Arizona's Dreaming and Other Stories
Gaspar Mairal
To my friends Carla and Rich Stoffle
There is a place in Arizona, a stone's throw from the border, called Montezuma Pass. In fact, it is a mountain pass in the Huachuca Mountains, at more than 2000 metres altitude, and that is why it offers unique panoramic views. Looking towards the Mexican southwest, it stands out Sierra Madre, place of refuge for Geronimo and his Apaches more than a hundred years ago and today a hideout very appreciated by narcs. To the southeast is the mountain of San José, a large cone that denotes its volcanic origin, which rises just a few kilometers from the border. The space in the middle of these great mountain ranges is occupied by the Sonora Desert.
The Sonora Desert was once the northern border of the Spanish Empire in America or the northern border of New Spain. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado's expedition entered this area in 1540, but it was not until the 17th century that Father Kino penetrated into what is now the state of Arizona, founding "presidios" and missions such as Tubac or San Xavier de Bac in 1699. In 1775 Hugo O'Conor founded the Tucson Presidio, which is the origin of this great city in the south of the state of Arizona. Already at that time the rebellions of the Pueblo and Yuma Indians and the continuous incursions of the Apache, gave this inhospitable territory the character of a dangerous boundary space in a nature dominated by the desert.
Montezuma Pass, the place from which I have begun this story, is a place of great majesty and beauty, but it also has its own historical significance because if Vázquez de Coronado passed through here in 1540, Melchor Díaz left from here, when he separated from this group that was going toward the north and he went toward the west to the encounter of the ships of supply of Pedro de Alarcón that had been waiting for him in the Gulf of California. To get there he had to cross the desert of Sonora from side to side opening a route that is still known today as "the Devil's Road". These portentous adventures are told, in English and Spanish, in panels installed in the viewpoints of Montezuma Pass. After reading it, it is advisable to look closely at the vast desert plain that extends to our feet to detect a black line, perfect in its trace, that crosses this immensity. It is the wall that the US authorities have erected to prevent or hinder the illegal transit of immigrants, drugs and weapons across the border. Also striking is a vehicle parked in the small parking lot next to the gazebo, with the windows covered and huge antennas protruding from it. Next to this vehicle there is another with the identification of the "Border Patrol", police force also known as "la migra". Inside the vehicle an agent controls the cameras and sensors that sweep continuously the border between Mexico and the US. When comparing the historical significance of the place, described in information panels by the authorities of the Coronado National Monument, with the use made of it today by the federal immigration authorities, a paradox appears on which it is useful to reflect. I have spent five months in Arizona, moved along the border and I read as much as I could, looking for clues that would be useful in deciphering the undecipherable: an explosive mixture of desert immensity, wild nature, rampant violence and historical depth. Little to do with that topic, so European, that makes the United States a young country with no history. This is not at least the case in Arizona. The open, gigantic and also desolate space with which the first Spanish conquerors who were looking for the seven cities of Cíbola or the "gran dorado" of the north met, has now been delimited, fenced, controlled and monitored to interrupt the transit of new "conquerors" who also seek a "gran dorado" to get out of poverty. A fundamental fact to consider is that the conquerors of four hundred years ago and the illegals of today, share the same language, Spanish. In Arizona, any contrast between the past and the present is ultimately paradoxical.
I arrived in Tucson in early February 2010, but before that I had read some of Cormac McCarthy's border novels and especially Meridian of Blood, a story that is largely set in this same desert. I have also read 2666, the great novel by Roberto Bolaño, whose epicenter is also in this long border that crosses the desert of Sonora and goes to the Rio Grande. The borders that have delimited or delimit empires, are propitious scenarios for war and the illegal traffic of objects or human beings, but also for the legends that make of them spaces for the epic or the adventure and at the end and in the hands of great writers, like McCarthy or Bolaño, they are mythical places where evil nests. The Pyrenees, which were for centuries the border between two empires, the Balkans territory in wh East and West encountered and the Caribbean where the great colonial empires collided, are good examples for which Pío Baroja, Ismail Kadaré or Alejo Carpentier have also produced great literature.
