The Searchers (45 page)

During that first outing to the valley, Ford and his crew shot for only seven days and he wound up using only
about ninety seconds of the footage
in
Stagecoach
. Ford and his crew stayed not at the Gouldings' but at the inn and trading post run by John Wetherill and his wife in Kayenta, twenty five miles to the south. But when Ford came back after World War Two to make
My Darling Clementine
, he stayed in the guest room on the second floor above Goulding's trading post, and later still Harry and Mike built Ford a cabin of his own. By 1955 they had added a small motor lodge with nine rooms along the ledge above the valley, and they gave number nine to Ford.
It had a double bed
and a small refrigerator that they stocked with fruit juices at his instruction—no beer this time. For the duration of the film shoot, John Ford was officially on the wagon and Monument Valley was his personal rehab center.

“
It gives me a chance to get away
from the smog, to get away from this town, to get away from people who would like to tell me how to make pictures,” Ford told fellow director Burt Kennedy. “You're working with nice people—cowboys, stuntmen, that kind of person. You get up early in the morning and go out on location and work hard all day and then you get home and you go to bed early. It's a great life—just like a paid vacation.”

FORD AND HIS CAST AND CREW BOARDED the famed Santa Fe Super Chief at Union Station in Los Angeles early Tuesday afternoon, June 14, 1955, for the seventeen-hour, all-night train ride to Flagstaff, Arizona. Already they were behind schedule:
bad weather in Arizona
had delayed their departure by a day. Ford was so anxious, he couldn't sleep that night aboard the train.

Flagship of the Santa Fe line,
the Super Chief was the appropriate
vessel for Ford's new venture: the gleaming, stainless-steel face of its diesel locomotive was painted crimson red, with trailing yellow and black trim, in the style of an Indian war bonnet. Its elegant interior featured Navajo patterns and motifs in turquoise and copper. Ford held court in the dining car most of the evening. Henry Brandon, the German-born, Stanford University–educated actor hired to play Scar, the Comanche war chief who abducts the young Debbie Edwards, recalled finding Ford there late in the night poring over Frank Nugent's final shooting script.

As soon as they arrived at 6:45 on Wednesday morning, Ford and his son Pat boarded a small plane for Monument Valley. When the plane touched down, he wasted no time. Harry Goulding met him at the airstrip in an ancient station wagon. Ford and Pat hopped in and off they went, navigating the bone-rattling dirt roads and dried creek beds, scouting locations for the opening day's shoot. John Wayne arrived later in his own private plane, while most of the other crew members endured the six-hour drive from Flagstaff on largely unpaved roads.

The making of a Western movie on location was a giant, complex, and costly enterprise. There were hundreds of moving parts: people, vehicles, horses, cameras. John Ford had spent years gathering a collection of actors, cameramen, soundmen, wardrobe designers, support crew, wranglers, stuntmen, and extras who would obey his commands and perform the work with passionate dedication and reasonable efficiency. Ford had the kind of control over the script, the casting, and the editing of his films that most directors could only dream of. Still, so much was beyond even his control, subject to the whims and uncertainties of man and nature.

“
A shooting schedule
on as rough a location as Monument Valley is really catch-as-catch-can, and depends on Ford's imagination and resourceful genius … just an educated guess on paper,” Merian Cooper wrote to Sonny Whitney. “On every picture I have done with Ford, such a schedule always has to be revised. It is like fighting a battle. You can plan what you are going to do, but you don't know what the enemy is going to do. And our enemies are the myriad things that can happen on location.”

It had been seven years since Ford and Cooper had last mounted a film production in Monument Valley, but little had changed. The Navajos had long since dismantled the previous movie sets Ford had bequeathed them, using the precious lumber for their dwellings and roadside stands and selling off the rest. There were still no phones, no public water system or electrical grid, and only one semipaved road.

After nearly a month on the site, the road and construction crews had completed most of their work. Some two dozen trucks and bulldozers, noisily clawing the ground like mechanical ants in front of the silent, brooding mesas, had smoothed a flat surface on the valley floor just north of Goulding's lodge, and crews had erected some fifty large canvas tents to house three hundred people, wardrobes, and other essentials.
They carved roadways
and paths between the structures, and planted a
street sign in the middle that read “Hollywood and Vine.” A late-spring desert wind promptly knocked it over.

