The Field Program Of The Rainbow Bridge Monument Valley Expedition

Reports on a 1933 expedition to study the Rainbow Bridge-Monument Valley area in order to aid the possible creation of a national park.

Tells the story, accompanied by numerous photographs. of the 1933 expedition to study the Rainbow Bridge-Monument Valley area in order to aid the possible creation of a national park.

Tells the story, accompanied by numerous photographs. of the 1933 expedition to study the Rainbow Bridge-Monument Valley area in order to aid the possible creation of a national park.

This is a mimeographed copy of the official report resulting from the Rainbow Bridge-Monument Valley Expedition of 1934. These expeditions, which were privately funded and headed by Ansel Franklin Hall, took place from 1933-1938. The work was supervised by Lyndon Hargrave of the Museum of Northern Arizona and the crew consisted of archaeologists, paleontologists, botanists, biologists, and geologists. The report details the group's findings from their archaeological surveys and excavations of several early Anasazi (Pueblo) sites in northern Arizona and southern Utah. It also gives a detailed description of the geology of the region including Monument Valley, Navajo National Monument, the Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park, and concludes with a chapter on the modern Indians of the region, the Hopi and Navajo. Also included are maps and seventy-two mounted original photographs. The forward is by Ansel Franklin Hall.

The Colorado River Plateau is home to two of the best-known landscapes in the world: Rainbow Bridge in southern Utah and Monument Valley on the Utah-Arizona border. Twentieth-century popular culture made these places icons of the American West, and advertising continues to exploit their significance today. In Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley, Thomas J. Harvey artfully tells how Navajos and Anglo-Americans created fabrics of meaning out of this stunning desert landscape, space that western novelist Zane Grey called “the storehouse of unlived years,” where a rugged, more authentic life beckoned. Harvey explores the different ways in which the two societies imbued the landscape with deep cultural significance. Navajos long ago incorporated Rainbow Bridge into the complex origin story that embodies their religion and worldview. In the early 1900s, archaeologists crossed paths with Grey in the Rainbow Bridge area. Grey, credited with making the modern western novel popular, sought freedom from the contemporary world and reimagined the landscape for his own purposes. In the process, Harvey shows, Grey erased most of the Navajo inhabitants. This view of the landscape culminated in filmmaker John Ford’s use of Monument Valley as the setting for his epic mid-twentieth-century Westerns. Harvey extends the story into the late twentieth century when environmentalists sought to set aside Rainbow Bridge as a symbolic remnant of nature untainted by modernization. Tourists continue to flock to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, as they have for a century, but the landscapes are most familiar today because of their appearances in advertising. Monument Valley has been used to sell perfume, beer, and sport utility vehicles. Encompassing the history of the Navajo, archaeology, literature, film, environmentalism, and tourism, Rainbow Bridge to Monument Valley explores how these rock formations, Navajo sacred spaces still, have become embedded in the modern identity of the American West—and of the nation itself.

Reports on a 1933 expedition to study the Rainbow Bridge-Monument Valley area in order to aid the possible creation of a national park.