Legend or Real? In Spellbounding Monument Valley
Monument Valley is one of the most magical and majestic places I have ever visited. It is located on Native American Navajo land in the northeast corner of Arizona and southern Utah, at 5,564 feet elevation. The region is part of the Colorado Plateau. The Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park was established in 1957 and includes 91,696 acres within the approximately 16-million acres Navajo Reservation. The Navajo people prefer to be called Diné, which means The People. In their language, Monument Valley is known as Tse’Bii’Ndzisgaii meaning Valley of the Rocks.
Monument Valley is famous for its towering sandstones and fragile rock pinnacles that rise 400 to 1,000 feet from the desert floor, surrounded by miles of mesas and buttes. These rock formations are the result of wind and water erosion during the past 50 million years. Their bright red coloration is due to iron oxide exposed in the weathered siltstone. Depending on the time of day, season, sun, shadows, and scenic clouds, especially during the summer monsoon rainy season, the scenery can be spell-bounding. In addition to the pictorial landscape, an eerie silence with only the wind whistling between the buttes, chimes the ancient history of rocks and people.
My husband and I have visited Monument Valley twice – once during the August summer monsoon season and another time in snowy December. Both times we took the guided tour with Navajo guides, the best way to really appreciate Monument Valley and the adjacent Mystery Valley, which, along with some of the famous landmarks, is only accessible by guided tour.
Standing at the visitor’s center one can see the worldfamous Mitten Buttes and Merrick Butte, and the Mitchell mesa, all part of the renowned panorama featured in many photographs and western movies. The long list of movies shot within Monument Valley includes Director John Ford’s 1939 famous Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948), and other films as recent as 2011.
A small uranium-vanadium mine, the Mitchell Mesa Mine, was located on Mitchell Mesa. Mining permits and leases for this mine were issued by the Navajo tribal Council and approved by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The mine was exploited between 1965 and 1966 when mining was still permitted. It permanently closed in 1966 (AZ Geological Survey, 1965). But about a century earlier a silver mine, known as the Navajo Pishlaki mine, became the center of a legend.
THE STORY OF MERRICK AND MITCHELL
In 1863, two army soldiers, Jack Merrick and Ernest Mitchell, served under Army Col. Kit Carson, detailed to round up and relocate the Navajo people. Merrick and Mitchell admired and examined the silver jewelry worn by the Navajo. In 1879, assuming the silver for that jewelry