Monument Valley Menu

Monument Valley, which is located on the Navajo Indian Reservation, was made famous by John Ford westerns in the 1930s. So many Santa Fe passengers who had never actually been to the valley probably still recognized the cover of this menu, which was used on Santa Fe’s Grand Canyon in 1950.


Click image to download a 1.3-MB PDF of this menu.

This painting is by Charles Waldo Love, the staff artist at the Colorado Museum of Natural History (now known as the Museum of Nature and Science) who did the background paintings for the museum’s popular dioramas. The Santa Fe Railway acquired this particular painting in 1946 and used it on its 1947 calendar. The interior of this menu is identical to the Grand Canyon menu presented here last month.

Love’s dioramas remain popular at the museum today. Above shows Love’s painting of the Colorado Rockies forming the backdrop to a subalpine forest diorama. Below is a photo of Love (who apparently went by Waldo, not Charles) painting one of the dioramas.


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