John Ford's Country: Monument Valley and the Movies
Near Mexican Hat, Utah
A short drive south of Mexican Hat, past the northern boundary of the Navajo Nation, the highway enters Monument Valley. The great sandstone buttes of the Mittens, Merrick Butte, Elephant Butte, and dozens of others rise from a flat red plain to heights of more than a thousand feet, their profiles as recognizable as any image in American popular culture. That recognition was largely invented by one filmmaker: John Ford, who first visited Monument Valley in nineteen thirty-eight while scouting locations for Stagecoach.
The setting, in the heart of the Navajo homeland, became his signature backdrop. Ford returned repeatedly, filming My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, The Searchers, and other westerns against the towers and mesas. Monument Valley became so associated with Ford's vision of the frontier that it shaped how millions of people worldwide imagined the American West, even though the canyon country of the Navajo Nation looks nothing like Texas or Oklahoma or Wyoming, where most western stories were set.
For travelers coming through Mexican Hat, Monument Valley is often the reason for the whole journey. The Navajo Nation operates the tribal park, employs Navajo guides, and charges an entry fee that supports the community. The buttes that Ford made famous belong, as they always have, to the Navajo people.
The movies are one layer of the story. Beneath them is a landscape of extraordinary depth, shaped over many millions of years and inhabited by the Diné for centuries before any camera arrived.
