![\"Thomas](\"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/053s.jpg\" "\\"Thomas")
<\/a>In this finalist for the Utah Book Award, Salt Lake Tribune reporter Thomas J. Harvey shows how the Rainbow Bridge and Monument Valley landscapes in Utah and Arizona have become iconic images representing all of America — in large part due to the films of John Ford but also, recently, due to Jeep Grand Cherokee ads. In the early 1900s, he says, the area saw a swirl of archaeologists, writers, movie makers, adventurers and tourists who shaped it into a 20th<\/sup>-century space. Its significance, however, is now exploited by 21st<\/sup>-century advertising and, to an extent, by contemporary Navajo-operated tourism.<\/p>\nHarvey writes that many Easterners, feeling confined in cities and offices, went west in search of a sort of Adventureland where the risks were real but not really life-threatening. Others, like the University of Utah archaeologist Byron Cummings, were led by American Indians to \u201cdiscover\u201d places such as Rainbow Bridge that the guides themselves already had long held sacred.\u00a0 (Harvey\u2019s first chapter deals interestingly with how Rainbow Bridge was made into a Navajo space.)<\/p>\n
Western writer Zane Grey features prominently in the book, his surprising sexual and mental abnormalities detailed, and his importance to the evolution of this region fully developed.<\/p>\n
Monument Valley, Harvey tells us, had a history of filmmaking at least two decades before John Ford arrived to make \u201cStagecoach\u201d in 1939. There was a silent movie called \u201cThe Vanishing American\u201d (with cards for narrative and dialogue) and a number of Zane Grey Westerns, as well, that preceded it.\u00a0 But Ford is, as it were, the star here as four decades of his work in the area is thoroughly evaluated, all the way through \u201cCheyenne Autumn\u201d released in 1964. Within a decade, Harvey writes, the Western genre was all but dead.<\/p>\n
In 1913 use of the land of the Utah-Arizona border country was beginning to shift to tourism. That was when John Wetherill guided Zane Grey and later Theodore Roosevelt to Rainbow Bridge. He and wife Louisa had owned a trading post in Oljato, Utah, in the Monument Valley area, and in 1910 moved to Kayenta, Arizona. Louisa, a writer, guide and gifted amateur anthropologist\/archaeologist, noted that first the prospectors, traders and settlers had arrived, \u201cpeople who wrung a living from the earth or were dependent upon those who did,\u201d followed by scientific explorers. Now this shrewd observer (who had of necessity learned to speak fluent Navajo) saw coming, she wrote, \u201cthe men who came to accept [the area] as their playground.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harvey covers the region\u2019s environmental debacles too, outlining the lawsuits brought by the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the Navajo Nation and others during the 1970s, seeking, for their own varied reasons, to rid Rainbow Bridge of the waters backed up behind Glen Canyon Dam. \u201cIn contrast to . . . the preservationists, local Navajos saw Rainbow Bridge not simply as a beautiful natural phenomenon that inspired a spiritual attachment, but as a part of a whole in which spirituality was inseparable from those aspects of economic production that sustained them and their culture.\u201d Harvey says the canyon country of the Utah-Arizona border \u201cbecame the symbolic space of disappearing American nature.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is a book that will enthrall armchair and actual travelers; film buffs; those interested in history or American Indian studies; literature; environmentalism; and even tourism. It draws attention to how important Utah was to the formation of the mythical West of 20th<\/sup>-century American culture and of the Western book and movie — the dominant genre of much of the century.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a selection of at least one Utah book club \u2013 and would be a good choice for others. There\u2019s a lot of rich material here for thoughtful discussion on how this part of the West was won — or lost.<\/p>\n Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley is a 2011 Utah Book Award Finalist in the Nonfiction category. Winners of the award will be announced October 5.<\/em><\/p>\n __________________________________________________ Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley: Making the Modern Old West In this finalist for the Utah Book Award, Salt Lake Tribune reporter Thomas J. Harvey shows how the Rainbow Bridge and Monument Valley landscapes in Utah and Arizona have become iconic images representing all of America — in large part due to the films of John Ford […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":844,"featured_media":13431,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[30,35],"tags":[909,1062],"class_list":["post-13430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-literary-arts","tag-by-ann-poore","tag-utah-book-awards"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/053s.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-31 00:40:30","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/844"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13430"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13430\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46907,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13430\/revisions\/46907"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/em><\/p>\n
\nThomas J. Harvey
\nUniversity of Oklahoma Press, Norman
\n2011
\n237 pages
\nNow in paperback $19.95
\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"