THE SEARCHERS
Dir. by John Ford

The Searchers is perhaps John Ford’s masterpiece among Westerns. It is a landmark among classic Westerns, standing in sharp contrast to the high points of the revisionist era such as Little Big Man. It is also one of, if not the greatest role by John Wayne. The cast was one of the best assembled for a Western, and there are magnificent performances by Jeffrey Hunter, Natalie Wood, Ward Bond, Harry Carry, Hank Worden, and Vera Miles among others.

The story concerns Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), an un-Reconstructed Reb who returns to visit his brother in Texas. While Ethan has been busy acquiring newly-minted double eagles from an un-named source, Aaron Edwards (Walter Coy) is busy raising a family on the West Texas frontier. Living with the Edwards family is Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter, know to SF fans as Capt. Pike of the Starship Enterprise). Martin is an orphan, his family was massacred by Indians and he was the sole survivor. Ethan was the man who found Martin (an echo of Tom Dunson’s relationship with Matt Garth in Red River).

Ethan’s re-entry to domesticity from the cauldron of war and banditry is short-lived. While he and Martin join a group of Rangers on a scout, Comanche raiders led by Scar (Harry Brandon) attack the Edwards cabin and kill the adults and carry off the girls. Ethan and Martin begin a search of epic proportions to find Debbie (played by Lana and Debbie Wood as a girl and young woman), the youngest child.

The Searchers is not exactly a sentimental film about getting a lost child home. Rather it is a story of how racism poisons that sentimental attachment to family. For Ethan comes to realize that Debbie will no longer be a child when they find her, she will be a woman. Moreover, she will be the bride of a hostile Comanche warrior. The same as the warriors who raped and murdered her older sister. Ethan is caught in a terrible moral trap, guilt for failing to save his family compels him to search for the lost girl. The same guilt commands that he kill her as an irredeemably tainted race traitor.

Martin is at least as driven to follow Ethan on his demented quest. He too is driven by guilt and terrible memories. He is as much Ethan’s rival as he is his helper. Ethan repeated makes it clear that Martin is no kin to Debbie or any Edwards. Yet Martin knows better. He turns his back on a happy life to follow Ethan, martyring himself paradoxically because he cannot become a tormented soul or an indifferent one.

The racism of the film’s characters stands out, arguably by design. Ethan introduces Martin by contemptuously referring to him as a half-breed of Cherokee ancestry. Laurie (Vera Miles), Martin’s love, demands to know why he should sacrifice so much for Debbie, who is no longer white, but has been, “sold and sold again to the highest bidder,” as though to be a Comanche captive is to be a whore. Cavalry officers dismiss the deaths of white captives in an attack as better off dead. However, for all that the film probably tones down white hatred of Indians and the racism of the era. Still, Ford was bold enough not to eliminate it. The Searchers is not a whitewash.

Ford shows us why the white settlers would hate and fear Indians, but provides hints about why the Indians would hate and fear whites. Scar’s own sons were killed by whites. We see a young woman’s body (Wild Goose, played by Beulah Archuletta), after the cavalry has stormed her village. Martin asks what did she do to deserve that. While The Searchers does not provide nearly as much from the Indian point of view as it does from that of the whites, it is there.

The elephant in the corner is the attitude of Debbie to the idea of “rescue”. While Debbie is portrayed as a rational young woman, other white captives seem demented, broken by the horrors of captivity. The problem is that by-and-large that simply wasn’t the case. The Comanches were apt to rape, mutilate, and murder adult women they took as prisoner. But children were raised as part of there families. Even older children were shown tenderness and could identify with people who were not some much alien captors as adoptive parents.

If anything, it was white culture that enslaved and broke the spirits of “redeemed captives”. The records show that people like Cynthia Ann and John Parker, Herman Lehman, Clint and Jeff Smith, and Adolf Korn suffered terrible pain from the loss of their Comanche families and faced great difficulty in adapting to white society. Some never did. What future would Debbie Edwards face? What would she have said to Ethan and Martin, alienated kinsmen, who were warriors of the hostile Texans bent on exterminating her people?

As much as anything else, the open ended nature of these questions, ones that The Searchers raises but can not answer, make this a film that you can watch again and again.

-Dave Hardy

THE CAPTURED
By Scott Zesch

As a youngster, Scott Zesch heard tales of Adolf Korn, his great-uncle. Adolf Korn would have been little different from other German youngsters in Texas, except that one day in 1870, Indian raiders carried him off. Eventually he returned to his white family, but he was a very different young man.

In searching for this ancestor who had been lost to his family, Zesch began following the trails of other white captives from Central Texas. He recounts, sometimes in horrifying detail, what Indian raids were like. But this is no “the only good injun is a dead injun” book. Because Zesch found that almost all captives came to prefer Indian life. Zesch offers some cautious hypotheses as to why these children (always children, adults fared badly at the hands of the Comanche and Apache raiders) identified so strongly with an alien culture that had forcibly abducted them. After considering the impressionability of childhood and the “Stockholm Syndrome” (where hostages come to identify with captors), Zesch returns to a simple thesis: Indian life offered a simplicity, ease, and freedom that the lives of hardscrabble settlers on the Texas frontier could not match.

The Captured compares the lives of Herman Lehmann, Clinton and Jeff Smith, Rudolf Fischer and many other white children who were abducted by Indians. Zesch offers us many insights into their lives as well as the lives of those they left behind and the life they adopted. They experienced Indian life in its last years of freedom before buffalo hunters destroyed the Indians’ livelihood and the US Army destroyed their people. Zesch’s accounts of Comanche and Apache raids find grim echoes in his description of Army attacks on Indian villages.