I have traveled along the border chasing the trail of Geronimo in the Chiricahua mountains, imagining the expedition of Juan Bautista de Anza advancing slowly and desperately through the desert in search of a well or trying to see for myself the violent landscapes of McCarthy in a lost corner of this vastness that is the desert of Sonora. Finally a territory like this can only be explained in its capacity to integrate the strength of an overflowing nature, a history inhabited by mythical heroes such as Cabeza de Vaca, Coronado, Anza, Padre Kino, Cochise, Geronimo or Wyatt Erp, the cinematographic images created by John Ford and other great authors of the western, the stark reality of those who cross the border illegally to perish in the desert, the daily murders committed by the drug cartels and in the end the violent contrast between the US and Mexico. All this combines to create a world that stands out from both reality and fantasy and that takes me back to the reading of Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo's masterful account.
A good part of the works of Cormac McCarthy and especially his frontier trilogy, have much more to do with the Latin American narrative than with that of his American contemporaries (Auster, Roth, Carver, Pynchon, etc.) We should go to Rulfo, García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier or Vargas Llosa to find comparable narratives; stories that spring from a multidimensional reality in which it is very difficult or simply impossible to draw lines of separation between reality and dream, madness and sanity, good and evil and they can only be understood in a space be it the desert, the jungle, the moor or the high mountain, which transcends its scenic condition to finally become protagonist. It is true that in the case of McCarthy beats an American influence that was also present in much of what was then called the "boom" of the Latin American narrative, that of William Faulkner. Touring the south of Arizona I have perceived a sense comparable to what my reading of McCarthy has been suggesting to me: the final protagonism of the landscape and the territory that are actually those that are leading very diverse individuales towards a final destination. Now, as in many of the books written by the authors I have quoted, space is still inhabited by the spectra of those who passed through it before.
At the foot of the Chiricahua Mountains, where in 1886 Geronimo, at the head of a small group of rebel Apaches who were already the last to resist the push of the US cavalry, finally surrendered, A monolith and a plaque are erected that shows how in this way the United States definitively concluded the so-called "Indian wars". After reading and photographing this plaque placed at the edge of the road and driving through forest tracks I went into the Chiricahua mountains. At the top the snow covered the slopes and piled to the edge of the track. Further up in Apache Pass I stopped and I stared at the scenery for a while. In this same place Cochise had his first armed encounter with American soldiers and then began the last great combat, which was to last several years, of the Chiricahua Apaches, the most indomitable Indians of all who faced the USA. Geronimo's final destination was prison in Florida and that of the Chiricaua Apaches, not to return to their mountains and have to inhabit the San Carlos reserve, within the state of Arizona, but further north. I was also there to see how the Chiricahua live today and the first thing that appeared to me was the great casino, which they themselves run and which stands on the edge of the reserve next to their own airfield. This was my first visit to an Indian reservation - then I met that of the Pápagos or Tohono O' dham, Navaho, Hopi and Apaches of the White Mountains - and in almost every case I have made a rather sad impression about the fate of the first inhabitants who had this great territory. It is true that today in almost all these reserves are exhibited in small museums or shops of traditional items, a version of identity in the form of traditional objects along with those stories that show pride in their ethnic status. This is the case of the Hopi, whom I discovered when I was a student of Anthropology and thanks to the work of Benjamin Whorf, the great American ethno-linguist, who had studied their language. This memory and the fascination I felt for this language, as Whorf described it from its categories of representation of space and time, prompted me to approach there. The Hopi reserve is located in the territory of the "mesas" which is what the plateaus are called here. Unlike the Apaches, Comanche or Navaho who came to this territory from the north around the 13th century, the Hopi are considered descendants of the so-called "prehistoric" Indians, also called Anasazi and are supposed to have been displaced by these new, much more warlike groups. They inhabit a desert territory and have only a small reserve. The visit was very quick and the truth is that there was hardly anything that incited to stay. The small towns that marked the road gave an impression of great poverty compared to some establishments where artisan products were sold. I must confess that I stopped at one of these tourist shops, bought a "kachina" doll, nothing cheap by the way and left. When you visit places like this, the dream of Arizona fades away, and instead you see a kind of ethnic prison that locks in poverty the few Hopi Indians who inhabit this reserve. This has been the general impression I have drawn from the brief visits I was able to make to some of the Indian reservations of the state of Arizona.
