After our visit to Fort Verde we drove north to the head of Oak Creek Canyon so Libba could take some video footage there.  The light was a little flat for her purposes but she got some good stuff anyway.  The first Hollywood film shot in the Sedona area, in 1923, featured Oak Creek Canyon as its main location.  The film, The Call Of the Canyon, based on a Zane Grey novel, was directed by Victor Fleming.  Long thought lost, a print of it was discovered in Russian archives in 2010.

We continued north from there to the Hopi Reservation.  Hopi art was an inspiration to the artist Libba is making her documentary about.  The main settlement on the reservation is set amidst a vast empty landscape, hours away from any other town, and is a depressing place, like many Indian reservations.  We were not inclined to linger long there.

We drove west looking for a place to stay the night but had a hard time finding one.  At Tuba City, in the Navajo Indian Reservation that surrounds the Hopi lands, the most likely spot, all the motels were filled.

We had to drive to the outskirts of Flagstaff to find a Travelodge with a couple of free rooms.  It made for a long day but at the end of it we were treated to the sunset above by way of compensation.

[Photographs © 2014 Libba Marrian]

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The high point of our Arizona trip for me was a visit to Fort Verde, the best preserved of all the frontier cavalry posts in the state.  Only a few post buildings remain, along with the parade ground, but it’s enough to give you a strong sense of what the place must have been like in its period of service from the 1870s to the 1890s.  There’s not a lot of modern building around it that you have to overlook, as there is at Fort Hayes in Kansas, for example.  Hayes was a bigger and more important post but its few 19th-Century structures are surrounded by a modern working army base.

Fort Verde, pictured above in 1879, was never a stockaded fort, like the ones you invariably see in Hollywood Westerns, and hardly any cavalry posts were — Indians almost never attacked large concentrations of soldiers, so there was no need for defensive walls.

General Charles King, whose novels give the best picture of everyday life in frontier army posts, was once stationed at Fort Verde, which served as the model for the fort in his most famous book, The Colonel’s Daughter.  It was a place renowned for its civilized amenities, courtesy of the officers’ wives stationed there over the years.  The commanding officer’s home, for example, below, had a mansard roof because the first commanding officer’s wife had seen them once on a trip to France and developed a fondness for them.

The post administration building survives, along with the commanding officer’s home, one building that housed unmarried officers and the post doctor’s house, all ranged on the edge of the parade ground, which feels haunted by the ghosts of many parades and formations of mounted men doing a tough job in a forbidding place.

So here they are: the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals   . . . riding the outposts of a nation.  From Fort Reno to Fort Apache — from Sheridan to Startle — they were all the same: men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing.  But wherever they rode — and whatever they fought for — that place became the United States.

My sister posed in one of the uniforms the park visitors’ center provides for such purposes.

I was thinking about John Ford the whole time.

[Contemporary photos © Libba Marrian]

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On our second day in Sedona we drove south of the town so Libba could photograph the scenery for her documentary.  Then we drove down to the old cavalry fort in Camp Verde, but it was closed so we settled for lunch in the town of Camp Verde at the picturesque restaurant below.

It had a spiffy old Bel Air parked beside it and pretty good Mexican food.  Then we drove out to see Montezuma’s Castle.

Early visitors to the Verde Valley figured the cliff dwellings had some connection to the Aztecs, hence the name, but they were actually built by the Sinagua Indians, a local tribe.  No one is quite sure why they built their houses so high up — protection from enemies, perhaps, or refuge from floods.  In any case, the complex is quite impressive.

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