The Murky True Story Behind The Searchers
Glenn Frankel discusses his new book about the making of an American legend.
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Courtesy of Warner Bros.
Listen to author Glenn Frankel discuss his new book, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend:
Andy Bowers
John Ford’s The Searchers is widely considered not only one of the best Westerns of all time but one of the best movies, period. (It’s currently No. 7 on Sight & Sound’s list of the 50 greatest films.) Less well-known is the true story that inspired the film, the 1836 kidnapping of 9-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker, a white girl captured in a Comanche raid during the long-running war between Native Americans and European immigrants in Texas. Parker lived for decades with the Comanche before being returned, not altogether happily, to her original community. Former Washington Post reporter Glenn Frankel has written a new book that explores the facts and the myths surrounding Parker’s abduction, the legacy of both her white and Comanche families, and how it all came to be portrayed—and altered—by John Ford and John Wayne in The Searchers.
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