Without a doubt, the Navaho are an exception because the territory of their reserve is very extensive and includes places as spectacular as Monument Valley. The Navaho nation has a great political-administrative autonomy to the point that belonging to the state of Arizona maintain for its reserve a different time zone, on the other hand, they come to constitute the largest tribal contingent of Indian-American population of the USA.
I have always considered and know that I am not by far the only one,John Ford's The Searchers (1956) as the best "western" ever filmed and one of the masterpieces of cinema, too. This film, shot entirely in Monument Valley, would be unimaginable elsewhere. It is worth starting with the final scene, when its protagonist, a character played by John Wayne, moves away from home and the door frames his figure against the landscape, the immense red of Monument Valley, which is guessed in the background. We follow this character, the real protagonist of the film, and we see how he moves away into the desert immensity of the valley. This brief sequence is an extraordinary visual metaphor to define an epic hero, who appears constantly in Ford's films and who was portrayed so many times by John Wayne himself. Lonely individual who always carries some guilt and who goes looking for a redemption that almost never finds. Wounded by something or someone in a past that is sensed but that is never explicit, he rides as a soldier or cowboy and almost always comes across a love more or less impossible. He is a character that does not shy away from danger and a skeptic of life who always succumbs to love or friendship. This characterization has, however, an exceptional dimension that is typical of the best "western" and that meets with the maximum intensity in the cinema of John Ford, it is the location of a character like this in an immense landscape. The Searchers is the great masterpiece of the "western" because, among other things, it places this character in a place as majestic as Monument Valley.
The invention of landscape in cinematography is related to the incorporation into a genre like the western of two technical advances: color photography and cinemascope. In my opinion this substantial change could be comparable to the one achieved with his painting Joachim Patinir when at the beginning of the sixteenth century he abandoned the classic format of the triptych and the representation of large scenes, for using a rectangular format to reduce the size of the scenes and expand the landscape background. Thus, the landscape was born in painting. Something similar happened with the great westerns made especially in the 1950s and 1960s by directors such as Henry Hathaway, Anthony Mann, Howard Hawks, Bud Boetticher and especially John Ford, among others. The panoramic view of The Searchers allows to conceive new images in which the human figure is dwarfed so that the landscape grows in front of the hero and can dominate him. It was these new images that came to create an epic language capable of narrating the foundational myth of the western. A lonely hero, fiercely individualistic, always living on the edge, in constant movement in a space that does not allow itself to be dominated and that expresses itself both with a majestic beauty and with a cruel violence. [1]
The reddish color of this desert land dominates the images that John Ford was able to create and this effect, which an excellent photograph is capable of causing, remains in the retina of any spectator who has been impacted by this great film. It was these images, a vast red plain from which they stand out, like castles and cathedrals, gigantic stone moles, that took me to Monument Valley in the middle of the Navaho reserve and to the north of the state of Arizona. At the entrance to Monument Valley there is a reception building and a hotel where the actors and the team whofilmed The Searchers stayed at the time. Large terraces overlook the arid and extensive valley that is dominated from there. John Wayne sat on this balcony at sunset, after filming, and spent some time contemplating the panorama. I did the same, I sat down, stretched my legs and let the sun go down little by little hiding behind one of these great plateaus.
