John Ford's Monument

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Desert Dreamscape

The 30,000-acre Monument Valley National Tribal Park that straddles the Utah-Arizona line consists of mesas carved millions of years ago from stone plateaus by water and wind.

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Most westerns back then were filmed on stage sets or in the open spaces just north of Hollywood, and they looked artificial. "Stagecoach," the first movie Ford shot in the valley, brought a fresh sense of drama and authenticity to a fading genre. It also established 32-year-old John Wayne as a star. Ford stayed up in the guest room in Harry and Mike's quarters on the second floor of the trading post, while most of the cast and crew bunked in tents along the valley floor. The crew named the dirt crossroads "Hollywood and Vine."

Harry did everything possible to accommodate Ford. When the director said he needed billowing clouds to frame the monuments, Harry turned to Hosteen Tso, a medicine man known among the Navajos as "Big Fats" because of his heroic girth. The next day, clouds appeared along the skyline just after lunch. After that, Harry took Hosteen Tso to Ford's room late every afternoon. Ford would pour the old man a drink and ask him to predict the weather for the next day's shoot.

"We'd ask him, 'Grandfather, how'd you know the weather for tomorrow?' " recalls Don Holiday, one of Hosteen Tso's grandchildren. "He'd say, 'I go to my hogan and listen to the radio.' "

The museum preserves the original counter over which Harry and Mike traded with their Navajo customers, as well as a gallery of Muench's iconic photos. And on the wall downstairs is the lodge's old register, framed behind glass. "Thanks, Harry & Mike, for everything," wrote Ford on one page. "Also, my thanks to 'Fatso' for the weather."

After heading up the Navy's combat film unit in World War II, Ford came back to the valley to shoot "My Darling Clementine," "Fort Apache" and "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon." Navajo extras played Apaches, Comanches and Cheyenne -- whatever Ford needed. He paid them cash -- $5 a day at first. And he didn't forget them when times were hard. During bad storms in the winter of 1948, Ford pulled strings with the military and had supplies of food and hay airlifted to the area.

Ford didn't like to talk about his work, but he expressed his enthusiasm for Monument Valley in a 1948 letter to author James Warner Bellah, whose short story Ford used as the basis for "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon."

"At Monument Valley," Ford wrote, "I have my own personal tribe of Navajo Indians who are great riders, swell actors . . . have long hair and best of all they believe in me."

Ford was a firm believer in routine. Each morning his personal accordion player, Danny Borzage, would launch into "Bringing in the Sheaves" to announce the old man's arrival on the set. Lunch was always served at noon, and tea was promptly at 4. No one was allowed to discuss work at dinner at the risk of banishment from the table.

Ford was one of the few silent film directors who had successfully made the leap to sound, and over the years he won a record four Academy Awards for best director, plus two more for his World War II documentaries. But by the mid-1950s, his career was beginning to unravel. Heading into his 60s and struggling with alcoholism, he had a disastrous experience filming the Broadway hit "Mister Roberts" in 1954, even getting into a fistfight with Henry Fonda, the movie's star and an old friend. Ford abandoned the film midway for gall bladder surgery. Many in Hollywood thought he was washed up. But Ford took his loyal film crew, including John Wayne, by now Hollywood's biggest box office attraction, and returned to the valley in the summer of 1955 to make another western.

Based on a novel by a western author and screenplay writer named Alan LeMay, "The Searchers" is a dark, bloodstained quest. Like Ford himself, Ethan Edwards is a troubled and alienated man, alone even among family and friends. His search for his kidnapped niece, accompanied by his nephew Martin Pauley, becomes a mad obsession, motivated not by love but by hate. It becomes clear to Martin that Ethan is planning not to rescue Debbie but to kill her. It's a matter of blood and honor -- she has grown into a young woman and become a Comanche warrior's squaw.

Once again, the film company brought money and patronage to the area. Harry Goulding organized a tent city for 300 film crew members, and Ford hired an additional 300 Navajos. It was a hot, punishing summer, but the sandstorms and brilliant sun only compound the feeling of hardship and living on the edge that saturates the film. On July 4, the Navajos honored Ford by installing him as a member of the tribe. Ford was delighted. The Indians presented him with a ceremonial deerskin that dubbed him Natani Nez -- "Tall Leader." Ford would later describe this honor as more meaningful to him than his Oscars.

John Holiday, another local tour guide, is 42 -- much too young to have been around for "The Searchers." But he knows someone who was. Susie Yazzie is a weaver and a jewelry maker and probably one of the most photographed people in North America -- for a generation she was in virtually every documentary, photo book and story about the Navajos.