This book uses a broad range of primary and secondary sources, including archives, interviews, newspaper articles, scholarly works, memoirs, Comanche oral tradition, and visits to historical sites. It covers events that span a century and three quarters and took place over a broad expanse of the southwestern United States, from Texas to Hollywood. Some of the research stops were to long-standing repositories of essential materials—for example, the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, which is home to the Joseph and Araminta Taulman Collection, the foremost archive of documents and photos for the Parker family. It includes many unpublished and unannotated documents, including the handwritten notebook and letters of Susan Parker St. John and similar treasures from Araminta Taulman. There is a web of museums, libraries, and archival collections in southwest Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle that also house a host of treasures, many of them overlapping thanks to the miracle of modern photocopying: the Fort Sill Museum and Archives and the Museum of the Great Plains, both in Lawton, Oklahoma; the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas; the Oklahoma State Historical Society in Oklahoma City, and the University of Oklahoma Library in Norman. But virtually every public library in southwest Oklahoma and northern Texas, including the Panhandle, has a file of documents, letters, or photographs covering the years of Comanche-Texan wars and their aftermath. Bill Neeley’s files, which he accumulated in researching his book The Last Comanche Chief, are an invaluable source of primary documents and are available at the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum.
When it comes to Quanah Parker and the Comanches, the Kiowa Indian agency files, available on microfilm, are an invaluable source of official documents about life on the reservation. The National Archives—Southwest Region in Fort Worth is a repository for these files. The Works Progress Administration Indian-Pioneer Papers were an ambitious and systematic attempt in the 1930s to interview everyone of prominence or interest concerning the Indian agency and its residents. These, too, are available on microfilm in many locations, and the Western History Collection of the University of Oklahoma Library in Norman has a complete set. The Indian Archives of the Oklahoma Historical Society are also an excellent source of primary materials. Chronicles of Oklahoma is a tireless and thorough collection of articles, interviews, and memoirs of the state and its residents, all of it now available online.
Comanche oral tradition, as handed down from generation to generation by members of the extended Parker family, is neither more nor less accurate than many published accounts. It is a reliable gauge of the reverence for Cynthia Ann and Quanah Parker that is such an important part of the spiritual life and identity of the Parker clan. Another excellent source of oral lore is Comanche Ethnology, a collection of the field notes of a team of anthropologists who interviewed eighteen Comanche elders in the 1930s. These field notes also contributed to two valuable anthropological studies: Comanches: Lords of the South Plains by Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel, and Thomas W. Kavanagh’s The Comanches: A History.
Finally, two books that are required reading for anyone interested in Comanche history are The Comanches: Destruction of a People, T. R. Fehrenbach’s magisterial and lyrical classic, now much criticized by modern historians for its imperial assumptions; and Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire, a fresh interpretation of the meaning and the power of the Comanche nation, its allies and enemies.
Two writers who made essential contributions to The Searchers have been largely forgotten, but their lives and work can be traced in archives. The Alan LeMay Papers at UCLA contain twenty-three boxes of the novelist’s research and letters, donated after his death by his widow, Arlene. His son Dan also has many important documents and letters, which he used for his own biography of his father’s life, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has a file of correspondence between LeMay and his book editor, Evan Thomas. Screenwriter Frank S. Nugent’s widow, Jean, donated his papers to Boston University. There is no archive for Patrick Ford, John Ford’s only son and a key architect of the film. The only interview with him that I am aware of was conducted by James D’Arc at Brigham Young University in April 1979, and it is an invaluable source for anyone seeking to understand this somewhat tragic figure.
The Searchers has no dedicated archive, and John Ford was famously averse to committing his thoughts to paper. But the John Ford Papers at the Lilly Library at Indiana University contain the film notes that John and Pat Ford prepared as they worked out the concepts and logistics of the movie. The notes are not comprehensive—for example, there no notes between John Ford and Frank Nugent—but they are the best account we have of John Ford’s creative process going into the film shoot.
The other essential collection is the C. V. Whitney papers, which are the property of the Whitney family and which I was privileged to be the first researcher to examine. They offer a road map to Whitney’s thinking and ambitions, and his constant interventions with Merian C. Cooper in an effort to achieve the film he keenly wanted.
Other useful archival materials can be found in the Ronald L. Davis Collection at Southern Methodist University, which contains transcripts of the interviews Davis conducted with Ford’s and Wayne’s friends and colleagues for his thoroughly researched biographies of the two men; and in the Ransom Center’s John Wayne Papers, which contain the files of author Maurice Zolotow for a Wayne autobiography, My Kingdom Is a Horse, that the two men worked on but never completed. Zolotow went on to write Shooting Star, his own biography of Wayne, using the material. There are also intriguing shards of documents about The Searchers in the Warner Brothers Archive at the University of Southern California and at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
For such an iconic film, The Searchers has been the subject of surprisingly few books. Edward Buscombe’s The Searchers, part of the first-rate BFI Film Classics series, is an excellent introduction; while The Searchers: Essays and Reflections on John Ford’s Classic Western, edited by Arthur M. Eckstein and Peter Lehman, is a fine collection of thoughtful academic articles. Michael F. Blake’s Code of Honor gives a thorough account of the making of the film.
Fortunately, there are many fine books on Ford and Wayne to help fill the gap. The essential list includes Searching for John Ford: A Life, Joseph McBride’s magisterial biography; Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford by Scott Eyman; Pappy: The Life of John Ford by Dan Ford; and my sentimental favorite, Company of Heroes, Harry Carey Jr.’s candid but affectionate memoir of his life as a member of the John Ford Stock Company.