It might seem that The Searchers, being a masterpiece of cinema ends in the sublime landscapes of Monument Valley, capable of cementing a myth around the figure of its protagonist. In this way the story that is told to us would be like a pretext and the truly important thing would be the visual construction of the myth. This is certainly already a plausible interpretation and one that I myself have welcomed for a long time. However, even though the story told us in the film is inseparable from the visual effect it produces, there is still another story among the many that the western tradition offers us. In this case it would be the persecution of a band of Indians who have raided a farm killing all the men and taking the women. But my devotion to The Searchers led me not only to Monument Valley but also to the reading ofGlenn Frankel's The Searchers and this book showed me that behind The Searchers [2] there were also great stories that are part of history of the the American West.
John Ford's film was shot in Arizona, but the events he tells take place in Texas. Monument Valley is located within the large Navaho reserve, but the Indians who star in this story are Comanches. In any case, the story told here fits perfectly into the space in which it unfolds, for we have no doubt that if the events take place in Texas and the Indians are Comanches, they may well have happened in the northeastern corner of the state of Arizona, where the extremes of Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico coincide and the Indians were Navahos or Apaches.
After several years Ethan or John Wayne returns to his home, which is now his brother's farm, wearing the uniform of a Confederate army officer. Only with these details can we immediately understand that Ethan is a loser who returns home after the defeat. This is the main profile that many of the characters[3] who star in John Ford's films, mostly played by John Wayne, usually present and they always drag behind them a past that more than told is insinuated or suggested. From a tragic event such as the assault on the farm carried out by a party of Comanche Indians, in Ethan's absence, the story advances showing us the immediate persecution that is being organized to rescue the two young women, that the Indians took after killing the rest of the family. The pursuers will eventually be only two, Ethan and a young man with some Cherokee blood in his veins. After years of fruitlessly following the trail of the Comanches they finally find one of Ethan's nieces - the other had been killed shortly after the persecution began-who has become the wife of Comanche chief. The conflict that Ethan is dragging on reaches its maximum expression when he meets his niece and understands that over the years she has become a real Comanche. He makes an attempt to kill her, but his young companion prevents him. This long pursuit will end with the assault on the Comanche camp and the release of this young woman whom Ethan himself finally returns to his home in a great final scene to which I referred earlier. Really and after this tireless search for the abducted girl what underlies is a crucial issue in the history of the American West, the"mestizaje". This is what Glenn Frankel's book reading made me see. If for me there was already a story in Monument Valley that fully justified a visit to this place, then I discovered that after this first story, the one that tells us the film of John Ford, there are many others. These are the other stories I want back here. An exceptional landscape like this or others that are not as monumental, such as the immense desert of Sonora, awaken in us the imagination and with it our ability to evoke stories already known or to search for others yet to be discovered. In the end the stories are linked and allow us to expand more and more the spectrum of our gaze that is what a landscape is after all.
The "Comanche Empire" is a fairly recent denomination and I have been able to know thanks to the reading of a book that bears precisely this title, The Comanche Empire[4] of Pekka Hamalainen. This title, so provocative to the image that one still has of the American Indians because it assigns them nothing more and nothing less than an empire, expresses with resounding the thesis of its author: that the Comanches were able to successfully develop and sustain a way of life of their own for several centuries and almost always against the Spanish empire first, the United States of Mexico later and finally the United States of America. Thanks to the domestication and use of the horse that had been introduced by the Spanish conquerors, the Comanches were able to develop this way of life that included hunting and gathering, plunder and trade, extended their domination by the states of New Mexico, Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma while raiding Mexico. They only succumbed after the extermination carried out, on the pretext of feeding the railroad workers under construction and which was to communicate the east and west of the United States, from their main source of supplies: the large herds of bisons grazing in the vast meadows. This new historiography is part of a mainstream that reconstructs the history of the Southwest of the USA to change the prevailing perspective about mainly the Comanches, Apaches and Navahos. There have also been some novelties in the literature written in Spanish and in this case to return the almost forgotten story about the Spanish presence in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas and to place in the place that corresponds to the Mexican period, from the independence of Spain to the Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty. In this case, I especially refer to Banderas lejanas[5] by Fernando Martínez Laínez and Carlos Canales, a book that was published in 2009 and had a great success and dissemination in Spain.
