John Ford's claim to "discover" Monument Valley did not sit well with John Wayne

In Maurice Zolotow's "Shooting Star: A Biography of John Wayne", the star claims he discovered Monument Valley a full decade before John Ford set eyes on it. In Wayne's account, he was "proppin' and stuntin'" on a George O'Brien Western in 1929 when, in a fit of commotion, he jumped into a car and drove around the Four Corners area of ​​the States -United. Per The Duke:

"I went out onto this Navajo reservation. It was coming in at sunset. Then I got into this valley. I parked the car and I got out and I looked at it and, well, you know how it looks, and that night it looked, well, kinda like it was another world. I thought it would be a good place for a western because the cloud formations were fantastic in that area. Those two mounds - I guess they're over 1,000 feet high, which would definitely frame a composition."

A decade later, when Ford was looking for unknown locations for "Stagecoach", Wayne recommended Monument Valley. The Duke says Ford had never heard of it. So when Wayne joined Ford and a small crew on a reconnaissance expedition around the Utah-Arizona border, he was amazed when, upon encountering the valley, Ford boasted, "I just found the location we're going to use."

Wayne told Zolotow that he never ceased to be vexed by this little infraction. "He wanted to be the one who found it. I don't know why he never wanted to thank me for telling him about Monument Valley."

As to why Ford's telling of this story has endured, Wayne could take cold solace in the most famous line of dialogue from the last classic western he did with the director: "When the fact becomes a legend, print the legend."