The Searchers (56 page)

Nicholson was a lawyer who lived in Palestine, eleven miles north of Elkhart, one of the triangle of East Texas towns where the Parkers settled and still resided. He could trace his roots back seven generations to Daniel Parker via Daniel's son Dickinson, who fought with Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto; to “Virginia John” Parker, a Confederate soldier who surrendered at Appomattox and walked all the way home to Texas; to Ben J. Parker, the sheriff and part-time farmer who had met with Alan LeMay in 1952, and to Joe Bailey Parker, who was president of the Elkhart State Bank, and to Jo Nell Parker, Scott's mother, who was also in attendance.

The Comanche descendants of Quanah Parker at a pow-wow during their annual family reunion in Cache, Oklahoma, June 2008.

The Texan descendants of Cynthia Ann Parker at their annual family reunion in Ft. Parker State Park near Groesbeck, Texas, in July 2008.

“We're proud to have our Comanche cousins and we look forward every year to our Comanche cousins and to many years of reunions,” Scott Nicholson told the crowd.

Next up was Sarah McReynolds in her Cynthia Ann Parker outfit of buckskins, fringe, moccasins, and long earrings. “I'll never forget May 19, 1836; the gates were open …,” she began, channeling Cynthia Ann as she retold the story of the original abduction and all that followed. It was a tale she had recited many times at gatherings over the years.

“It's horrible to be kidnapped; no one comes for you. I kept looking and looking but no one ever came …

“By the time I'm twelve years old white traders came and I made my mind up that day: I would not leave. By the time I was seventeen I was courted by a man named Peta Nocona … The man loved me. He never took another wife.

“They sent Sul Ross out to hunt down my husband and kill him. Quanah was twelve, Pecos nine. They were with their father. The same scenario happens again [as in 1836]. They took me away from my family.

“I sealed my fate that day when I said, ‘I'm Cynthia Ann! I'm Cynthia Ann!' “

Sarah was close to tears as she finished. But she ended on a note of romantic optimism. “This is a tragic story,” she concluded, “but it's a wonderful love story in many ways.”

Paul Carlson told it very differently. A retired professor of history at Texas Tech in Lubbock, Carlson was coauthor of a scrupulously researched, myth-busting account of the Pease River massacre in December 1860, and he sought to deflate a few more myths in his keynote address. He told the audience that Cynthia Ann was only one of Peta Nocona's several wives—and “a chore wife, not a favored wife.” That was why she was at the Pease River encampment, working the dreary winter buffalo meat detail, up to her elbows in greasy entrails, body parts, and blood.

This was not the version that most of the Comanche Parkers believe in, but no one seemed angry or tried to challenge Carlson's account. The legend of Cynthia Ann was so entrenched in their minds that no one could harm it. It had sustained them for generations, honored their name, and made them special through good times and bad. “We're not just Native Americans, we're a cross section of America because of Cynthia Ann Parker,” Ron Parker had told me when I first met him in 2008. “I'm a Parker because my great-grandfather loved his mother. He never forgot her after they took her away, and he took his mother's name.”

Baldwin Parker Jr., age ninety-three, at the family reunion in Quanah, Texas, marking the hundredth anniversary of his grandfather's death.

Paul Carlson continued. Sul Ross and his Texas Rangers didn't capture her at the Pease River battle, he insisted; U.S. Cavalry troopers did, but Ross took all the credit. The battle itself was a massacre that Ross and his supporters managed to repackage as a glorious military triumph. Carlson said he and his coauthor, Tom Crum, studied nineteen separate accounts from nine alleged participants, all of them partial and contradictory. Ross himself gave six different versions over the years, he added. Several of the most vivid accounts came from men who were not even at the site when the fight occurred. “But not having participated did not prevent them from reporting what they did not see,” said an indignant Paul Carlson.

The argument could never end because it was not about specific facts so much as their larger meaning. Were the Comanches noble warriors or murderers and rapists? Were the bloody clashes between them and the Texans battles or massacres? Was Cynthia Ann Parker the ultimate Texas heroine or the ultimate victim? Were Comanches the victims or the perpetrators of their own demise? Was the Savage War of Peace and the Conquest of the American Frontier justified or immoral? Whose myth is real?

“
We are shape shifters
in the national consciousness, unwanted reminders of disagreeable events,” writes Paul Chaat Smith, a Comanche who is associate curator of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. “Indians have to be explained and accounted for, and somehow fit into the creation myth of the most powerful, benevolent nation ever; the last best hope of man on earth … We're trapped in history. No escape.”

THE NEXT MORNING, Don and Ron Parker and their cousin Bruce traveled out to the Pease River with a small entourage consisting of Lucia St. Clair Robson, author of a romantic historical novel called
Ride the Wind
about Cynthia Ann; Tom Crum, the retired Texas judge who co-wrote the Pease River massacre book with Paul Carlson; and Tom's son Carl, a documentary filmmaker based in Fort Worth.

The caravan bounced down narrow dirt lanes, past the site of a Texas state marker located in the wrong place and inscribed with the wrong date for the battle, past salt cedar trees, bear grass, sagebrush, dove weed, prickly pear cactus, sand drop seed, and windmill grass, all of it going brown and brittle from the June heat invasion. Virtually none of this vegetation existed 150 years ago when waves of buffalo regularly swept
through the area like Noah's flood, stomping or devouring every growing thing in their path. “It would have been bare and flat as a billiard table,” said Tom Crum, who led the way. “You could see everything.”

