The Searchers (54 page)

Alan LeMay died of a brain tumor in 1964 in relative obscurity; the few obituaries were brief. “
Writers are forgotten people
out here,” Alan's widow, Arlene, told
Washington Post
film critic Gary Arnold in 1979.

Arnold was one of the few critics to have championed the novel version of
The Searchers
after the film's critical emergence; in fact, he regards the book as the indispensable element in the greatness of the movie. Arnold regrets that Ford sacrificed LeMay's original concluding scene for his own, more visual closure. “LeMay devised stunning climactic and concluding episodes,” writes Arnold. “They leave emotional reverberations that the movie never quite equals.”

Arnold admires Ford's ending, which left Wayne's character beyond the family threshold, proud and alone. “But there's also an unseen, forgotten man lingering out there in the cinematic ether,” concludes Arnold, “the storyteller who imagined
The Searchers
in the first place.”

Another debate has focused on gender issues. In 2007 the
feminist social critic Susan Faludi
invoked the film's purportedly macho themes as a prime example of how American society, whenever under sustained attack, falls back on familiar myths of male virtue and domination. This intuitive response holds true, argues Faludi, whether the enemy is Comanche warriors in nineteenth-century Texas or Islamic terrorists in twenty-first-century New York. Faludi reinterpreted the abduction tales
of Cynthia Ann and Rachel Plummer from a feminist perspective, and she named her book
The Terror Dream
after a passage in LeMay's novel. But while she made a compelling point about the American response to the September 11 attacks, Faludi badly misread the meaning and message of
The Searchers
. Whatever stereotypes they may evoke, Ford's women are strong, fearless, determined, and in the end triumphant. Martha, Mrs. Jorgensen, Debbie, and their male surrogate, Martin Pauley, are the winners. The macho men—Ethan and Scar—are either killed or excluded.

And so
The Searchers
continues to ride the distant ridge in American cultural discourse, fated to be talked about and admired—and misunderstood—more than viewed.

Its fiftieth anniversary came and went in 2006 with little fanfare. James D'Arc of Brigham Young University worked with Brian Jamieson of Warner Brothers to put out a special DVD edition. “
We worked together
on a project that would include material from the collection, the original soundtrack and all of that, a booklet and everything,” D'Arc recalled. But the executives at Warner Brothers killed the most ambitious parts of the project. The two-DVD set that was released was a shadow of what D'Arc and Jamieson had in mind. “It's a real shame,” said D'Arc. “That struggle carried on for a good three years.”

Several mysteries remain about the film. In a 1956
Warner Brothers Presents
TV show promoting the movie, Jeffrey Hunter tells host Gig Young that John Ford shot seven reels of film about the making of the movie—“an unprecedented film about a film,” says Hunter. The Warner Brothers program shows some scenes of bulldozers, crew workers, John Ford, and John Wayne. All of that footage seems to have disappeared.

Leith Adams, a Warner Brothers studio archivist, tried unsuccessfully to track it down. He spoke to the widow of Brick Marquard, one of Ford's favorite cameramen, who recalled that when her husband visited the set at Monument Valley during the filming, Ford handed him a camera and asked him to shoot the making of the movie. Mrs. Marquard said she and Brick later attended a private screening of an hour or two of the footage with Ford, his wife, and Merian Cooper. Then it vanished. “
I've had people searching
high and low for original color footage in the vaults and I'm pretty sure it isn't there,” said Adams.

Adams also failed to locate most of Ford's outtakes from the film that might help explain the choices the director made and, most especially, the variations of the climactic scene when Ethan decides to spare Debbie's life. One likely explanation: Ford shot so economically that outtakes
were rare, and he surely didn't want those that may have existed to fall into the hands of the studio executives he so richly despised. Perhaps he made them disappear.

Similarly, the notes and files that Alan LeMay compiled during of the writing of the novel have largely vanished. After her husband's death, Arlene LeMay donated twenty-three boxes of Alan's papers to the Charles E. Young Library at UCLA. The archives reveal Alan to have been a meticulous researcher of his historical novels and Westerns, but they contain virtually no
Searchers
material. Arlene died in 1993, and Alan's children have no idea where the
Searchers
files have gone.

