The Searchers (34 page)

They finally locate Debbie living in the encampment of a Comanche chief named Scar. They arrive claiming to be traders, but Scar knows who they really are. They keep their cool and ride off, but Debbie intercepts them outside the village and warns them to flee, that Scar is planning to kill them. She refuses to go with them: she is betrothed to a
young warrior and considers the Comanches her people, even though Martin tries to explain that it was Scar who led the raid that killed her family—just as Cynthia Ann's Comanche husband, Peta Nocona, had led the murder raid on Parker's Fort in 1836. The scene mirrors that of Cynthia Ann when white scouts came across her in 1846 but she refused to consider leaving the Comanches to return to her Texas family.

In the novel, Amos and Martin meet up with a contingent of Texas Rangers, U.S. Cavalry, and their Tonkawa Indian allies who aim to attack Scar's encampment. Martin also runs into Charlie MacCorry, a local cowhand and Texas Ranger, who informs Martin that he and Laurie have gotten married.

The Texans and soldiers attack Scar's village and overcome the defenders—not unlike the Ranger attack at the Pease River in 1860. Amos sees a Comanche girl who looks like Debbie, reaches for his pistol, but at the last minute chooses to rescue her. But it isn't Debbie. The girl pulls a gun from the fold of her outfit and shoots him dead.

Martin searches in vain for Debbie among the wreckage of the village, then trails her to the remote northwest, where he finds her cold, exhausted, and dying of thirst and cold. He warms her body with his own and keeps her alive. She tells him that she ran away from Scar and the Comanches after discovering that what Amos and Martin had said was true: the Indians had killed her family. Now she has no family, no people, and no hope. “
I have no place,” she tells him
. “It is empty. Nobody is there.”

Martin promises he will stay with her. “I'll be there, Debbie.”

He begs her to remember the past. “I remember,” she tells him. “I remember it all. But you the most. I remember how hard I loved you.”

Love and memory have the last word. But there is no way to know how these two orphans will fare in such a merciless land. Martin's possibility of happiness with Laurie has been shattered, while Debbie has lost her home and her people. Their only hope now is each other.

The Searchers
is a story of courage and endurance, of people who refuse to give up even when the odds are ruthlessly stacked against them. But it is a hard, pessimistic book, as unyielding as the landscape it takes places in. In its sense of despair, its emotions echo those of Cynthia Ann Parker after she was purportedly liberated in 1860.

Alan LeMay dedicated the book to his Kansas ancestors. The book jacket, adapted from a letter Alan wrote his publisher in July 1954, explains: “These people had a kind of courage that may be the finest gift of man: the courage of those who simply keep on, doing the next thing,
far beyond all reasonable endurance, seldom thinking of themselves as martyred, and never thinking of themselves as brave.”

In this hard land, the most destructive force is the Comanches themselves. Unlike in
Painted Ponies
, LeMay's first novel, there are no Noble Savages in
The Searchers
and not one sympathetic or admirable Indian character. The Comanches are brutal, duplicitous, and merciless. They ruthlessly take advantage of the U.S. government's naïve peace policy to shelter during the winter in government reservations in Indian territory, then resume raiding and pillaging vulnerable pioneer families in Texas in springtime. They literally spit upon and try to intimidate the benevolent Indian agents who seek to help them. They are unstoppable, unappeasable, and fundamentally inhuman. All of their actions and instincts are unpredictable and confounding. “
I ain't larned but one thing about an Indian
,” says Amos. “Whatever you know you'd do in his place—he ain't going to do that.”

Even the gift of language—one of the fundamental attributes of humankind—seems beyond them. “
The Comanches themselves seemed unable
, or perhaps unwilling, to explain themselves any more exactly,” writes LeMay. “… Nothing else existed but various kinds of enemies which The People had to get rid of. They were working on it now.”

