My own opinion of this film is mixed, even conflicted. It is certainly a beautifully made him, but one that has some very ugly flaws. We will see both in the excerpts that follow. However, regardless of its flaws, The Searchers is an important film. In this film, Ford delved very deeply into the darkest part of human nature. Remarkably, the actor he chose for this exploration is none other than John Wayne. Perhaps we should not be so surprised by this. Wayne was, after all, quite versatile in some respects. In 1939, he played the teenaged Ringo Kid while a mere ten years later in 1949 he played the old cavalry officer, Nelson Brittles, preparing for retirement in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon. Again in 1962, he would play the “young” Tom Doniphon and less than a decade later he would win his only Academy Award for playing an aging, drunken Marshall Rooster Cogburn in True Grit (1969). If age presented no challenge to Wayne, then neither did playing morally complex characters such as Thomas Dunson, who would kill a man for land but see that he had a proper burial after, or Tom Doniphon, who would commit murder to protect the man who stole the girl he loved. His character in The Searchers, Ethan Edwards, has been called the most complex character Ford and Wayne ever created together. He is certainly the darkest. We will meet him now in the opening scene of the film.

At first, the Rangers all go looking for the missing girls, but after a brief battle with the Comanche, the Captain of the Rangers tells Ethan that he will have to continue the search alone because he has to take the wounded back to civilization. However, both Martin and Lucy’s boyfriend, Brad, insist on going with Ethan, and the three of them continue to search for the missing girls. You now know why the film is called “The Searchers”.

What Happened to Prisoners of the Indians: Rape, Torture, Killing and Adoption

We have to remember that when we say “the Indians”, we are talking about hundreds of different tribes and sub-tribes each with their own languages, cultures, and living situations. How prisoners were treated depended on a number of factors, the most important of which was which tribe they had been captured by. The age and sex of the captive was also very important. Adult prisoners were far more likely to be tortured and killed than children. Adult males or older male children were also more likely to be tortured and killed than females. However, children of either sex under the age of twelve were very often “adopted”. This was a custom that was totally confusing to white settlers. Indians sometimes raided white settlements in order to capture children to adopt. Whites never did this. The Indians had no concept of “race”. The primary distinction among the Indians was between “my tribe” and “not my tribe” (although certain tribes would be considered friendly while others would be considered enemies). For whites the primary distinction was racial. If you were not “white” you were the racial “other”, which meant your life did not have the same value as a white life. This was how whites justified enslaving Black Africans and committing genocide against the Indians. It was also why no non-white person was ever fully accepted into white society. Whites simply did not accept people of other races. On the other hand, the Indians of one tribe might consider their enemies in another tribe to be “worthy” enemies. Warfare between the tribes frequently led to dangerous losses of population. This was why the custom of adoption was so common. If one tribe raided another and lost three warriors in the fight, but captured ten children from the other tribe, they would have gained a total of seven new future members of the tribe. In other words, for whites, an Indian was always “the other” because of his race, but for the Indians, it was possible for someone of any race to become a member of their tribe if they had been adopted.

Children under twelve were usually adopted, but older children are not adopted nearly as often. This is because children under the age of twelve can usually learn a new language with complete fluency while older children cannot. This is because of changes that occur in the human brain at about the age of twelve, (btw, this was what I studied when I was doing my graduate work in linguistics long, long before I became a film historian). In other words, young children simply adapted better to adoption by learning the language of their new tribe. However, in some cases, older girls and even adult women were also accepted as members of the tribe. More frequently older girls and women were treated as slaves rather than accepted as full members of the tribe. However, there are quite a number of cases in recorded history where white women captured as young adults were not badly treated and even ended up married to Indian warriors or even chiefs. A great deal depended on how well someone seemed to adjust to the tribe. One captured white woman, Cynthia Anne Parker, even became the mother of the last great Chief of the Comanche, Quanah Parker. There are no cases of adult male captives being adopted into a tribe that I am aware of, but there are cases of adult white males voluntarily joining a tribe (this was in fact was the subject of the Academy Award-winning 1992 film Dances With Wolves).

But The Searchers does not just hint at the threat of what might happen, the worst does happen and it is too much for Brad to endure and he rides off in a rage to try to take revenge on the Indians who did this to Lucy. Brad’s rage leads him to a suicidal act. Ethan is just as enraged, but he intends to live to take his revenge. On the other hand, Martin is still focused entirely on rescuing the little girl Debbie.

In the next scene, Martin narrates in a letter to Brad’s sister (who he is in love with) something that he says he cannot quite figure out. Let’s see if you do.

