Zane Grey was an American author best known for his novels set in the American Southwest. As he liked to tell the story, he was on horseback in 1913, riding deep into Navajo country, when a flash lighted the desert. That flash, Grey wrote, “revealed a vast valley, a strange world of colossal shafts and buttes of rock, magnificently sculptured, standing isolated and aloof, dark, weird, lonely.” Grey had found his way to Monument Valley. He told his friend, Hollywood director John Ford, about his find. Ford would go on to direct ten films in the valley. Marion Robert Morrison was born in Winterset, Iowa but from the age of nine was raised in Los Angeles. As a young man he attended the University of Southern California (USC) on a football scholarship. By 1939 Morrison, now known as John Wayne, was starring in John Ford's Stagecoach. He once revealed how he felt about Native Americans. I must admit, after I read the quote I felt differently about him.

“I don't feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

― John Wayne in a 1971 Playboy interview I guess he never heard the Thanksgiving story of how Native Americans welcomed the Pilgrims and taught them how to grow crops to keep them from starving. In gratitude the Europeans conducted a war of extermination on them. At the end of his life John Wayne lived in a large villa overlooking Newport Harbor in Orange County, California. I wish I had the opportunity to move into one of his empty bedrooms. You know, one that he wasn’t using. I’m sure he would not have objected. After all, that would have been selfish. John Wayne is a local hero in the Monument Valley area but I don’t imagine anyone there ever read the quote. John Ford was so important, economically, to the area that they named the image below John Ford’s Point in his honor. Here is Adrian at the point looking epic.