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

Glenn Frankel’s The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend is a tour de force of deep research and penetrating analysis. The book is divided into four sections. The first covers the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was both the nine-year-old Texan girl captured by the Comanches in 1836 and the Comanche woman captured by the Texans twenty-four years later. The second section reveals the remarkable life of her Comanche son, the famous Quanah Parker, who like her Texas relatives not only pursued the real Cynthia Ann, but also helped to turn her life into a legend.

The last two sections of the book meticulously describe the transformation in the 1950s of the tale of Cynthia Ann’s captivity into another kind of story altogether by the novelist Alan LeMay and the film director John Ford. As their shared title—The Searchers—suggests, their dramatic narratives focus neither on the captive nor her Indian captors, but rather on those who sought her rescue. According to Frankel, John Wayne’s performance as the grimly obsessed uncle who pursued his niece over the vast Comancheria for more than a decade is “one of the greatest in film history” (307).

Many viewers of the film, then and now, would disagree with this assessment, but Frankel nevertheless makes a good case for including even the taciturn Wayne in the author’s long list of storytellers who have crafted myth and legend from the bare facts of Cynthia Ann’s short and tragic life. Both she and her young daughter died within a few years of their “rescue” by the Texans; Frankel titles the chapter on their difficult time with white relatives who were often mortified by their “savage” behavior as “The Prison.”

Quanah Parker heads up the long list of mythmakers. He shrewdly used his mother’s identity and “romantic” story to help turn himself into an effective middleman between red and white during some of the most difficult times for the Comanche people. Like all other parts of this book, Quanah’s life and times are skillfully contextualized by Frankel, who deftly provides the reader with sufficient background on everything from federal Indian policy to film criticism to give this book considerable historical heft. The author’s extended description of Cynthia Ann’s white relatives in the Texas Republic as “tribesmen and warriors” (14), not so different from the Indians they fought, is especially valuable.

The mythmakers with whom Frankel is least impressed are the would-be historians in the Texas of more than a century ago—James T. DeShields, Victor Rose, and Governor Sul Ross—who for political and propaganda purposes inflated the banal facts of Cynthia Ann’s recapture in 1860 into a glorious and monumental victory over the Comanche nation. In exposing their fabrications, Frankel ably uses the recent work of the myth-busting historians Paul H. Carlson and Tom Crum in Myth, Memory, and Massacre: The Pease River Capture of Cynthia Ann Parker (2010).

Frankel is far more charitable to the men who consciously wove facts into myth in the service of fiction and film. LeMay and Ford are praised for reexamining the “foundational myth” of the American frontier—the captivity narrative—in a way that reveals the undercurrents of sexual obsession and racist paranoia at its core. Frankel argues that Ford’s epic movie “both honors and dissects the values and assumptions” of the traditional Hollywood Western (7), and he lauds Ford’s “ability to weave myth and truth into a seamless fabric” (18). Frankel, brilliantly, has done no less with this superb book.