By now
The Searchers
itself has become a legend and the mythmakers themselves have become mythic. Ford is an historic figure, revered by many. Wayne these days is more iconic than real. The purported macho meaning of his persona—captured in the still potent but sad and readily parodied figure of his later life and work—has outstripped his actual performances in his best films. And
The Searchers
is perhaps the greatest Hollywood film that few people have seen. It is hiding in plain sight, gaining in stature even as it lingers in a space between legend and obscurity. Like the generation that first dismissed it as just another Hollywood Western, we think we know what it is about, but its relentless ambiguity defeats us. We honor its ambition and its artistry. But we have no firm sense of what it means nor how truly great and disturbing it is.

The fierce Texas sun was incinerating
its way toward another 101-degree day on a Saturday morning in early June as the procession began its solemn trek through the half-abandoned downtown of Quanah, Texas, population 2,437. A muscular young man named Ronnie McSwain led the way, dressed in a bright yellow vest and pants with white fringe and moccasins and a bristling array of eagle feathers, jingle-jangling up the broad, empty main street past a silent audience of boarded-up storefronts, artists' galleries, and preservation projects. He was followed by Don Parker, one of Quanah's great-grandsons, a dignified man of sixty-five riding erect on a handsome brown steed and gripping the red, blue, and yellow Comanche Nation flag in his left hand. Then came Don's older brother Ron, in a white-feathered ceremonial war bonnet similar to the one his great-grandfather wore more than a century ago. Then a handful of others, friends and relatives, including Sarah McReynolds, director of the Parker's Fort State Park, dressed in buckskins as a tribute to Quanah's long-lost mother, the tragic, iconic Cynthia Ann.

Even at a slow pace, it took them only ten minutes to reach the town square. They were met there by Baldwin Parker Jr., who at age ninety-three was Quanah's oldest surviving grandson, and a crowd of two hundred extended family members, local dignitaries, and onlookers. Baldwin, too, was wearing a bright red feathered chief's bonnet. His son Ron took his arm and helped him to the microphone, where Baldwin recited the gentle blessing that Quanah himself had once bestowed upon the town that bears his name:

“
May the Great Spirit smile
on your little town, may the rain fall in season, and in the warmth of the sunshine after the rain may the earth
yield bountifully. May peace and contentment be with you and your children forever.”

Baldwin was not a solemn man. When the mayor of Quanah handed him a key to the city, he asked if it opened any local bank vaults.

The story of Cynthia Ann Parker's abduction by Comanches in 1836, her recapture by U.S. cavalrymen and Texas Rangers in 1860, and the rise to prominence of Quanah Parker, her surviving child, was re-created and reimagined over many generations, each for its own needs and reasons. But the story did not end with
The Searchers
. Like the legend itself, the two sides of Cynthia Ann's family—Texan and Comanche—have endured. They hold separate annual family reunions each summer, send emissaries to each other's events, and get together to honor their ancestors, retell their stories, and bask in their myths.

There are Texas towns named after Quanah and his father, Peta Nocona, a Cynthia Ann Parker Elementary School in Houston and a Cynthia Ann Parker College of Liberal Arts at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Texas.
Lone Star Trilogy
, a homespun ballet featuring Cynthia Ann, Charles Goodnight's wife, Molly, and Frenchy McCormick, a notorious saloon hall dancer, had its world premiere in Amarillo in April 2011. Country music star Larry Gatlin wrote the music, lyrics, and story for a musical called
Quanah
that had several public readings, including one at Pace University in Manhattan in January 2010. There are Cynthia Ann reenactors who tour Texas public schools, and a bay gelding named Quanah Parker who raced in the United Kingdom.

The year 2011 was the one hundredth anniversary of Quanah's death, and the emphasis was on peace and friendship between white people and red. The story had acquired an added layer of significance since the election three years earlier of Barack Obama. Like Quanah, the American president was the talented child of a union between a man and a woman of different races and different worlds. And, like Quanah's, his ascendancy was historic, holding out the possibility of reconciliation in a country founded on slavery, racial strife, and protracted warfare between whites and Indians on its limestone plains.

