After working intensely to churn out a script he was proud of, Alan was bitterly disappointed by the picture itself. The giant squid looked like “the world’s most bewildered inner tube” despite all the money DeMille spent on special effects. The best faint praise that Alan could offer: “It is definitely not as bad as North West Mounted.”
Despite Alan’s disdain, the credits with DeMille opened up a world of steady, lucrative work. Alan was an independent scriptwriter—he never knew where his next paycheck might come from—but a well-paid one. In the mid-1940s he spent a year on contract at Warner Brothers, where he contributed to various second-tier Westerns. He became known as an “outdoor writer,” yet one who could write meaty parts for women.
Even though he was working more steadily than most independent screenwriters, Alan LeMay still careened from prosperity to famine and back again. In 1945 he reported he had an eight-month cushion of savings. A year later he had to borrow money to pay the bills. In June 1947 he was still in trouble, yet eighteen months later he was able to produce an early television pilot with his own surplus funds.
Alan and Arlene’s lifestyle was affluent, although a serious notch below Hollywood aristocracy. They lived in a succession of comfortable houses, starting with an elaborate rental on Lookout Mountain that was formerly occupied by Errol Flynn. In 1951 they bought a house on a quiet block of Toyopa Drive in Pacific Palisades. It was a sensible two-story affair, with gnarly camphor trees slouching like twisted sentries on both sides of the front door walk. Charlton Heston lived across the street, and Walter Matthau, Mel Blanc, and Audrey Hepburn eventually moved nearby. The great Frank Sinatra rented a house near the beach for himself and Ava Gardner in 1950 at a time when he was struggling as an actor and a voice. The LeMay house was designed by Paul Williams, an African-American architect who not only drew up plans for opulent mansions for celebrities but also designed reliable middle-class houses for people like the LeMays. The purchase price was $37,500.
Arlene wanted children, and the LeMays wound up adopting two newborns—Molly and Mark—in the mid-1940s. Alan made clear that this second round of parenthood wasn’t his idea; nonetheless, he held up his end as a father.
By then he had figured out that the real money in Hollywood didn’t lie in screenwriting, and he pressed various studios to give him a shot at producing or directing. But he was too much in demand as a writer. When studios showed an interest in his comic novel The Useless Cowboy, Alan tried for a producer’s credit, but Gary Cooper intervened and took it for himself. The result, Along Came Jones, became one of Cooper’s biggest hits. Next, Alan formed an independent production company with his friend George Templeton. Together they took a cast and crew to the Texas Panhandle and filmed two low-budget Westerns with screenplays based on Alan’s novels: The Sundowners (1949), directed by Templeton and starring Robert Preston, Robert Sterling, and Chill Wills; and High Lonesome (1950), which Alan directed as well as produced. Neither made any money, and Alan’s direction of High Lonesome was panned by reviewers as stiff and unconvincing. But he enjoyed working on location, and both films featured fabulous shots of Palo Duro Canyon, the former Comanche stronghold, now overrun by white men in cowboy outfits firing pistols with blank cartridges while the movie cameras rolled.
Alan LeMay directing on the set of High Lonesome in Palo Duro Canyon, Texas, in 1950.
Still, an independent screenwriter was only as good as his last picture, and Alan was struggling. He was fed up, disillusioned, and slightly broke. In a moment of uncharacteristic self-pity, he wrote to his father back home in Indiana that although he had directed one movie, produced two, and written seventeen, “I am now totally unknown and can start over at the bottom.”
His melancholy conclusion: “All I want of this business and this town is out of it.”
In the late 1940s, he had written an original screenplay treatment called African Pitfall, set in southern Africa in the 1890s, about a soldier of fortune named Charlie Frye who searches for and ultimately rescues a white girl abducted by Matabele warriors and raised in a chief’s kraal. It was a Western captivity narrative transplanted in African soil: the abduction of a white virgin by savages who adopt her as one of their own. The theme, which had long resonated in American literature, now caught Alan’s imagination as well. Although African Pitfall was never made into a movie, he didn’t forget.
It wasn’t long before he found another, similar story. Most likely it was while on the film shoot in the Panhandle that he heard about Cynthia Ann Parker. Her story had many of the elements he was looking for: pioneer families on the brink of danger, Comanche raiders, a captive white girl, and the uncle who seeks to get her back. Alan was interested in all these themes, but he was especially intrigued by the search to find and restore Cynthia Ann to her original family. He was also desperate to stop writing second-tier screenplays and return to a form he knew well, one that he—not the producers, nor the directors, nor the money people, nor the actors—could control: the Western novel.