There is great similarity in the importance of rice to the Japanese and the importance of buffalo to the Indians of the American West. Hunter-gatherers everywhere maintain a very close relationship to nature and view nature itself as sacred. Of all the societies in the world I have studied or experienced, the agricultural society that comes closest to that of the American Indians’ cultures is Japan’s. Shinto and Native American spiritual traditions have many similarities. But, the Indians were not farmers, they were hunters and by far the most important animal they hunted was the buffalo. Rice was terribly important in Japan, but it was possible for the Japanese to survive if their rice crops failed. Also, remember that many poor farmers were forced to give all their rice to their lord and survived on other foodstuffs. In contrast to this, without the buffalo, the Indians literally starved to death. Ethan’s behavior confuses Martin because Martin just wants to rescue Debbie. Ethan, on the other hand, is out for revenge against the Indians…all Indians, not just the ones who took Debbie and Lucy. But Ethan is only an example of the whites did to the buffalo. Now read about how the whites committed ecological genocide against the Indians

The Destruction of the Buffalo Herds

It is estimated that before the whites came to North America there were as many as 60,000,000 buffalo roaming the western plains in herds so vast they covered the land of entire states. The Indians never hunted more animals than they could use for food and they also used every part of the buffalo: the hide for clothing and teepees and the bones and horns for tools as well as the meat for food. The whites began hunting buffalo in great numbers after the Civil War. At first, they used the meat and hides much as the Indians had done, but quickly buffalo hunting became a sport where they simply killed the animals and left them to rot.

But it soon became clear to the whites that without the buffalo, the Indians would starve. Just as whites had placed a bounty on the scalps of Indians, they also paid a “bounty” for buffalo hides: $3.00 for cowhides, $2.50 for bull hides, $1.50 for yearlings, and $.75 for calves. In one year, 1870, it is estimated white hunters killed 2,000,000 animals and thereafter the massacres increased every year

The most famous of the buffalo hunters was “Buffalo Bill” who could kill one hundred buffalo in a single day. Cody would become extremely rich by creating a “Wild West Show” that toured the world. In the show, there would be a mock battle with the Indians in which Cody heroically saved a white woman from the Indians. In real history, however, no one saved the Indians from the mass starvation Cody and the buffalo hunters brought to tens of thousands of Indians.

By the year 1980, there were only 300 (three hundred) wild buffalo left alive in the American West. They were on the edge of total extinction. The massacre of the American buffalo may possibly be the single greatest ecological crime ever committed in human history. Moreover, the United Nations has just recently (in the year 2018) adopted Resolution 2417, which “strongly condemns starving of civilians” in time of war or conflict. The buffalo massacres were exactly this, a means of starving the civilian population of Indians in what was clearly an attempt at genocide.

In all the films of John Ford I have ever taught or studied, I believe this scene is the most offensive he ever filmed. It is both racist and sexist at the same time. Ford could not have shown Martin kicking a white woman like this because the censors would never have tolerated it. But because she is “only” an Indian woman being treated this way, they allowed the scene to be included in the movie.

It is largely because of this scene that I refuse to call The Searchers one of Ford’s great films. I feel the scene diminishes the film and reveals the very worst side of John Ford. However, I said Ford was a man of contradictions, and nowhere is that more clear than in the contrast between the scene of the Indian woman being kicked and the next scene. Ethan and Martin have finally found the band of Comanche who are holding Debbie prisoner. They have been looking for this girl for five years and then she suddenly just appears!

When John Ford made Stagecoach and Drums Along The Mohawk he was forty-five years old. He had already won an Oscar for best director and he would go on to win three more. He would continue to make films for another twenty-seven years. But as I have already said, Ford would gradually change over time. When Ford turned seventy, he seemed to look back on his long career and regret the way he had depicted the Indians in his films. More than anyone else, John Ford was responsible for the image of the Indian Hollywood had created.  In 1964, he no longer wanted to “print the legend” he wanted to tell the truth! He would attempt to do just that in his last Western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964). The film is a serious attempt to tell the truth about what happened to the tribe that defeated Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the Cheyenne.

Cheyenne Autumn was John Ford’s final Western and was a project he took very seriously. It was both his longest and most expensive film. Ford may have thought of it as the capstone of his career and may even have hoped it would be seen as his greatest work. One critic called it “Ford’s attempt at personal redemption” for all the films he made in which the Indians were stereotyped and vilified. Whatever else it is, it is a sincere effort. However, John Ford, possibly Hollywood’s greatest director, failed badly in his last Western. The film was both a commercial failure (it didn’t make a profit) and a critical one, (it received almost universally poor reviews). Like Ransom Stoddard, Ford finally tried to tell the truth, but no one wanted to hear it. America in 1964 was unwilling to hear the truth about the Indians, even if it was John Ford telling it to them.

It was not until Arthur Penn, (the director of The Left-handed Gun) made his film Little Big Man in 1970 that American audiences were willing to watch a film about what they had really done to the Indians. If you have enjoyed the films I have shown you in this class and would like my recommendation for a film I know you will enjoy and learn from, please watch this film. It is a very different kind of Western than any we have seen in this class. Sadly, we do not have time to discuss it because we have reached the end of our time together.

Let me finish by saying it has been my pleasure to be your teacher this year and I hope you have enjoyed this class, learned some English, learned something about films, and learned something about American culture (the good along with the bad). Thank you all for your attention and hard work. Please stay safe and be well.