The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend by Glenn Frankel (review)

Within the introduction to The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, Glenn Frankel explains that what he finds most striking about the film is John Ford’s “ability to weave myth and truth into a seamless fabric” (8). This book is Frankel’s attempt at deconstructing the myths behind the film: the kidnapping of a white settler girl named Cynthia Ann Parker, her assimilation into Comanche society, and her “rescue” decades later by the Texas Rangers. Frankel elucidates how this history has been written, rewritten, and reinterpreted by a number of people and groups, including Ford in his 1956 film The Searchers.

The first two sections of the book compose the most compelling half of the narrative when Frankel deals specifically with the mythology of how Parker’s story has been passed down and translated throughout the years by her white and Comanche descendants, as well as by US western writer Alan LeMay and filmmaker John Ford. Frankel deftly deconstructs a number of interwoven mythologies involving white settlers, Comanches, Texas Rangers, western fiction writers, directors, producers, Navajo actors, movie stars, and he convincingly illustrates how the story of one woman became a part of the mainstream US consciousness.

Also admirable is how Frankel privileges histories written by women, representing much of the mythology surrounding Parker as the product of male creation: “Each of these male authors created and buffed the macho frontier legend using whatever facts fit their vision and discarding those that were less convenient. But occasionally, someone came along who gathered a more modest, fact-based account” (151). Thus, he privileges the voices of Rachel Plummer, Marion Ross, Susan Parker St. John, and Araminta Taulman in telling this history.

It is disappointing, however, that Frankel settles upon a particular representation of the Comanches. He elides the history and cycles of violence that had shaped Comanche/Euroamerican relations for hundreds of years previous to the kidnapping of Parker and portrays the Comanche people largely as marauding, baby-killing rapists bent on the destruction of white bodies. While he comments about the regrettable way US citizens and the US government treated Native Americans in general, he claims, “The modern image of Indians—nurtured by the Native American rights movement, revisionist historians, and the film Dances with Wolves—has been one of profoundly spiritual and environmentally friendly genocide victims seeking harmony with the land and humankind. But the Comanches were nobody’s victims and no one’s friends. They were magnificent, brutal, and relentless” (32).

While only a revisionist historian could portray the Comanches as a peaceable or docile people, Frankel portrays them using the language one would use in describing the great white shark in Jaws (1975). He largely ignores that the Comanches fought back against the Euroamerican encroachment that had dispossessed them from their land and spread disease and famine among them for generations. Additionally, many Native American studies scholars and many people within the Native American rights movement, or even those familiar with it, would take issue with Frankel’s suggestion that they have nurtured an image of Native Americans as anything other than human beings who are not simply figures of a brutal or a romanticized past. Finally, is Frankel proposing that Native Americans were not victims of genocide? Is genocide a word that can only be applied to those victims that can be deemed friendly or incapable of resisting?

In the introduction, Frankel explains what he found most fascinating about The Searchers when he watched it in his youth: “What entranced me most were the Comanches. … Ford’s portrait of them is mostly one-dimensional: Indians in The Searchers are for the most part murderers and rapists” (7). It is, therefore, ironic that Frankel largely portrays the Comanches in the same fashion. This lack of historical contextualization is especially frustrating because, otherwise, the book is truly captivating. Frankel’s illustration of how a specific history gave birth to a number of mythologies and how those mythologies in turn...