The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend GlennFrankel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Abstract

The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend Glenn Frankel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013.The collaborations of John Ford and John Wayne, beginning with 1939's Stagecoach, have come to define the Western genre for many. This relationship would culminate in the 1956 masterpiece, The Searchers. Often cited as the emergence of the revisionist Western, The Searchers continues to receive critical attention and accolades: it has been ranked the seventh-greatest film of all time by the 2012 Sight and Sound poll and the best Western and twelfth-best film of all time by the American Film Institute. In Glenn Frankel's most recent book, he traces the origin of the acclaimed film to the myths surrounding the 1836 abduction of Cynthia Ann Parker by a band of Comanche.The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend is organized around the four key elements of the myth's development-Cynthia Ann Parker, her mixed-blood son Quanah Parker who would become the last great Comanche chief, the novelist Alan LeMay who penned The Searchers in 1954, and John Ford's production of the film in 1956. While the legend exists in various manifestations, the primary tenets are Parker's abduction in 1836, James Parker's obsessive search, Cynthia Ann Parker's marriage to a Comanche chief, her eventual rescue at the Pease River Massacre in 1860, and her unwillingness to reintegrate herself or her daughter, Prairie Flower, back into white society. In the absence of a personal narrative written by either Cynthia Ann or Quanah Parker, Frankel draws upon primary sources ranging from military reports and family histories to Comanche oral tradition in creating a working history of the Cynthia Ann Parker legend. Throughout the sections devoted to Cynthia Ann and Quanah, Frankel achieves a lyric narration that continues to instill the mythic and legendary into his construction of their tale.Shifting focus to Parker's oldest child, Frankel explicates the means through which Quanah attained cultural prominence as the heir to and essential element of his mother's legend. Frankel further explains Quanah Parker's rise to the position of chief and his often controversial tribal politics that emphasized integration and coexistence with white America.The sections devoted to LeMay's novel and Ford's film draw on biographic information and first hand accounts of each artist's process. Discussing LeMay's craft, Frankel emphasizes the breadth and depth of his research into captivity narratives, which evinces the connection between The Searchers and Cynthia Ann Parker. …