He rented office space about a mile up the hill from the house, just across West Sunset Boulevard, in a corner room behind the House of Lee Chinese restaurant. Its two windows oversaw a rear parking lot, but in the distance the Santa Monica Mountains glowed orange in the sunset. It was there that Alan LeMay set to work on The Searchers.
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 c
reated a second fictional searcher in Martin Pauley, whose own family had been slaughtered by Comanches when he was a baby. And LeMay updated the tale: instead of taking place in 1836, the raid and abduction occur after the end of the Civil War, which allowed LeMay to turn Amos into a disgruntled Confederate war veteran and to track the decline and final defeat of the Comanches by the U.S. Army as he tells the saga of Amos and Martin’s search for a fictionalized version of Cynthia Ann.
A meticulous researcher, LeMay collected information on sixty-four Indian abductions, including Cynthia Ann’s; his notes show references both to her and to her Comanche son Quanah. He compiled ten pages of typed and handwritten notes about abductions, battles, and Comanche bands. In the end he freely cherry-picked and mashed together features from several true stories to create his fictional one.
Amos Edwards is forty, “a big burly figure on a strong but speedless horse,” with heavy reddish brown hair and a short, silent fuse. “He was liable to be pulled back into his shell between rare outbursts of temper.” He is a drifter on the frontier: his résumé includes two years as a Texas Ranger, four years in the Confederate cavalry, and two long cattle drives working as a cowhand up the Chisholm Trail. Yet he always finds his way back home to work for his younger brother Henry on the ranch, and no one can quite figure out why. Amos’s secret is that he is in love with Martha, Henry’s wife. Amos tells no one; not even Martha suspects the truth.
Martin Pauley, his fellow searcher, is “a quiet boy, dark as an Indian except for his light eyes; he never did feel he cut much of a figure among the blond and easy-laughing people with whom he was raised.” Martin’s parents had settled the territory alongside two other families, the Mathisons and Edwardses, two decades earlier. Martin was a baby when his family was wiped out in a Comanche murder raid in the early 1850s. Henry Edwards found him lying under a bush where his parents hid him from the warriors, and Henry and Martha took him in and raised him as one of their own.
LeMay’s Texas frontier is a frightening place where families risk annihilation at the hands of savages, and those who remain do so because they feel they have no choice. It is a land where only the strongest and most stubborn seek to hold on. “It was Martha who would not quit,” writes LeMay, “and she had a will that could jump and blaze like a grass fire. How do you take a woman back to the poverty of the cotton rows against her will? They stayed.”
Martha’s insistence that she and her family remain on the frontier eventually leads to their destruction. No one blames her, however. It is the land itself that is truly at fault. “This is a rough country,” Amos tells Martin. “It’s a country knows how to scour a human man right off the face of itself. A Texan is nothing but a human man way out on a limb. This year, and next year, and maybe for a hundred more. But I don’t think it’ll be forever. Some day this country will be a fine good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.”
When the posse figures out they’ve been duped by the Comanches, Amos and Martin race back to the Edwards homestead to find the butchered corpses of Henry, Martha, and their two young sons. The Comanche raiders have abducted Debbie and her older sister, Lucy. The pioneers hastily bury the victims, and Amos, Martin, and five neighbors set out to try to find and rescue the girls. James Parker took weeks to get a posse going, while Amos and Martin are able to launch theirs at once.
They track the raiding party for five days, then realize that the Comanches have sucked them into an ambush. The Texans hold off a large force of Comanches in a gun battle at the Cat-Tails marsh, after which Amos, Martin, and Brad Mathison, Lucy’s ardent young suitor, continue the search alone.
Amos breaks off at one point to follow tracks up a narrow canyon, then catches up to the others minus a saddle blanket. Brad scouts ahead, finds the Indian camp, and reports back that he has spotted Lucy there. But Amos tells him that what he saw was a Comanche buck wearing Lucy’s dress. Amos found Lucy’s body the day before and buried her in his blanket. When Brad asks, “Did they—was she?” Amos explodes: “Shut up! Never ask me what more I seen!”
Despite the attempts of the others to stop him, a crazed Brad charges into the Comanche camp on his own and is killed and mutilated. Amos and Martin continue their pursuit for several more weeks, but break it off as winter closes in. “This don’t change anything,” Amos pledges. “If she’s alive, she’s safe by now, and they’ve kept her to raise … We’ll find them in the end; I promise you that … We’ll catch up to ’em, just as sure as the turning of the earth!”