Eventually all the captives returned to their white families, at least for a time. But they all felt the pull of Indian life strongly. They had trouble adjusting to white life, they had learned to conform with Indian ways, easy-going and free. Some returned immediately to the reservation. Rudolf Fischer reluctantly visited his biological family, and shortly returned to his Comanche wife. Others stayed in Texas and even achieved a level of fame (both Herman Lehmann and Clinton Smith wrote autobiographies). Some, like Adolf Korn, withdrew from society altogether.

The Captured is a fascinating study, not just of a critical period in the history of Texas (and America), but also a window on the creation of character and personality when cultures clash inside a single person.

-Dave Hardy

THE BOY CAPTIVES
By Clinton L. Smith

Clinton and Jeff Smith had their lives irrevocably changed on February 26, 1871. They were captured by Apache raiders. What began as a terrifying experience ended up with the boys becoming Indians themselves. The lads were split up, Jeff went to the Apache and was adopted by Geronimo while Clint became a Comanche.

Like many other children captured by the Comanche, Clint was adopted into the tribe. After an initial testing period he was treated no differently from other Comanche boys and expected in time to become a full-fledged warrior. The objective in taking captives, besides the possibility of ransom, was to bring fresh blood into the tribe and replace numbers decimated by war and disease. Clinton Smith lived alongside Adolf Korn, a German boy who had been captured and adopted. Many other Germans, Americans, and Mexicans became Comanches in this way. The Comanches’ greatest chief Quanah, was the son of Cynthia Ann Parker, a captive/adoptee who was related to one of Texas’ most prominent families.

Clinton Smith recounts Comanche raids for livestock and sometimes for bloodshed. He became fiercely attached to the Comanche point of view, a feeling reinforced when the 4th cavalry attacked the camp he lived in. As result of Comanche reverses, they were forced to send Clinton Smith back to his family. His brother was captured by Mexican bandits, who shortly returned him for a reward. They became cowboys and managed to re-adapt themselves to white society.

The Boy Captives tells about Clinton smith’s coming of age at a critical time in Texas history. It is a remarkable recounting of both sides of the bloody war that ended the Comanches’ way of life, as such if you are interested in how Texas came to be it is essential reading.

-Dave Hardy

ADVENTUROUS LIVES

I’m out of Tarzan material for the moment, so I’d like to build on my earlier review of The White Headhunter. James Renton crossed the boundary from the rough, but relatively domesticated world of Western civilization to life as a tribal warrior in the Solomon Islands. Quite a few other people made the same trip. Here in Texas it was often children who were captured and adopted by Indians such as the Apache or Comanche. Some of these captive/adoptees left memoirs. Hence my review of Nine Years Among the Indians.

The image of a ordinary young person from the prosaic domesticated world of frontier farms and whaling ships (ok, it seems pretty wild compared to OUR era, but no doubt seemed ordinary at the time) entering into the heroic, individualistic life of a tribal warrior demands attention. Arguably, that fascination with the idea of the primitive (as distinct from the reality of tribal life, let me be clear) informs quite a bit of adventure fiction and especially sword and sorcery. So why not explore the reality of that world? It's as fascinating as anything you'd read in Thrilling Jungle Tales.

FLASHSHOT

You can still sign up for Flashshot in time to get my forthcoming micro-fiction. "A Visit to the Caucasus, 1839" will be e-mailed on Monday the 18th. For details go to http://www.gwthomas.org/subscribe.htm.

-Dave Hardy

NINE YEARS AMONG THE INDIANS 1870-1879
By Herman Lehmann

Herman Lehmann was an ordinary German boy living on the Texas frontier in 1870. Then Apache raiders carried him and his brother Willie off. Willie escaped, but Herman did not get away from his captors. When he returned, Herman was no longer a captive of the Indians, he was a captive of the whites.

Lehmann (and probably his editor J. Marvin Hunter) had a gift for narrative. Lehman recalls his capture in vivid detail. Fear of the strange Apaches, the pain of being tied to a horse and driven across miles of open prairie, and the disgust at what Apaches ate on the trail are all rendered in intense detail. He describes how the Apaches killed a calf and ate the contents of its stomach with relish. They forced some on Lehman, who vomited.

But in this unorthodox coming of age story, the Apaches become Herman’s family and tribe. They are the people that raised him and that he came to love. The boy grows to be a warrior, inured to hardship, intense exertion, and warfare. Lehman even echoes the scene of eating the contents of a calf’s stomach, but this time he recalls it as a special feast!

This book is not for the faint of heart. There is no romanticizing of Indian life in Nine Years. Lehman recounts Indians raids in horrific detail, less as cattle lifting trips than as murder excursions. But he never backs down from his commitment to the Indian point of view. Lehman’s apology is simple and to the point: the Apaches and Comanches were fighting for their land and survival. He tells readers enough of the horrors that occurred when the U.S. Army raided an Apache camp to show what defeat meant for them.

Lehman was eventually forced to flee the Apache due to a feud. He was adopted by the Comanche and became a close friend of Quanah Parker (himself of white captive descent). After the defeat of the Comanche Lehman returned “home” and embittered warrior, a patriot of a lost nation forced to live among his enemies. His transition to white life was not easy, but he achieved a celebrity status of sorts when he embraced his white Indian status and in turn Texans came to embrace him. Nine Years Among the Indians is a unique testament from a critical time of the Texas frontier and deserves to be embraced by new generations of Texans.

-Dave Hardy