In July 2017 we took a research trip to San Francisco and Berkeley to visit descendants of expeditioners with fantastic stories and archives as well as the University of California, Berkeley’s archive. Our first stop was the family of Jerry Hansen’s. We were able to meet Anna, Jerry’s great granddaughter and Anna’s grandmother. Jerry was the head of mapping for the Rainbow Bridge Monument Valley Expedition in 1937 and turns out he was 57 at the time. At 16 years old, Anna’s grandmother typed Jerry’s monograph that contained stories and drawings from his time working with RBMVE. This monograph is an especially unique perspective of an older man, compared to many of the younger expeditioners diaries and letters we have read. Jerry was a really wonderful story teller, that we are now able to experience through access to all the letters he wrote home and his monograph.
The second stop on the trip was to meet Lissa Mckee. Her father, Brad McKee was on the expedition in 1934. Lissa found in the back of his closet a box of amazing portraits of Navajo and other Native American people. She so generously let us take these images to the Navajo Nation Fair, to hopefully identify the portraits. These images are a tremendous resource to us.
Because this is a story telling project, when we find a source with these stories written down it is huge for us to continue to develop the full story of the RBMVE.
Portraits taken circa 1940 by Brad McKee, the first image was at a annual ceremonial gathering of tribes from all over the West, the other two portraits are from the RBMVE.
The last stop was to the UC Berkeley libraries that we viewed original albums put together for the expedition administration that were highly illustrated. We were also able to see Vernon DeMars work for the first time. He was an architect who did detailed site drawings and other sketches of the landscape that are iconic, and extremely helpful with details as we reconstruct sites from the Rainbow Bridge Monument Valley Expedition.
All in all, this trip to Northern California was hugely beneficial in piecing together the different stories and people that were a part of the Rainbow Bridge Monument Valley Expedition. Thank you to all who welcomed us into their homes and archives, sharing with us such personal stories, we are hugely grateful!
