffith, brother of director D.W.
Griffith, commissioned to evoke a grand trading post. Route Sixty-Six ran directly in front of the hotel, and for two decades the combination of the highway and the film industry made El Rancho one of the best-known stops on the Mother Road. It still operates as a hotel today.
