In 1836 in East Texas, Cynthia Ann Parker, a nine-year-old girl, was kidnapped by Comanches. She was raised by the tribe and eventually became the wife of a warrior. Twenty-four years after her capture, she was reclaimed by the U.S. cavalry and Texas Rangers and restored to her white family, to die in misery and obscurity. But her son would become one of the last great Comanche warriors, and later an apostle of reconciliation between white people and Native Americans.
Cynthia Ann's story has been told and re-told, by Comanches and Texans, altered and recreated by over generations to become a foundational American myth. The legend has given rise to operas and one-act plays, and in the 1950s to a compelling Western novel by Alan LeMay, which would be adapted into one of Hollywood's most legendary films, The Searchers, "The Biggest, Roughest, Toughest... and Most Beautiful Picture Ever Made!" directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne.
The dominant story that has emerged is of the inevitable triumph, through blood, sweat, and tears, of white civilization-How the West Was Won-underpinned by anxiety about the seduction and sullying of white women by "savages." But it is also a story of a woman - and later, her son - searching for identity and community between two warring worlds. John Ford captured something of that dichotomy, and Glenn Frankel, beginning on set with the Hollywood legend, then returning to the origin of the story, creates a rich and nuanced anatomy of a timeless film and a quintessentially American myth.
