Riding Across the Painted Desert

A team of horses pulls one of the party’s chuckwagon along the desert trail in Northern Arizona.

[click the image to enlarge]

(Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections & Archives, Zane Grey Rainbow Bridge photograph collection, P0672, Box 1, Image 071)

“The spectacle behind was grand—a vast gray desert slope, shelving back to rise to the great dark plateau with the peaks white and pure against the sky. To the fore, as we went down into the valley, the Painted Desert began to lift into the sky, ridge on ridge, the long escarpments reaching out to the west a vast colored, wonderful land, bare and desolate…. It was inspiring, lonely, terrible and beautiful.” —Zane Grey, Down in the Desert[1]

Much of Zane Grey’s 1922 Rainbow Bridge photograph album consists of various landscape photographs, many of which the exact location is unclear. Grey took these photographs so he could incorporate the landscapes he saw on his adventures into his books.

A view of what Zane Grey describes as "the Moki village" which is a Hopi American Indian settlement.

[click the image to enlarge]

(Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections & Archives, Zane Grey Rainbow Bridge photograph collection, P0672, Box 1, Image 077)

Zane Grey stands next to a Paiute[?] women and her two children.

[click the image to enlarge]

(Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library, Special Collections & Archives, Zane Grey Rainbow Bridge photograph collection, P0672, Box 1, Image 296)

“Moki” Village

After making their way East, Zane Grey and his party stayed in Tuba city for a night and then visited what Grey called the “Moki Village” which was nearby. The village that Grey referred to is the Hopi village of Moenkopi. Grey provides this description of the village in “Down in the Desert:”

“This Hopi or Moki village was a cluster of stone and adobe homes on a bluff. It had three houses with shingled roofs that were not there when I last visited the place. The streets of the little village where squalid and littered with truck, apparently under guard of numerous ugly dogs.”[2]

This shows that Grey was unimpressed with the living conditions at the Hopi village and even deemed the area pitiful. On his trip Grey also encountered Navajo and Paiute Indians. He explained that he pitied the state of the Navajo as World War I and the 1918 Spanish Flu Epidemic had disrupted their way of life.[3] At the same time, Grey seemed to be awed by the American Indians, especially with one who he encountered in the remote part of the desert. When he encountered some Paiute children and adults on top of one of the mesas he climbed. He explains “They impressed me as wonderfully as the upstanding red walls.”[4] Zane Grey, like other Anglo Americans who encountered American Indians, esteemed them as both remarkable and pitiful.