Most of the cast and crew lived in the tent city, while Ford, Wayne, the female stars, and their families stayed at the lodge up the hill. Alongside the tent city was a makeshift airstrip, which ferried the principals to the site and carried daily film footage down to Flagstaff every afternoon for the evening train to Los Angeles. Ford's religious insistence on not looking at the dailies would serve him well on this location; there was no time nor facilities to do so before the flight.

In the first days the work crew got their water from Lyster bags, thirty-six-gallon canvas contraptions developed for the U.S. Army that hung by ropes on sturdy tripods. Then Whitney's construction company brought in a heavy-duty pump to service a primitive Indian well, providing the first electrically pumped water ever supplied to the valley.

They erected a canvas mess hall seating two hundred people and shipped in fresh food and ice daily from Monticello, Utah, sixty miles away. They set up a 20,000-kilowatt generator for electricity and portable water tanks. Still, Pippa Scott, a nineteen-year-old actress in her first film role, said it was all “quite primitive.” “
The women were installed
[at the lodge],” she recalled, and “all the men were down in the valley floor in a huge sort of tent city that glowed at night with campfires and, well, frankly, a certain amount of drinking and gambling and carousing. Great fun!”

There were no phones, just a shortwave radio. They set up a three-legged system: a receiver and sender at the Hotel Monte Vista in Flagstaff, 185 miles to the southeast; a second 30 miles from camp atop Black Mesa, the highest point between Flagstaff and Goulding's; and the third at the lodge itself. They took a radio jeep on location wherever they went.

Average temperatures were supposed to be in the high eighties in June, but someone forgot to tell the sun, which was in a vindictive mood. By noon each day the mercury often exceeded 100 degrees. “
Wind was an enemy
,” a film production press release noted. “It raised hob with the roads, obliterating them on a single afternoon's blow. Red dust was in everything, making it especially difficult for the cameramen to keep their lenses clean.”

The crew also built two large ranch houses—one for the Edwards family, the other for the Jorgensens. They sank telephone poles as corner braces to keep the flimsy shells from blowing away. Ford in a
preproduction note said he wanted the Edwards home to look like “
adobe, whitewashed but with the bricks showing
through the white in places. It is almost a fortress. It sits alone in a vast expanse.” From a distance, the ranch house, nestled just below the trademark butte known as West Mitten, looked exactly as he had projected.

WHILE THE CAST AND CREW WERE ARRIVING, hundreds of Navajo men, women, and children quietly descended on the valley by jeep, horseback, and foot. They established camps on the fringes of the movie set with their tent openings always facing east toward the rising sun, and reported for work as film crew men, construction workers, and movie extras.
Lana Wood recalled
seeing their campfires each night and hearing their singing wafting up. (She also recalled the discomfort of those who watched her sister sunbathing on the rocks during the day in a skimpy leopard-skin swimsuit.)
The men earned $15 a day
, women $10, and children $5, plus a free lunch for everyone and time-and-a-half after eight hours, all of it considered a fine day's pay by Navajo standards. Women, often with babies strapped tightly to their backs, took jobs as housekeepers and laundresses. This was the first major film production to hit the valley since
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
seven years earlier, and the Navajos had no intention of missing the opportunity.

“
A lot of people came
from Kayenta and Tuba City, some people who lived here tried to be part,” recalled Susie Yazzie, a Navajo woman who worked on the set as an extra. “Harry Goulding was the one who asked me to participate.” Susie, one of the tribe's most skilled rug weavers, worked for about a month. “We used to eat a lot, we worked in different places. There was a lot of money.”

Ford liked to frame his decision to go to Monument Valley in terms of personal benevolence toward the Navajo:

“
When we first went into the Indian reservations
, they were poor and starving. The pay from the shooting of
Stagecoach
helped put them on their feet … I don't mean we should take too much credit for this, or that it makes up for our treatment of them on film, but it is a fact, and it's been important to them.”