The idealistic young novelist who wrote so sympathetically about the Cheyenne Indians in
Painted Ponies
twenty-five years earlier had hardened into the remorseless creator of
The Searchers
. Alan himself explained his antipathy to the Comanches as his attempt to even up the literary box score. “
A great deal has been written
about historic injustices to the Indian,” he wrote one reader. “I myself once wrote a book highly partisan to the Northern Cheyennes. I thought it was time somebody showed that in the case of the Texans, at least, there were two sides to it, and that the settlers had understandable reasons to be sore.”

But the real depths of LeMay's hard-earned pessimism are evident in his portrayal of Laurie Mathison, Martin's lost love. In most of LeMay's novels and screenplays, the hero gets the girl, and vice versa. Not so in
The Searchers
. Martin loses Laurie for the noble reason that he won't abandon his sacred mission for the sake of their personal happiness. Laurie tries to be as virtuous as he is; she waits patiently for years and helps him however she can. But in the end she surrenders to despair and marries Charlie MacCorry. Before she does so, she endorses the idea of an honor killing—that because Debbie has been defiled by savages, she must be killed to restore her own purity and her family's honor.
Debbie has “had time to be with half the Comanche bucks
in creation by now,” Laurie
tells Martin. “… Sold time and again to the highest bidder … got savage brats of her own, most like.”

“Do you know what Amos will do if he finds Deborah Edwards?” she adds. “It will be a right thing, a good thing—and I tell you Martha would want it now. He'll put a bullet in her brain.”

As she speaks these hateful words, Laurie's beautiful face hardens, and “the eyes were lighted with the same fires of war [Martin] had seen in Amos' eyes the times he had stomped Comanche scalps into the dirt.”

Martin refuses to accept Debbie's death as a just solution. “Only if I'm dead,” he tells Laurie, and leaves her behind one last time in order to rescue his adopted sister. For Martin, kinship is stronger than love or hate.

The Searchers
was Alan's first serious literary effort in ten years, and it was a painful and painstaking labor that took him nearly eighteen months to write. “
In all I wrote about 2,000 pages
, mostly no good, to get the 200 pages we used,” he told one letter writer.

When another letter writer suggested he write a novel about Cynthia Ann Parker, Alan replied with a gentle refusal.
The Searchers
, he wrote, “represents about all I have to contribute on this particular subject.” It was as close as Alan LeMay would come to acknowledging the connection between Cynthia Ann's story and his novel.

Alan first wrote the novel in five serialized pieces, titled “The Avenging Texans,” which his New York agent, Max Wilkinson, sold to the
Saturday Evening Post
for an undisclosed sum. Next, Wilkinson took it around to book publishers. He and Alan settled on Harper & Row and an experienced and empathetic editor named Evan Thomas, who would later become famous for editing John F. Kennedy's
Profiles in Courage
and William Manchester's
The Death of a President
.

In the end
The Searchers
can be read not just as Alan LeMay's tribute to his ancestors and his purest and most personal expression of the American Western founding myth, but also as an exploration of his own hardened psyche. LeMay felt he had barely survived Hollywood, hanging on to a piece of his soul in a predatory environment where only the strongest and most cunning could survive. He himself had become a searcher for his own autonomous place in a difficult world. His kinship with his hardy ancestors was not just a blood tie but a link forged by grim experience. In this sense—as with all storytellers—Alan's story is about himself.

The book was a critical success. “
Its simplicity is one of subtle art
,” wrote the literary critic Orville Prescott in the
New York Times
, “suggestive, charged with emotion and the feel of the land and the time.”

The Searchers
, by Alan LeMay, published in 1954 by Harper & Brothers.

The hardcover book sold more than fourteen thousand copies, and has continued to sell in various reprints and paperback editions for more than a half century. It garnered a lot of gratifying attention, which Evan Thomas eagerly reported back to his author. “
One of the White House correspondents
tells me that Eisenhower is reading the book, with great pleasure,” Thomas wrote to Alan in February 1955.

