AT THE root of actual conflicts which arose between European settlers, native Indians, ranchers, farmers, miners etc, was the question of who had absolute or ultimate rights or ownership to the land, or the landscape they dwelled upon: A question that opens up a profound and significant topic, stretching far beyond the American west and very much alive today in terrible conflicts still erupting or raging in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Indian sub-continent, Russia and recently Eastern Europe, even sometimes in South America.
This question, taken to its ultimate deduction, results in another question: Who owns the earth? Which brings us face-to-face with the absurdity of human possession of the world, and the inevitable inequalities of what is owned, shared and developed in that world, which can mold humans into mere animalistic rivals governed by an instinct of survival aimed at its most comfortable state. This is a topic which elevated the art of the American  western into a persistently relevant and vital artistic genre.
John Ford was one of the first major Hollywood film directors who focused on the sparsely inhabited and unusual Western landscape, as well as the social intrigues of at least three races in contact with each-other there. These Westerns of Ford’s remain high examples of an artist’s use of creative filmmaking to provoke and remind us of our human situation on a planet which dwarves our physical dimensions.
No specific landscape in Western films has received as much consistent attention and use as Monument Valley, which straddles about thirty miles on each side of the borders of Utah and Arizona, two of the American west’s most spectacular States, precisely because of this amazing sandstone valley of imaginative shapes, which remains part of the enormous reservation of the Navaho Indians and contains some of the best petroglyphic art from its first nomadic native inhabitants.
Ford established Monument Valley as a signature landscape in his cinematic style through seven Westerns filmed there: Three in black-and-white (‘STAGECOACH’ 1939; ‘MY DARLING CLEMENTINE’ 1946; and ‘FORT APACHE’ 1948),and four in stunning colour (‘SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON’ 1949; ‘THE SEARCHERS’ 1956; ‘SERGEANT RUTLEDGE’ 1960; and ‘CHEYENNE AUTUMN’ 1964).
Each of these films contain such powerful visual significance and narrative subtlety that any shallow idea of the Hollywood Western as simply about violent shootouts and showdowns, crude outlaws, robberies, ‘cowboys and Indians’, etc, is dismissed by Ford’s and thousands of other Westerns, to nonsensical rubbish, which only uneducated and untutored minds might try to emulate.
Ford’s seven Westerns, filmed in Monument Valley, made the Western not an object of escapist entertainment, but a contemplative work of art which questions and helps us to realize, or become aware of our human insignificance, frailty, mortality or temporary presence in a planetary landscape which existed millions of years before and without us.
Such a landscape, carved by natural or cosmic forces long before man’s arrival, retains its power to question us by its visual mystery and power. This truth we as a film audience are able to deduce under the imposing stature and mystery of the landscape, if we notice it, whereas the various conflicts, prejudices of each film’s characters expose us to people unaware of their opportunity to see their transient existence in comparison to such an environment’s genesis, and therefore to pursue a less antagonistic and violent existence.
Ford’s Monument Valley provides a cosmic background against which characters are unable to pacify or satisfy the mundane appetites of their human and historical existence. His Westerns show exceptions to this problem, however, in special roles, such as John Wayne as the unforgettably wise and humane cavalry officer in ‘SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON’, and the ‘old timer’ in ‘THE SEARCHERS’ who turns a blind eye to bigoted obsessions around him.
About 30 to 40 thousand years ago, nomadic groups of humans who later defined the various indigenous tribes of North and South America, drifted into the enormous continental North American landscape, a landscape, unlike Africa, Europe, and Asia, devoid of humans until then, and with staggeringly diverse natural formations and animals (many extinct today, or even still unclassified).
How these people survived by living and hunting on the banks of rivers, lakes, creeks, fashioning spears, arrows, utensils, clothes, bags, sandals etc, from animal bones, stones, animal skins, grass fibers, trees, clay etc, will forever be an inspiration for artists, especially painters, sculptors, writers, and film-makers, because their survival over thousands of years in an unknown environment represents the epitome of artistic creation.
The best Hollywood film directors of Westerns which focused on the American Indian’s encounter with European civilization were: John Ford, Delmer Daves, John Huston, John Farrow, Rudolph Mate, William Wellman, John Sturges, Robert Aldrich, Anthony Mann, Phil Karlson, among others.
What makes their Westerns superior to the simple-minded stereotype of Native Indians portrayed as naturally evil enemies of Western settlers in unimportant commercial Hollywood Westerns is the complex moral and critical stories which these artistic film directors explore.
