TAKEN AGAINST HER WILL — TWICE
A Haunting Story Of A Girl Captured By Comanches
Cynthia Parker may or may not have inspired ‘The Searchers,’ but a book does justice to her tragic life
Some historians believe John Ford’s great film The Searchers was inspired by the story of Cynthia Parker, a white girl captured at the age of 9 and adopted by Comanches. The question of its origins may never be resolved: The movie was based on a novel by the late Alan Brown Le May, whose notes suggest he may have had another incident in mind.
But the gifted journalist S.C. Gwynne nonetheless does justice to Parker’s heartbreaking story in his bestselling Pulitzer finalist, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Tribe in American History (Scribner, 2010).
No Indians of the Southern Plains had a more fearsome reputation than the Comanches. Nomadic warriors who liked to attack under a full moon, they inspired terror with their horned buffalo-wool caps and their ability to fire arrows while clinging to the sides of horses, a skill dramatized in countless American TV Westerns. They gang-raped women, speared babies with lances, and tortured male captives, sometimes by burning them to death.
After a massacre, an Army captain reported seeing evidence of beheadings and victims whose “fingers, toes, and private parts had been cut off and stuck in their mouths.”
Gwynne denies neither these atrocities nor the many betrayals by whites that fostered the warriors’ thirst for vengeance. With journalistic balance and novelistic flair, he tells the true story of the fall of the Comanches through the lives of three people: Quanah Parker, their last great chief; Cynthia Parker, his mother, who was forcibly removed from her adopted family by Texas Rangers 24 years after her kidnapping; and Ranald Mackenzie, a brilliant Indian fighter who attended West Point with Gen. George Armstrong Custer.
Of those three lives, only Quanah’s did not end in tragedy, and Empire of the Summer Moon shows the cost of the American ideal of Manifest Destiny both to those who pursued it and to those who obstructed it. Few stereotypes of Native Americans have proved more tenacious than that of the “noble savage,” but Gwynne makes clear that among native people as among whites, extraordinary courage often went hand-in-hand with comparable ignobility.
Jan Harayda is an award-winning journalist and critic who has been the book editor of Ohio’s largest newspaper and the book critic for Glamour. She has written for many major media including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Salon. On Medium she writes the Pop Culture Shorts column that appears on FanFare every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
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