Reader's Digest
bought the rights for $50,000, half of which went to Alan and half to Harper. But the most important sale was to Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, a playboy businessman and heir to the immense Vanderbilt-Whitney fortune. Whitney had just formed a film company and hired Merian C. Cooper as his executive producer. Cooper's other business partner was the famed film director John Ford.

Alan returned home to Pacific Palisades from two weeks of researching his next novel among the Kiowas in Oklahoma to learn the good news that H. N. Swanson, the legendary Hollywood literary agent who once boasted F. Scott Fitzgerald as a client, had sold the movie rights to C. V. Whitney Productions for $60,000. The amount, “
I am told (not too reliably)
,
ties the record for the year,” an ecstatic LeMay wrote to Thomas, “the whole thing being made possible by the rewrite under your coaching.”

Still, despite his years of experience as a screenwriter—or more likely because of them—Alan wanted to have nothing to do with the movie. He told his son Dan that he had sold the rights with the stipulation that he would not have to write the screenplay or even see the film. Having survived working for Cecil B. DeMille for a half-dozen years, the last thing LeMay wanted was to get involved in making a movie with John Ford, who was by reputation another famous tyrant and scourge of screenwriters. LeMay had been in Hollywood long enough to know how Ford liked to work. He would probably use his own in-house screenwriter, Frank Nugent, and film the picture in Ford's personal Western playground: Monument Valley, the stunningly beautiful Navajo tribal park on the Arizona-Utah border. It was a ridiculous notion to film a story set in the flat, high plains of Texas in the lunar mesa dreamscape of Monument Valley. But when it came to making Westerns, nobody, especially a lowly novelist and screenwriter, could tell John Ford what to do. Better, thought Alan LeMay, to get out of the way.

The Searchers
was John Ford's baby now.

As John Ford liked to point out, movies and Westerns grew up together, a natural marriage of medium and genre. The first moving picture in the United States was a series of still photographs in 1878 of a horse racing down a track south of San Francisco on the grounds of what became Stanford University, stitched together by Eadweard Muybridge to prove that horses did indeed gallop with all four feet off the ground. From that time on, horses and pictures seemed to go together, as Ford himself once noted: “
A running horse remains
one of the finest subjects for a movie camera.”

The official end of the American Frontier, solemnly announced like a death in the family in 1890 by the Office of the Census, virtually coincided with the birth of motion pictures. Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis—that the West had provided a safety valve that had defused social tensions and class conflict during the American nation's adolescence—became
a template for the Western film
, which was from its beginnings a form of elegy for a time and place that had already vanished.

After
The Great Train Robbery
in 1903, the genre slowly took shape over the course of a decade, overlapping with genuine remnants of the past. Ford himself befriended the legendary lawman and gunslinger Wyatt Earp, who spent his final years loitering around Hollywood film sets. Buffalo Bill Cody, Frank James, the surviving Younger brothers, the former Comanche captive Herman Lehmann—all appeared in various cinematic accounts of their life and times, adding a dab of color, showmanship, and faux authenticity.

The first moving pictures of Indians
were likely made by Thomas Edison in 1894 for a small kinetoscope called
Sioux Ghost Dance
, an
immediate hit on the penny arcade circuit. The early films were makeshift and improvisatory. They used real locations and real Indians.
One of the first was a short called
The Bank Robbery
, filmed in 1908 in Cache, Oklahoma, in the heart of the former Comanche reservation by the Oklahoma Mutoscope Company. One of its stars was the former Comanche warrior turned peace chief, Quanah Parker. After outlaws rob the bank at Cache, Quanah rides with the posse that tracks them to their hideout in the Wichita Mountains. Quanah is involved in a shootout in which all of the robbers are either gunned down or captured. The money is restored to the bank and the outlaws are hauled off to jail. Despite his Comanche ethnicity, Quanah Parker is undifferentiated from the rest of the volunteer lawmen—just a good citizen doing his duty.