Goulding's in Monument Valley

After a couple of hours of driving we arrived at Goulding’s Lodge, first established in 1923 by Harry Goulding and his bride “Mike” (supposedly he couldn’t pronounce her first name Leone). They were just married and decided to open move from Durango, in southern Colorado, to what can only be described as a parched land next to some incredibly high rocks. Goulding is credited with introducing John Ford to making movies in Monument Valley. Ford’s first movie was Stagecoach with John Wayne in 1939. You can see all the many movies filmed in an around that location at the Goulding museum. There were literally dozens and dozens over the years. 

In the 50’s I remember watching western’s set in this harsh land with towering monuments and thinking “Where out West is this place?” (In 1939 alone, Ford directed Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, and The Grapes of Wrath. Reportedly he hired a “B” grade actor, John Wayne, to make a statement about the American frontier spirit.) You can sit on a chair at Goulding’s looking out over the desert at high monuments and just about see the stagecoach coming down the road. Of course today’s modern stagecoaches are air conditioned. Reportedly more than 400,000 people visit Monument Valley every year and most, it seems to me, are from another country. Hey, where are the Americans who live in this land? OK – maybe they show up during school vacation periods but…

Monument Valley Tribal Park would most probably not be what it is today without the support of Harry Golding and his wife Mike. Harry was born in Colorado, and more of the sheepherder type. He moved into Monument Valley area in 1923 and established the trading post. He and Mike loved the life there, quickly learned and liked the culture of Navajos.

In Gouldings Museum you can learn more about these important days in Monument Valley’s history. And plan to stay for at least an hour. Many of the films made in Monument Valley play continually on a HD TV in the Museum. John Wayne had the room in the back to himself.

Monument Valley was not known to many film makers. But times were tough in the 30s. Harry and Mike had little to trade let alone live on. So...


From Inventing Ford Country by Buzz Bissinger.

Then, in 1938, Harry Goulding took the most uncertain trip of his life, to a land in some ways even more mysterious than Monument Valley and far more mercurial, a place where people spoke in smiling code, a place where what you saw was almost never what you got. Of all the towns in the United States, this was the most unlikely place to find a man like Harry. And yet what he managed to do while he was there reverberates to this day.

The way the story goes, Harry learned that United Artists was looking to film a Western on location. Harry went to work, enlisting the help of Josef Muench, a superb photographer who had first seen Monument Valley in 1935 and, during the course of some 350-odd trips there, would shoot some of the most memorable photographs of the place ever taken. At Harry’s request, Muench made up an album of 8-by-10 scenes of the valley. Then Harry and his wife loaded the “bedroll, coffee pot, grub,” as Harry later put it, and drove to Hollywood. They stayed with Leone Goulding’s oldest brother. He was a stunt pilot, and basically told Harry he was crazy, as related in an oral history of the Gouldings called Tall Sheep, published in 1992, written by Samuel Moon: “There ain’t a bit of use going down there. You can’t get into that place.”

“Well, that’s all right,” Harry said. “But I’m going to get in there or go to jail. I know I’ve got something they need.… You show me the right door to go in down there, their main door, and I’ll go on from there.”

So Harry went over to United Artists with his wife, who waited in the car and knitted. He made it to a receptionist, and he told her he wanted to talk to someone about a new Western that was going to be made. She looked at him as if he were crazy and told him he couldn’t see anybody without an appointment. Harry said he didn’t have an appointment, and she reiterated that there was no way he was going to see anyone. Harry said that was fine, then went to get his bedroll from the car, because he had no intention of leaving and figured he might as well be comfortable. At that point the receptionist called someone.

The location manager for the Western Stagecoach, which was about to be shot, came out all indignant and riled. He was livid at Harry Goulding for wasting his time, this dumb-ass western son of a bitch thinking he knew anything about the movie business, until he got a glimpse of the pictures that Harry had with him. Then he wanted to know where they had come from. Then the director John Ford looked at the pictures. And it wasn’t long after that that Ford decided to use Monument Valley as a backdrop for Stagecoach.

  
The stagecoach.

Ford and Wayne years later. I heard a comment from an Indian spokesman who said that they were indebted to Ford for producing his many movies in Monument Valley (and other Western locations) because they were paying jobs - something not readily available after the war (WWII).