Goulding's Lodge: How Monument Valley Went to Hollywood

That cluster of stone buildings on the mesa above the valley floor is Goulding's Lodge, and without it Monument Valley might never have become the most photographed landscape in the American West.

Harry Goulding and his wife Leone, known as Mike, arrived here in nineteen twenty-three as sheep traders. They built a two-room stone cabin and opened a trading post. Then the Depression hit, and the Navajo families who traded there were desperate. In nineteen thirty-eight, Harry gathered a portfolio of photographs of the red buttes and spires and, as the story is told, made his way to Hollywood. He talked his way into director John Ford's office and laid the photos on his desk. Ford was sold. Within weeks, cast and crew descended on Monument Valley to film Stagecoach, the movie that made John Wayne a star.

Ford returned again and again, for Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, and more. The stone cabins expanded into a motel. In twenty twenty-three, a hundred years after Harry arrived, the Navajo Nation purchased the property for nearly sixty million dollars, returning the land to the people whose landscape made it famous.