"A woman in a blue country dress and a white apron stares from the porch of a simple ranch house. She spies a lone rider framed by two distant, towering buttes, moving slowly across sage brush, sand and scrub. Martha Edwards realizes it's her long-lost brother-in-law, Ethan, coming home three years after the end of the Civil War. Ethan's war has never really ended: Following the defeat of the Confederacy, he has been living south of the border as an outlaw and a hired gun.

The opening panel of "The Searchers," John Ford's classic western, sets the scene as Texas 1868, but the real setting was Monument Valley, Utah; the year was 1955; and Ethan Edwards was played by the legendary John Wayne. It was the fifth western that Ford filmed primarily in this desert dreamscape, 650 miles east of Hollywood. He filmed cowboys and Indians and cavalrymen against brooding mesas and cloud-feathered skies. A complicated man who ruled his movie sets like a cranky despot, Ford loved the splendid isolation of working far from the moguls and money men in a place where he could reign over his loyal troop of actors, cameramen, wranglers and stuntmen. He stayed just up the road at Goulding's Lodge, whose amiable owners set up a special cabin for him, fed his crew and even provided a medicine man to predict the weather. He admired the Navajos who lived here, and they in turn appreciated the cash his film company paid them for working as extras and support crew.

But what he most liked was the setting: the stark, arid landscape, the sandstorms and the scarred, defiant mesas rising 2,000 feet from the earth, overshadowing man and beast. It was John Ford's mythic vision of the Old West.

It's mine as well. "The Searchers" has long been my favorite movie. It's a thrilling and emotionally complex film about race, anger, vengeance and love set against a breathtaking background -- I've seen it a dozen times, and it never fails to move me. After Martha and most of her family are brutally murdered by Comanches, Ethan and his adopted nephew embark on a five-year quest to find Debbie, Martha's kidnapped daughter. They roam far and wide through Monument Valley, its awesome silent beauty in marked contrast to the ugly deeds of men.

Sooner or later, I knew, I had to come here to see the places where Ford filmed his greatest scenes. But it's not easy to search for "The Searchers." Ford died in 1973, and the sets he built are long gone, as is just about everyone who worked on them. Still, the extraordinary landscape survives, as does Goulding's, which offers a variety of tours.

So on our first full day here, my wife and I and 18 other tourists are packed into narrow benches in the back of an open-air trailer, and Larry Rock, our Navajo guide, is at the helm of a four-wheel-drive pulling the trailer down the winding dirt track into the heart of the valley. On our way out of Goulding's, Larry points out the small stone cabin, once a storage shed, that Ford turned into an officer's quarters for "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," one of his earlier Monument Valley westerns. But Larry has never seen "The Searchers" and doesn't have much to say about John Ford -- he's got other stories to tell."

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John Ford's Monument (The Washington Post 9/14)
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