The Searchers by Glenn Frankel
Author:Glenn Frankel [Frankel, Glenn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2013-05-09T14:00:00+00:00
13.
The Novel (Pacific Palisades, California, 1953)
Supper is over and a bloodred sun is setting outside the ranch house. Henry Edwards is taking a last look around the extended yard before dark, cradling his light shotgun, but it’s not game fowl he’s seeking. He fears the worst—that somewhere beyond the faint roll of the prairie, just out of sight, a Comanche raiding party is preparing to attack.
The year is 1869 and the Edwards family lives at the sharp edge of pioneer country, “holding the back door of Texas” in the northwest corner of the state. Comanches and Kiowas are punishing the range, killing and burning out settlers, making a mockery of the so-called peace policy that President Grant and the Quakers serving as his Indian agents are seeking to establish on the High Plains. Despite a series of massacres, a few pioneer families are staying put, trusting that their luck will hold, but Henry Edwards’s luck has run out. The night before, he sent off his brother Amos and his adopted son Martin to help a posse hunt down purported cattle thieves who had struck a neighbor’s herd. But now it’s clear that the thievery was just a ruse by Indians whose real goal is a murder raid. Having tricked their pursuers into a wild-goose chase, the killers are about to strike.
So begins The Searchers, Alan LeMay’s thirteenth novel, one of the most memorable Westerns of the 1950s. It is the story of two men, Amos Edwards and his adopted nephew, Martin Pauley, and their epic search for Amos’s niece Debbie, the sole survivor of the raid on the Edwards’s ranch house that LeMay so dramatically sets up in his opening chapter. Set in post–Civil War Texas, The Searchers is an odyssey through the last years of the Comanche-Texan wars, told from Martin’s point of view. It captures the magnificent heroism and endurance of the settlers who carried on in the face of overwhelming odds, but it also reflects their deep racial hatred of Comanches, who are portrayed as savage murderers and rapists true only to their own barbaric code. Harrowing, grim, and unrelenting, the book reflects LeMay’s abiding verdict that life is inescapably tragic and even the dead do not rest in peace.
The Searchers is an inverted captivity narrative. It focuses not on the victims nor on their Indian captors but rather on the pursuers, Amos and Martin, who embark upon a quest to rescue the captives and take vengeance on those responsible. Debbie, the object of their search, is nine years old when the story begins—the same age as Cynthia Ann Parker when she was abducted.
Alan LeMay was intrigued by the fact that James Parker, Cynthia Ann’s uncle, was a backwoodsman of dubious reputation and an unrepentant Indian hater. The novelist proceeded to build his own fictional character, Amos Edwards, from the bare bones of James’s life and quest. He created a second fictional searcher in Martin Pauley, whose own family had been slaughtered by Comanches when he was a baby.
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