Book review: “The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend” by Glenn Frankel

The two searchers in John Ford’s classic Western The Searchers — Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) — come upon a smoldering Indian village and the bodies of men, women and children slaughtered by the cavalry of Col. George Armstrong Custer, and they are shocked.

It is, writes Glenn Frankel in The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, “the richest and most troubling” scene in the 1956 film and perhaps all American Westerns.

The object of the search is Debbie Edwards, Ethan’s niece and Martin’s adoptive sister, abducted years earlier by the Comanches in a bloody raid in which most of Debbie’s family were massacred, raped and mutilated.

It is clear to the two men, writes Frankel, “that white soldiers are as capable of wanton brutality as Commanche warriors.”

At a military outpost, Ethan and Martin find the surviving white female captives who seem “crazed, either from living with the Indians or from the horror they just witnessed.”  As the two men move away, one of the captives cries out:

Ethan stops and turns his head toward her so Ford moves the camera in to capture his expression. Ethan looks toward the woman, lowers his eyes slightly, and turns away. His facial expression burns with distress, sadness, anger, pity, resignation, maybe even despair.

 

Who is a savage?

It is a scene that contains and exemplifies many of the questions at the heart of Ford’s movie:

• Who is a savage?
• What does violence do to those it victimizes? To those who carry it out?
• For a white woman, is sex with an Indian, voluntary or not, a Fate Worse Than Death?
• Are the captive women still white, because that’s how they were born, even if they have lived for years among the Commanche and become family members?
• Do they still need to be “rescued” from captivity even when they don’t want to be?
• Who, after all, has a right to the land? The Indians who roam the land as nomads, living off the bounty of the sun and soil and native animals? Or the whites who want to turn the land into real estate, to develop it, to shape it to fit human desires and aims?

 

What is the role of myth?

Frankel’s book grapples with those same questions and others as well:

• What is the role of myth?
• What is the meaning of the real-life situation that gives inspiration to the creation of the myth?
• What is it like to find oneself inside a myth?
• What does it mean for the person who serves as a bridge between two myths? Is that person a traitor or a go-between? Both?
• How damaging is a myth that is rooted in racism?
• Can a myth be free of bias?
• Can a work of art present a myth or multiple myths in such a complex way that the viewer is left uncertain, unsettled, even troubled? Is that the role of art?

 

Ambiguity

In his film, Ford doesn’t deal with such questions directly. As Frankel points out, the director frequently leaves it up to the moviegoer to guess at motivations and reasons behind the actions of his characters. Many scenes and Ford’s movie as a whole work at deep levels because of the ambiguity in the director’s storytelling.

Similarly, in his book, Frankel doesn’t work through such questions as if on a list.

Instead, Frankel, a former longtime Washington Post reporter and foreign correspondent, offers facts and analysis, but it’s the reader’s job to connect the dots.

It’s not that his facts are ambiguous. Indeed, his research is compellingly intense and thorough. What’s ambiguous is what the facts mean about myth and reality and the way humans make their way through life.

 

Telling a book by its cover

The hardcover and paperback editions of The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend give the impression that Frankel’s book is tightly focused on Ford’s movie.

The bulk of the cover is taken up with one of Ford’s sweeping, arresting images of the natural setting of his story, a thin line of cavalry crossing a desert in Monument Valley in northeastern Arizona, looking tiny within the cup of natural rock formations under a sky that goes on forever.

Up in the left hand corner is Wayne as Ethan Edwards. Up in the right hand corner is what could be the image of a generic Indian, but it’s not.

It is a portion of the famous photo of Cynthia Ann Parker who, as a nine-year-old, was abducted on May 19, 1836 by Comanche raiders who had massacred most of the rest of her family. Adopted into the tribe, she later became one of the wives of Peta Nocona, a chief, and gave birth to two sons, Quanah and Pecos, and a daughter, Prairie Flower.

 

“A palpable sense of fear”

Nearly a quarter of a century after her abduction, she and Prairie Flower were captured by Texas Rangers in another bloody attack, this time by Texas Rangers on December 19, 1860, on an Indian camp near the Pease River in northern Texas. While some details of the fight are disputed, it is clear that few Comanche survived.  Frankel quotes one participant that “the Sergeant and his men fell in behind on the squaws…and killed every one of them, almost in a pile.”

One fleeing woman in a buffalo robe was about to be shot when she yelled “Americano!” and the Ranger noticed she had blue eyes. She was the thirty-three-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker.

She was returned to her white family against her will. The photograph with Prairie Flower was taken at a photo studio some weeks or months later.

In the photograph that has survived from that day, Cynthia Ann’s expression is hard and raw as granite. Her face is flat, weathered, and heavyset. Her lips are sealed shut. Her dark hair has been hacked short in the manner of a Comanche in mourning.

She is wearing a thin bandana around her neck and a borrowed muslin dress unbuttoned where her raven-haired little girl suckles at her right breast.

There is no comprehension; at best, there is resignation and lurking behind it a palpable sense of fear.

 

Four in one

Frankel’s book is four in one.

The first tells the bleak and sad story of Cynthia Ann Parker. It gets behind the bombastic and heavily fictionalized legends of pioneer Texas by using the best available, relatively objective contemporary reportage, including some sources rarely or never before studied. An emphasis in Frankel’s account is on the actions of Cynthia’s Uncle James whose search for her was part of “his personal crusade against Indians.”

The second deals with the success that Cynthia’s son Quanah had as a bridge between the Indian and white worlds.  Some of this was due to his mix of white and Indian blood, but, from Frankel’s reporting, it was much more the result of his willingness to live the difficult life of a man on the border of two drastically different cultures.

The shortest — 26 pages — tells how novelist-scriptwriter Alan Le May came to write his novel The Searchers which focused not so much on a Cynthia-like captive but instead on her Indian-hating uncle.

The fourth, the longest at 116 pages, details how Ford, using the LeMay novel as a base, created a movie that has been hailed as one of the greatest American films of all time while also criticized for its racist treatment of Indians.

 

Leaves it to the readers

In many ways, the four sections The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, have been written to stand alone.

Frankel is at pains to tell each story as accurately and completely as possible. But it’s clear that, for him, the presentation of these stories is only half of the process of reading his book.

He presents these stories and discusses in great detail the myths that arose and still hover around the real-life events, and he leaves it to the reader to make sense of the interaction.

Ford’s movie is only one version of the myths that were given birth by the story of Cynthia Ann Parker. It is a great work of art. Yet, how does the story Ford tells relate to the real-life captive and her experience?

What would Cynthia Ann think of Ford’s portrayal of the Comanches?

She never recorded her own version. Others, mainly whites, have told their own, almost always racist, versions for more than 150 years.

 

Desperate and unhinged

Frankel notes that the scene at the fort where Ethan and Martin are confronted by the “rescued” captives is “one of the few moments in The Searchers where the shadow of Cynthia Ann Parker plainly hovers.”  He goes on:

She and Prairie Flower, her baby girl, were ripped violently from the demolished Indian village by their white captors, then waited to be claimed by Cynthia Ann’s uncle and returned to a home she had long forgotten.

They could have easily been among the desperate, unhinged captives whom Ford depicts.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

7.19.26