"There are certain places in the world that seem like special effects, they don't seem real," said film historian Scott Eyman. "They're too perfect. And the first time you come here, you see it through John Ford's eyes."
Eyman, who has written biographies of both Ford and John Wayne, told CBS News' Martha Teichner that American settlers never came through Monument Valley.
"This was Navajo territory," he said. "But as a metaphor for the American conquest of space and the continent, this is the American West."