‘STAGECOACH’, John Ford’s first profound Western of 1939, which covers four or five topics in its story, reveals a number of deeply ingrained social attitudes which go to the root of egotistical intolerance, racism, and class prejudices based on wealth, as well as bigotries masquerading as moral manners.
In this film, when the Apaches on the warpath seem to be winning in their attack on a stagecoach way-station occupied by a group of white males and one white female, a Southern ‘gentleman’ with one bullet left places his gun to the head of the sole white female traveller, fully prepared to execute her rather than let ‘his own kin’ fall into the hands of Indians and a ‘savage’ lifestyle as one of their wives, as was a custom among many tribes.
But the US Cavalry arrives just in time, and he is saved from committing his ‘act of mercy’; but Ford has already proven his point about how far extreme feelings of racial kinship can go. Similarly, in ‘THE SEARCHERS’, one of the most complex and ambiguous Westerns ever made, Ford carefully shows us John Wayne as Ethan pursuing an obsession with racial purity when he hunts for over half-a-dozen years to find his young niece (Nathalie Wood) captured by Commanches and now one of their wives.
When he finds her in an Indian village dressed as a Squaw and she recognizes him and comes to his camp outside the village, Wayne takes her back to her own white kin; but at no point does Ford’s direction show her dissatisfied with her new Commanche lifestyle; her behaviour simply shows her fond memory and natural identification with one of her original family. These existential problems in such outstanding Westerns elevate them above mere illustration of historical facts, and make them vehicles of artistic values relevant to humanity on the whole.
In John Huston’s ‘THE UNFORGIVEN’ of 1960, one of the most honest and shocking anti-racial Westerns ever made, Audrey Hepburn is the delightful Native Indian baby girl saved from slaughter by a white settler’s wife (Lillian Gish), who brings her up as her own daughter without telling her two younger white sons that she is not their real white sister.
When an old man, who was in the party of
white settlers who slaughtered some of Hepburn’s village, spreads the word about her true racial origin to both the remainders of her Indian tribe and other European settlers sharing the same territory, a whole new conflict between the two races begins to erupt, based on the Indians trying to reclaim their kin sister, and the white pioneer family’s sons, Burt Lancaster and Audie Murphy, defending what they believe to be their white sister.
What makes Huston’s ‘THE UNFORGIVEN’ a truly unique and brilliant Western is Hepburn’s refusal to identify family values with similar blood relations after she discovers she is really a Native Indian, and the sister of one of the warring chiefs.
Other Classic Westerns of the highest quality, like ‘BROKEN ARROW’ 1950, ‘ACROSS THE WIDE MISSOURI’ 1951,’DRUMBEAT’ 1954, and ‘THE FAR HORIZONS’ 1955 show the reverse situation, where many Native Indian women became the wives of white frontiersmen, but their relationship is always shown to be tragically destroyed by racial sentiments and conflicts between the two cultures, or by resentment against a refusal to have to choose between the two cultures. 
This sort of conclusion to these classic Westerns is not really pessimistic or negative, but an artistic method for exposing the premises and breeding ground for racial problems, which can afflict any society containing diverse human cultures who naturally must deal with each-other.
For this reason, such American Westerns are unique works of art relevant beyond the specific history of North America’s conquest of its West. Some of these Westerns, like ‘DRUMBEAT’ of 1954, directed by the consistent Delmer Daves, offer frank positive conclusions to both racial and colonial problems.
This Western is unique, in that it begins with a group of Afro-American children playing outside the US President’s Washington office, which is open for visits from the public. The film ends with its star, Alan Ladd’s cool narration in summing up (after a true historical horrific war had occurred between fierce Modoc Indians and European settlers) that even though some Indians and some whites preferred conflict based on each of their steadfast opinions and grievances, a less antagonistic and ideological majority on both sides preferred to live in peace and compromise.
This brings us back to John Ford’s beautiful focus on the landscape of ancient prehistoric Monument Valley, with its constant storm clouds, lightning, thunder, rain and intense sunshine, where stagecoaches, Indian warriors, the US Cavalry, indeed everything concerning man, looks tiny and transient against the awesome expanse and grandeur of such a natural landscape far older and more enduring than all human life, proving therefore that to foster human conflicts born of violent possessiveness and constantly ending in tragedy, is an act of vain and ultimately self-defeating futility.