Ford had no patience for bleeding hearts who bemoaned the Indians' tragic fate but did nothing concrete to improve their economic status. “
People have said that on the screen
I like having Redskins killed. But today other people in the cinema feel sorry for them, make humanist
pamphlets, declarations of their intentions, without ever,
ever
putting a hand in a wallet. Myself, more humbly, I gave them work.”

Ford believed in Navajo medicine, or at least, as a good Catholic, he believed in the power of ritual. When Ford first queried Goulding about the weather, Harry told him about an old medicine man named Hosteen Tso. “You let me know what you want about four o'clock in the evening, and he'll fix you up with the weather the next day,” Goulding told Ford.

The first day out filming
Stagecoach
, Ford asked for “a few theatrical clouds.”

“I can't send that to him,” Goulding replied. “I don't know what a theatrical cloud is.”

“Just pretty, fluffy clouds,” Ford added.

“
We'll get it off
,” said Goulding.

And indeed, they did. The clouds appeared promptly in the afternoon.

After that, Goulding brought Hosteen Tso—Ford nicknamed him “Fatso” for reasons that were abundantly apparent—to visit Ford every afternoon at around four. Ford would give the old man a glass of whiskey and hand in his request for the next day's weather. Ford paid him fifteen dollars a day and claimed that Fatso never let him down.

Ford believed in the Navajos and he believed in Monument Valley, and his sense of responsibility for their welfare was genuine even if paternalistic. He could have filmed
My Darling Clementine
anywhere—it takes place in a mythical Tombstone, Arizona, during the time of Wyatt Earp—but insisted on returning to the valley despite the high cost of transporting and housing a movie crew there. After he finished making the movie, he donated to the Navajos the wooden sets, timber being a highly valued commodity in treeless Monument Valley. Two years later, after he finished making
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
,
the valley was buried
by a massive snowfall the Indians called “Two Men Deep.” Ford used his military connections to arrange for “Operation Haylift,” airdrops of food, grain, and other supplies.

In a letter to James Warner Bellah, Ford made clear just how handy the Indians were for his Westerns: “
At Monument Valley 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. We can braid their long hair in the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche or whatever hair-dress we desire … They are tall, sinewy and as the poor bastards never get enough to eat unless I make a picture there, they have no excess fat on them …”

Ford insisted that he treated Indians with dignity in his life and in his films. “
They were a very dignified people
—even when they were being defeated. Of course, it's not very popular in the United States. The audience likes to see Indians get killed. They don't consider them as human beings—with a great culture of their own—quite different from ours.”

He told another interviewer, “
My sympathy was always
with the Indians.”

Still, there was nothing dignified about the way Ford portrayed Indians in his early Monument Valley Westerns. In
Stagecoach
they were stock villains whose sole narrative purpose was to present a challenge that the protagonists had to overcome.

A scene in
My Darling Clementine
, Ford's first Western after returning from the war, was equally callous. Wyatt Earp, the movie's hero, arrests a drunken Indian who is shooting up the town of Tombstone by knocking him on the head and then kicking him in the rear. “Indian, get out of town and stay out,” Earp commands.

But Ford's attitude toward Indians was beginning to soften. Cochise in
Fort Apache
(1948) is an honorable leader seeking a peaceful accommodation with whites, but his honor is affronted by Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday (played by Henry Fonda), the callous, arrogant commander modeled after George Armstrong Custer who goads the Indians into military confrontation. In
Yellow Ribbon
(1949), John Wayne's Captain Nathan Brittles beseeches an old Indian ally with whom he has enjoyed a longstanding friendship to help him prevent an all-out war. The effort fails, but the scene between Brittles and the Indian chief—played with emphatic dignity by Chief John Big Tree, a Seneca Indian who appeared in at least four of Ford's films—is powerful and affecting. Then in
Rio Grande
(1950) two years later, the Indians once more are savage murderers who kidnap a band of white children and prepare to slaughter them, until John Wayne and the cavalry come to the rescue. There's a horrifying scene where Wayne and his troopers discover the body of a soldier's wife who had been abducted with the children and then raped and mutilated. Ford doesn't show us the corpse, but we see the face of the officer who finds her, the wagon wheel to which she was tied and tortured, and a steaming pool of water—all of it laid out, notes the cultural historian Richard Slotkin,
like a horror movie
.