The two men strike out for Indian Territory, just as James Parker did in real life. But after months of false leads and endless frustration, they return to the Mathison homestead. Amos is determined to continue the search on his own. Young Laurie Mathison loves Martin and begs him to stay behind, telling him that Amos will find Debbie without his help. “That’s what scares me, Laurie,” he replies. “I’ve seen all the fires of hell come up in his eyes when he so much as thinks about getting a Comanche in his sights.” Martin fears for Debbie’s life. He knows Comanches often kill their white captives when under attack. “What I counted on, I hoped I’d be there to stop him, if such thing come.”
The tension is established that drives forward the rest of the narrative. Amos Edwards is an angry, implacable man bent upon revenge. Even though Debbie is the daughter of Martha, the only woman he has ever loved, Amos doesn’t care if she lives or dies. His goal is to avenge Martha’s rape and murder, and to destroy the world of those who have destroyed his. His sole motivation is hate.
When it comes to Comanches, Martin is no less hateful. He embraces the Texan idea of a war of extermination. “I see now why the Comanches murder our women when they raid—brain our babies even,” he tells a fellow pioneer. “… It’s so we won’t breed. They want us off the earth. I understand that, because that’s what I want for them. I want them dead. All of them. I want them cleaned off the face of the world.”
But Martin’s hatred has its limits. It extends to all Comanches, but not to Debbie, even if she has grown up to become one of them. Martin values kinship above all else. Because Debbie is his sister, his obligation to her is clear, unbreakable, and nonnegotiable. While the world around him seems crazed with bloodlust and vengeance, his own moral compass remains firm.
The Searchers is a journey of discovery. Martin Pauley grows from a terrified, callow teenager into an adept, experienced, and grimly determined tracker and huntsman. His convictions harden and his willingness to challenge his elders—and most specifically Amos Edwards—evolves into a moral certainty. Even Amos comes to recognize Martin’s willingness to go all the way to defend Debbie. “I believe you’d do it,” he tells Martin, with grudging admiration. “I believe you’d kill me in the bat of an eye if it comes to that.”
Their search goes on for five years, echoing incidents that occurred in James Parker’s hunt for Cynthia Ann. Just as James received unreliable information from several traders in Indian Territory, so, too, must LeMay’s searchers deal with the machinations of an unscrupulous trading post owner. And just as James and a companion had to shoot their way out of an Indian ambush, so must Amos and Martin escape several attacks.
But their main antagonist is the land itself, the relentless High Plains of North Texas and the Panhandle, the flat, endless, natural habitat of the Comanches and a place where white men can expect to find death or a kind of malevolent, spirit-sucking black magic. “That country seemed to have some kind of weird spell upon it,” writes LeMay, “so that you could travel in one spot all day long, and never gain a mile … If a man could have seen the vastness in which he was a speck, the heart would have gone out of him; and if his horse could have seen it, the animal would have died.”
There are times when nature seems to want to kill Amos and Martin even more than the Comanches do. They are trapped by a sudden blizzard that takes them by surprise, blinds them in its white fury, and buries them alive. The storm is like a murderous animal: “It to
re at them, snatching their breaths from their mouths, and its gusts buffeted their backs as solidly as thrown sacks of grain.” It renders them “sightless and deafened in the howling chaos,” and it plunges them down a twelve-foot gulley, breaking the neck of Amos’s pony. They shelter under a newly downed willow, dig a small bare spot for a fire, and spend sixty hours huddled over it, taking turns staying awake to keep from drifting into a frozen death. Finally, they emerge from their snowbound prison, their lips cracked and blackened, their beards frostbitten, and trek 110 miles to the fragile safety of Fort Sill.
They finally locate Debbie living in the encampment of a Comanche chief named Scar. They arrive claiming to be traders, but Scar knows who they really are. They keep their cool and ride off, but Debbie intercepts them outside the village and warns them to flee, that Scar is planning to kill them. She refuses to go with them: she is betrothed to a young warrior and considers the Comanches her people, even though Martin tries to explain that it was Scar who led the raid that killed her family—just as Cynthia Ann’s Comanche husband, Peta Nocona, had led the murder raid on Parker’s Fort in 1836. The scene mirrors that of Cynthia Ann when white scouts came across her in 1846 but she refused to consider leaving the Comanches to return to her Texas family.
In the novel, Amos and Martin meet up with a contingent of Texas Rangers, U.S. Cavalry, and their Tonkawa Indian allies who aim to attack Scar’s encampment. Martin also runs into Charlie MacCorry, a local cowhand and Texas Ranger, who informs Martin that he and Laurie have gotten married.
The Texans and soldiers attack Scar’s village and overcome the defenders—not unlike the Ranger attack at the Pease River in 1860. Amos sees a Comanche girl who looks like Debbie, reaches for his pistol, but at the last minute chooses to rescue her. But it isn’t Debbie. The girl pulls a gun from the fold of her outfit and shoots him dead.
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