Holbrook

Holbrook wears two costumes, and neither one is quite honest — which is the most honest thing about it. It began as a Santa Fe railroad town in 1881 and turned, fast, into one of the roughest settlements in the territory. The Aztec Land and Cattle Company worked two million acres from here with a crew of cowboys called the Hashknife Outfit, wanted men among them; in 1886 a town of about two hundred and fifty people recorded twenty-six killings. The Bucket of Blood Saloon took its name from one of them. In September 1887 the sheriff, Commodore Perry Owens, walked up to the Blevins house alone and killed four men in under a minute, and that, more or less, was the end of the Wild West here. The town was still calling itself too tough for women and churches in 1914, when it was reputedly the only county seat in America without one.

The other costume stands on West Hopi Drive. The Wigwam Motel — Wigwam Village #6 — is fifteen concrete teepees built by Chester Lewis in 1950, each with a bed and a vintage car parked out front. The form is a borrowed one twice over: the teepee is a Plains dwelling, not a local one, and the architect who patented the design, Frank Redford, called them wigwams — an Eastern Woodlands word — because he thought it sounded better. It is roadside Americana at its purest and its most oblivious, standing on a street named for the Hopi at the doorstep of the actual Navajo and Hopi homelands. The Lewis family still runs it; Pixar borrowed it for the Cozy Cone Motel in Cars.

Both costumes sit at the edge of something older and larger. Holbrook is the seat of Navajo County and the gateway to the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert — the two-hundred-million-year-old logs and banded badlands just east — and the southern approach to the Hopi mesas and the Diné nation beyond.

Holbrook sits at about 5,100 feet on Route 66. West the old road runs through Winslow toward Williams and the pines. The kitsch is worth the stop. The country around it is worth the detour.