After the war between Mexico and the United States, Texas became independent and soon after joined the United States as a state. Large contingents of Anglo settlers arrived in Texas to farm and raise livestock. By 1833, the Parker family of pioneers were slowly advancing through the states of Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana. They came from Illinois and after crossing the Mississippi they followed the so-called southwestern route. They were part of one of those caravans whose images have so popularized the western. Rows of wagons pulled by oxen or mules across immense meadows, men on horseback, women and children on foot. Their destination was still a mysterious place: Texas. The patriarch of this family was called Daniel Parker and was a farmer, politician and Baptist preacher, a very appropriate mixture, to which he would later add that of fighter against the Indians, in this world of pioneers. On November 12, 1833, the Parker caravan camped near San Agustin within Texas. In a manner quite similar to that of the Mormons when they fled from Illinois to the arid plains and mountains of Utah, these pioneers believed they had entered their "Promise Land" and were willing to take root in it, even though there were already human beings inhabiting it and in this case the Comanches. The creation of the United States and especially the colonization of the West could not be understood without the biblical accompaniment it had. Especially the Old Testament is an incomparable source of stories and one of them, which corresponds to the Exodus or account of the flight of the Israelites from Egypt led by Moses, has surely been the most used to create myths of foundation and redemption. Moses' leadership, being the mediator between God and the chosen people, is based on his ability to lead his people to the promised land, even if he never sets foot in it. This circumstance gives this mythical leadership the character of redemption that also characterizes the figure of Moses[6]. This mythical elaboration is part of the history of the United States and has inspired the construction of some of the great figures of its history, from John Smith, founder of the Mormons, to Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King. Like Moses, none of these characters could step on or live to see the promise of redemption they had made to their followers come true. No one expressed the nature of this promise like Martin Luther King when he shared with his thousands of followers gathered in Washington the redemptive vision he had had and formulated with his familiar phrase of "I have a dream". All of them and after having released a promise of redemption were killed. Thus, the sacrifice of the leader mythologizes the promise to turn it into the desired destiny of a collectivity: Mormons, slaves or African-Americans. One of the visible pillars of American culture is to consider a country in which these prophecies can be fulfilled and so Mormons prospered in the state of Utah and especially in Salt Lake City where they have today their "Vatican". The Parkers arrived in Texas within a huge stream of thousands and thousands of people who went west believing they were heading for the Promised Land. This is a great story that contains many others and among all of these the Parker of Illinois.
In 1824 the government of Mexico, which had recently gained its independence from Spain, opened the territory of Texas to foreign immigration. They offered 1.7 hectares at thirty dollars and this attracted a good number of American citizens willing to colonize this new territory. The aim of this measure was to create a buffer between the communities of ranchers and large Mexican landowners in the south of the territory and hostile Indians in the north. The consequences of this action in the future were then unimaginable. Conflicts between these settlers from the United States and the Mexican government were on the rise and reached a point where rupture and separation seemed inevitable. Daniel Parker himself took part in the Consultative Assembly that met on November 3, 1833 to approve the "Declaration of the People of Texas" and form a provisional government. From this declaration war was inevitable and the Mexican army under General Santana entered Texas to defeat the rebels. The defense of the Alamo fort in the city of San Antonio in 1836 is the best known episode of this war and ended with the death of its 189 defenders, including the famous Davyd Crockett. Hollywood has since produced a number of films to extol the heroism of the Alamo's defenders. Not long after, however, on April 21 of that same year, Sam Houston defeated General Santana's troops in San Jacinto and paved the way for Texas independence and its subsequent annexation to the United States. While all these events were happening, the Parker farm, unprotected by the men mobilized by the war, was attacked by the Indians on May 19 of that same year. The result of this action was the death of five people and the capture of five captives. Among these were two young girls, Rachel Plummer and Elizabeth Kellogg, two boys, James Pratt and John Parker and a nine-year-old girl, Cynthia Ann Parker. The latter was to be the real person who would inspire the character of the young captive of the Comanches in The Searchers. After this assault, the Parkers mobilized intensively in search of the Indians who had carried it out, but due to the situation of war with Mexico, James Parker took more than a month to form a pursuer group composed of fourteen men. Meanwhile, the party of Indians continued their journey for five days until reaching the "High Plains" and there the prisoners were divided. While a group of Kichais Indians took Elizabeth Kellogg, the rest of the party, who were Comanches, took the other four who were also separated. There were many initiatives promoted by James Parker to recover his captured relatives, but they proved to be always fruitless.