The drought had sucked dry most of the wide bed of the Pease River, and Mule Creek was just a memory. Crum stood in the middle where a freshwater stream once flowed and told the story one more time: how Ross and Spangler in the early morning rain had observed the nine grass huts of the Comanche encampment from a ridge two hundred yards away; how Ross led his tired men forward while Spangler and his troopers flanked the camp from behind; how the Comanche women and children panicked and ran from the surprise attack; how Ross and his men ran down and shot the old warrior on horseback; how Cynthia Ann cried out “
Americano! Americano!
” as the trooper pointed his gun in her face.

Don Parker lit a small clump of sage and sent the smoke in four directions. Then he reached into the cedar case he carried like a doctor's kit for rituals and solemn occasions and pulled out eagle feathers and a gourd. He gently shook the rattle as he sang the “Bull Eagle Song,” about an eagle who flew so high it went into orbit around the earth. “This is holy ground to me,” said Don when he had finished.

Then he put the items back in the case and snapped it shut. The participants climbed into their pickup trucks and cars and roared away. The Quanah Parker Family Reunion was over for another year.

Some book projects sneak up on you. When I first thought of writing about
The Searchers
, I had in mind a modest coffee table book for the film's fiftieth anniversary in 2006. That'll be the day. Six years, eleven states, and maybe 20,000 miles later, the result is far more ambitious, sweeping, and unwieldy, and boasts, as they used to say in Hollywood, a cast of hundreds, if not thousands. In researching this story, I covered vast amounts of ground ranging from the former Indian agencies of southwest Oklahoma to the high limestone plains of North Texas, to the stunning vistas of Monument Valley to the studios, archives and other man-made landmarks of Hollywood. Not to mention some wonderful side trips to Bloomington, Indiana, where the John Ford Papers reside; Provo, Utah, where James D'Arc has built an extraordinary archival film collection; Boston University, keeper of the Frank S. Nugent papers; Winterset, Iowa, birthplace of Marion Morrison, and Fallbrook, California, home of Dan LeMay, Alan's oldest son and keeper of his father's literary legacy.

The journey began at Stanford University, where I worked as a visiting professor of journalism between 2006 and 2010, with two essential courses. Richard White's “A History of No Place: The Creation of the North American West” lecture class was a powerful and lyrical introduction to the legends and reality of the settling of the West. Scott Bukatman's “Being John Wayne” seminar gave me the opportunity to study the actor and icon with an inspired teacher and a group of bright, engaging film students. Every paragraph about John Wayne in this book was informed by our discussions in this class and by Scott's deep insights and infectious enthusiasm.

I owe many more debts of gratitude. The proud members of Quanah Parker's extended family treated me with extraordinary warmth and hospitality over multiple trips to Cache, Oklahoma, and three annual family reunions, starting in 2008. My deepest thanks to Ron and Don Parker, Totsiyah Parker, Ardis Parker Leming and her husband Glen,
Baldwin and Marguerite Parker, Rebecca Parker, and Jacquetta J. McClung; plus their adopted kinfolk, including Anna Tahmahkera, Russell Neese, Chuck Waltrip, and Paul and Linda Davis; and W. Scott Nicholson and Jo Nell Parker, on the Texan side of the family. Thanks, too, to Donna Lindsay, my canny and well-informed guide to Cache, and to the Woesner clan: Wayne Gipson, Ginger Gipson-Seibold, and their wonderful mother, the late Kathy Treadwell.

Many fine experts in Texas and Comanche history helped guide me as well: Paul H. Carlson of Texas Tech in Lubbock, Tom Crum of Granbury, Texas, H. R. Fehrenbach of San Antonio, Margaret Hacker of the National Archives in Fort Worth, Pekka Hämäläinen of the University of California at Santa Barbara, Sarah McReynolds of Old Fort Parker, Joaquín Rivaya-Martínez of Texas State University in San Marcos, Garvin Tate of Rockwall, Texas, and David D. Turner of Copper Breaks State Park. A special thanks to many librarians and archivists along the way, including Deborah A. Baroff, of the Museum of the Great Plains in Lawton; Scarlett Daughery at the Hardeman County Historical Museum in Quanah, Texas; Towana Spivey of the Fort Sill Museum and Archive, who is a national treasure of Comanche history and lore and who loaned me Jo Ruffin, a volunteer worker, for a long day in the archive, and Warren Stricker, director of research at the Panhandle Plains Museum. Thanks, too, to Parker family geneaologist Doris Cozart, who ran her own small library out of a former coffee shop in Chillicothe, Texas; Dorothy Poole at the Log Cabin Village in Fort Worth; Joel Lowry, DDS, who showed my wife and me around the site of the Pease River battle located on his property; Bob Montrose and Herbert Riley, who helped us find Cynthia Ann's original gravesite and recounted their role as grade school boys in helping clean up and restore the cemetery for the Texas Centennial in 1936; and novelist Lucia St. Clair Robson for her hard-won insights and high spirits.