Theme
Film Locations
13 destinations along 11 roads
The landscape you picture when you picture "the West" was mostly filmed here. John Ford shot nine of his westerns in Monument Valley, starting with Stagecoach in 1939, and the red buttes became Hollywood's shorthand for the frontier — the country John Wayne rode across. But Monument Valley is Diné land, and no settler wagon train ever crossed it; the mythic West on screen was Navajo homeland, in films that usually cast Native people as the enemy. Today the Navajo Nation runs the park and guides the tours. Moab and Kanab, "Little Hollywood," carried the rest.