Ever since they first invited Quanah to the town's founding celebration in 1886, the town fathers have periodically welcomed his heirs. Like many North Texas towns, Quanah's downtown has suffered a steady economic decline, and city officials were hoping the family reunion might give their community a much-needed boost. There were storytelling sessions, a gourd dance, a chuck-wagon banquet in the local meeting hall,
book talks, and field trips to places of significance in the saga of Cynthia Ann and Quanah, including the site of the Pease River massacre where she was recaptured by troopers in December 1860 and forced against her will to return to her white family after twenty-four years with the Comanches.

But there was one historic site seventy-one miles to the northeast in neighboring Oklahoma that was too far away to make the list. It was, however, the most significant and amazing place of all.

THERE IS NO ROAD SIGN for the Star House. Visitors knew to pull up at the Trading Post Restaurant and Indian Store on the main Cache road, just off State Highway 62—a four-lane designated as the Quanah Parker Trailway. You entered the coffee shop and asked for Wayne Gipson, a quiet man with curly blond hair, a rumpled T-shirt, and jeans. In the late afternoon, after the regulars had drained their final cups of coffee and cleared out,
Wayne took visitors for a drive
down a winding dirt road behind the trading post, past a collection of faded amusement rides and attractions. There was a rusted narrow-gauge railroad track, the sullen ruins of a wooden rodeo grandstand, an abandoned Ferris wheel and bumper cars, and a collection of old buildings: a church, a one-room schoolhouse, a newspaper office, a music hall, a drugstore, a livery stable, a ranger station, and a homesteader's cabin where the outlaw Frank James took up residence after retiring from a career in the family crime business. But the largest and most impressive site presided alone in the back of the property: Quanah Parker's aging two-story mansion.

After Herbert Woesner, Wayne's uncle, saved the Star House from destruction in 1958 by purchasing it and moving it to this site, he worked hard to preserve it. He replastered many of the interior walls and found matching wallpaper for Quanah's ground-floor bedroom and hallway. He nailed soda bottle caps to the soles of his shoes for traction and climbed the steep slanted roof to repair holes and replace missing shingles. He arranged for the return of some of the original furniture that had been sent to the Fort Sill Museum—including the long oak table on which Quanah had served dinner to Theodore Roosevelt—and found matching period pieces for the rest. When vandals threatened the property, he even slept on the premises. But Woesner was a fiercely independent man who followed his own code. He refused to accept government money for restoration or repair work, and he brooked no interference
from outsiders. “
I don't believe in restoring
,” he once said. “If you're going to restore, you might as well just build new. I believe in preserving.”

Woesner loved history, and he made himself into the resident expert on Quanah Parker and the origins of the house. He also forged bonds of friendship and loyalty with the Parker family and encouraged Quanah's heirs to hold their annual reunion and powwow at the site. Baldwin Parker Jr. said he could feel his grandfather's spirit every time he visited there, and some of the Parkers reported seeing their illustrious ancestor on the porch at dusk. Herbert also considered it his personal obligation to give tours of the house to anyone who asked.

For a time Woesner saw the Star House as the centerpiece attraction for his grand vision of a family entertainment and historical center called Eagle Park, named in honor of Quanah. He purchased and installed the rides and the rodeo grandstands and a dance palace. And he began collecting orphaned historical buildings from around Oklahoma, jacking them up and hauling them to Eagle Park on the back of a long, low trailer truck just as he'd done the Star House. Woesner figured families would buy a day pass that included the historical sites as well as the rides. He believed they'd be as entranced as he was by the Star House and its neighbors. But few were interested. Eagle Park survived into the mid-1980s, when the combined forces of television, rising liability insurance rates, and demanding government safety inspectors finally shut it down. The buildings were now settling gently into irredeemable decay, all of them boarded up and seldom entered except for the Star House. Eagle Park was a ghost town.