The final destination for the captives lay in the heart of the Comancheria which, as Glenn Frankel writes, was "the home and sanctuary of the Comanche nation, an empire without borders, signposts, fences or walls" and stretching some six hundred miles north facing south from Kansas to Rio Grande and four hundred east to west from Oklahoma to New Mexico. The Comanches, like so many other indigenous peoples, called themselves Nemernuh or "the people" and it was the Ute Indians, staunch enemies of the Comanches, who gave them the nickname of Koh-mahts or "enemies" from which the name we have been using ever since finally derived As other Indian nations with a nomadic way of life and great warrior activity, the Comanches were divided into bands, often at odds, and what united them was the language and the recognition of certain links, sometimes distant, of kinship between some bands and others. According to Frankel, the Comanches were divided into more than a dozen of these bands, including the Penateka in south and central Texas, the Nokoni in the northeast, the Quahadis in northwest Texas and New Mexico and the Yamparika in western Kansas and southeast Colorado.
The story of the Parker family, which we are interested in because of its relationship with the fiction shown in images by John Ford, is just one more episode of the many cases of Indian captives. Moreover, the captivity among the Indians of North America became, thanks to the account written by some survivors, a kind of genre. It was Mary Rowlandson[7] who in 1682 published the first of these accounts. She had been captured by Narragansett Indians with her three sons on 10 February 1675 and released on 6 May 1676. At this time one of his daughters died and was separated from her other two sons. The narrative of captivity featured women, often accompanied by their children, and expressed horror at the "other" being portrayed as a savage. Sexuality, especially rape, also came into play and stood out very prominently. Certainly, the episodes of violence in the treatment of prisoners were frequent and almost always the returning captives made them strongly shocked. The captured boys and girls were often integrated in such a way among their captors that they later refused to return to their own. This is the case of Mary Rowlandson, one of whose daughters married one of her captors and stayed forever with the same Indians who had kidnapped her. There are enough details in these narratives to recognize the ambivalence of feelings and behaviors that resulted from the captivity of the prisoners, almost always women and children, taken by the Indians in their assaults on farms and caravans. This ambivalence is a central issue in the story told to us in The Searchers and contributes more than anything else to define its protagonist.
The behavior of the Comanches and the core values of their way of life puzzled many of these captives who did not understand them. Sarah Ann Horn, one of these captives, describes the bewilderment caused by the way her captors acted:
"The strength of the bond that keeps them united to each other and the demonstration that they make of it, to the point of dividing the last piece of food from which they have come to starve, would make many Christians who declare themselves as such blush. Yet in their relationship with the outside world they are just the opposite."[8]
Let us return now to the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, the young woman whose story would inspire the story of The Searchers. Daniel Parker died in 1844 after eight years of unsuccessful search for his niece Cynthia Ann. His younger brother James Parker was to continue it until 1851. However, Cynthia was seen at a Comanche camp in 1846, but refused to answer questions from an Indian agent named Leonard Williams. Apparently, she didn't have much desire to be rescued. By this time, she had become one of the women of Peta Nocoa the leader of the Comanche band that had kidnapped her, her name was Naudah and she spoke perfectly Comanche and a rather corrupt Spanish who was a slang proper to the Comanches. Her first child was Quanah and then she had Pecos and a girl named Topsannah. Cynthia Ann Parker was "liberated" after the battle or rather massacre, of Pease River and in which a party of "rangers" under the command of Lawrence Sullivan Ross, later governor of Texas, attacked a party of Comanche Indians among whom she was. This attack took place on December 19, 1860, about twenty-four years after its capture.
