Wild West Land Blog

‘The Long Walk’ is etched into the memory of the Navajo Nation as a time of death and defeat when many died during the forced migration from their ancestral home of the Canyon De Chelly area of northern Arizona, 300 miles south to Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

Stanley Stewart, writing a travel piece in The Times about this most magnificent part of the American south west, gives a great summary of this period in American history - the 1860s - now looked back on with a sense of shame.

To the Indians of the American Southwest - the Navajo, the Apache, the Hopi and numerous others - the great ellipse of red-rock country between the Rio Grande and the Colorado River is the sacred land of their own beginnings. It was here that the first of their ancestors climbed through the sipapu, the hole in the earth, to emerge in this world.

At the heart of the region is an area known today as the Four Corners, for the four states that meet here - Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. It is one of the emptiest and most dramatic parts of the continent. To the west, it abuts the Grand Canyon.

To the north, it fades towards the surreal rock for­mations of Monument Valley, which have played a starring role in countless films, from John Ford’s Stagecoach to Back to the Future III. And occupying the largest part of it is the Navajo Nation, a swathe of country almost the size of Scotland.

Read the comments written by readers and you understand the mixed feelings today about the ‘genocide’ of the native American tribes during the period of westward expansion. The strongly held views are wildly divergent.

Cowboy Country sits at the heart of this region and I’d highly recommend a first hand visit to many of the sites mentioned. For now though take in this set of Flickr photos by Sublime Dharma of the Canyon De Chelly and Hopi Reservation:

Back in the days of the Great Depression, the US National Parks Service was persuaded by Charles E. Peterson, a young Park Service landscape architect, to create a new programme to generate work for jobless architects, draughtsmen and photographers.

And so the the Historic American Buildings Survey was born, its’ mission: “documenting a representative sampling of America’s architectural heritage“.

Now I love American history and love the access the web gives to search these historic databases. My first search turned up several treasures (I use the word loosely) in the city of Holbrook, Arizona, the city some 10 miles southwest of Cowboy Country.

Holbrook has a rich western history and an interesting mix of characters who were active during the second half of the nineteenth century when cattlemen and sheep ranchers roamed the vast lands around the soon-to-be Navajo County seat.

The HABS database has an entry for the Armijo House located at 301 Montano Street, Holbrook. Although it wasn’t built until 1915, the simple adobe style construction and freestanding water tower make it the most interesting building in the CF Perkins subdivision south of the Little Colorado River:

The house was originally built by the Armijo family “a pioneer group of Hispanic northern Arizona farmers and ranchers”. To learn more about the history and view another dozen black and white photos check out the report written by historian Robert G Graham on the HABS database.

I only wish I’d had the opportunity to know about this house and the other features of the city before my visit in January this year. If you are passing through and are able to send a photo or report of the location (16 years after the report was drafted) then I’d love to find out if the house is still standing.