The comparisons between the story told by John Ford in his film and the story of Cynthia Ann Parker are many, although the two stories do not agree on many aspects. At first, Ethan is nothing like Daniel Parker, as the latter was not a loser but an important figure in the founding of the state of Texas as an integral part of the United States. He was also a preacher and if there is a preacher in the film, which there is of course, this has nothing to do with Daniel Parker either, because in the end he is a character with a certain humor. John Ford remade the story by introducing into it the characters that were present in almost all his works: the loser, the comedian, the drunkard, the older woman of strong character, the handful redhead etc. The time of the real story is longer than that of the film that although it does not specify dates allows us to guess, by the ages of the abducted girl, who does not reach the twenty-four years. The search for Cynthia Anne Parker was not as immediate, nor as persistent nor as epic as in the film, but the end in both cases ends with the assault on a Comanche camp and the massacre that takes place there. It is evident that The Searchers reflects John Ford' s narrative style and the typology of his regular characters. In addition, and as a product of the film industry had to respect certain codes such as the "happy ending", although in this case it was not at all. The story ends in the film with the return home of the girl who was abducted and in the terms of its conclusion, allows us to venture a more or less happy ending from which, however, Ethan himself seems to be excluded. The story of Cynthia Ann Parker contains subsequent episodes and consequences of great interest and historical importance that increase the mythical dimension of the visual narrative that John Ford composed in such a majestic setting as Monument Valley. Some of them are worth exploring.
First of all, it is worth stopping, albeit briefly, at the sad fate of Cynthia Ann Parker after her return to the same society from which she had been taken by a band of Comanche Indians many years earlier. She suffered the consequences of cultural "mestizaje" in the most brutal way, as she could never integrate into white society. She lived saddly her last years as a ghost in an alien world. But there is an exceptional individual who stands out for his own merits in the close-knit stories of the Parker and the Comanche. This was Quana Parker, the eldest son of Cynthia Ann Parker and Peta Nocoa, the leader of the gang that raided the Parker farm.
( To be continued)
[1] The Stagecoach, another masterpiece of the western and also directed by John Ford, was shot entirely in Monument Valley but in a conventional format and in black and white. Although this film acquires great mastery as a story, it does not possess the epic qualities that The Searchers has nor does it achieve the enormous visual impact of this last film.
[2] Frankel, Glenn.- 2013 The Searchers. The Making of an American Legend. New York: Bloomsbury
[3] It is the case of The Quiet Man, in which John Wayne plays the role of Jack Thorton a boxer who returns to Inisfree, the Irish town from which he emigrated to the USA, tormented by the guilt of having accidentally killed an opponent in the ring. In this film rural Ireland is a happy Arcadia where this man will finally reach peace with himself. However, the Ethan of The Searchers overcomes the hatred that overpowers him, but he will continue to grieve for a past that we can only intuit.
[4] Hamalainen, Pekka 2011 El imperio comanche . Barcelona: Ediciones Península.
[5] Martínez Laínez, F and Canales Torres, C.- 2009 Banderas Lejanas. La exploración, conquista y defensa por España del territorio de los actuales Estados Unidos..Madrid: EDAF
[6] Wildavsky, A. The Nursing Father. Moses as a Political Leader.
[7] Rowlandson, M. 1682 A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
[8] Frankel, H. The Searchers