The Searchers

by Glenn Frankel

  The making of a Western movie on location was a giant, complex, and costly enterprise. There were hundreds of moving parts: people, vehicles, horses, cameras. John Ford had spent years gathering a collection of actors, cameramen, soundmen, wardrobe designers, support crew, wranglers, stuntmen, and extras who would obey his commands and perform the work with passionate dedication and reasonable efficiency. Ford had the kind of control over the script, the casting, and the editing of his films that most directors could only dream of. Still, so much was beyond even his control, subject to the whims and uncertainties of man and nature.

  “A shooting schedule on as rough a location as Monument Valley is really catch-as-catch-can, and depends on Ford’s imagination and resourceful genius … just an educated guess on paper,” Merian Cooper wrote to Sonny Whitney. “On every picture I have done with Ford, such a schedule always has to be revised. It is like fighting a battle. You can plan what you are going to do, but you don’t know what the enemy is going to do. And our enemies are the myriad things that can happen on location.”

  It had been seven years since Ford and Cooper had last mounted a film production in Monument Valley, but little had changed. The Navajos had long since dismantled the previous movie sets Ford had bequeathed them, using the precious lumber for their dwellings and roadside stands and selling off the rest. There were still no phones, no public water system or electrical grid, and only one semipaved road.

  After nearly a month on the site, the road and construction crews had completed most of their work. Some two dozen trucks and bulldozers, noisily clawing the ground like mechanical ants in front of the silent, brooding mesas, had smoothed a flat surface on the valley floor just north of Goulding’s lodge, and crews had erected some fifty large canvas tents to house three hundred people, wardrobes, and other essentials. They carved roadways and paths between the structures, and planted a street sign in the middle that read “Hollywood and Vine.” A late-spring desert wind promptly knocked it over.

  Most of the cast and crew lived in the tent city, while Ford, Wayne, the female stars, and their families stayed at the lodge up the hill. Alongside the tent city was a makeshift airstrip, which ferried the principals to the site and carried daily film footage down to Flagstaff every afternoon for the evening train to Los Angeles. Ford’s religious insistence on not looking at the dailies would serve him well on this location; there was no time nor facilities to do so before the flight.

  In the first days the work crew got their water from Lyster bags, thirty-six-gallon canvas contraptions developed for the U.S. Army that hung by ropes on sturdy tripods. Then Whitney’s construction company brought in a heavy-duty pump to service a primitive Indian well, providing the first electrically pumped water ever supplied to the valley.

  They erected a canvas mess hall seating two hundred people and shipped in fresh food and ice daily from Monticello, Utah, sixty miles away. They set up a 20,000-kilowatt generator for electricity and portable water tanks. Still, Pippa Scott, a nineteen-year-old actress in her first film role, said it was all “quite primitive.” “The women were installed [at the lodge],” she recalled, and “all the men were down in the valley floor in a huge sort of tent city that glowed at night with campfires and, well, frankly, a certain amount of drinking and gambling and carousing. Great fun!”

  There were no phones, just a shortwave radio. They set up a three-legged system: a receiver and sender at the Hotel Monte Vista in Flagstaff, 185 miles to the southeast; a second 30 miles from camp atop Black Mesa, the highest point between Flagstaff and Goulding’s; and the third at the lodge itself. They took a radio jeep on location wherever they went.

  Average temperatures were supposed to be in the high eighties in June, but someone forgot to tell the sun, which was in a vindictive mood. By noon each day the mercury often exceeded 100 degrees. “Wind was an enemy,” a film production press release noted. “It raised hob with the roads, obliterating them on a single afternoon’s blow. Red dust was in everything, making it especially difficult for the cameramen to keep their lenses clean.”

  The crew also built two large ranch houses—one for the Edwards family, the other for the Jorgensens. They sank telephone poles as corner braces to keep the flimsy shells from blowing away. Ford in a preproduction note said he wanted the Edwards home to look like “adobe, whitewashed but with the bricks showing through the white in places. It is almost a fortress. It sits alone in a vast expanse.” From a distance, the ranch house, nestled just below the trademark butte known as West Mitten, looked exactly as he had projected.

  WHILE THE CAST AND CREW WERE ARRIVING, hundreds of Navajo men, women, and children quietly descended on the valley by jeep, horseback, and foot. They established camps on the fringes of the movie set with their tent openings always facing east toward the rising sun, and reported for work as film crew men, construction workers, and movie extras. Lana Wood recalled seeing their campfires each night and hearing their singing wafting up. (She also recalled the discomfort of those who watched her sister sunbathing on the rocks during the day in a skimpy leopard-skin swimsuit.) The men earned $15 a day, women $10, and children $5, plus a free lunch for everyone and time-and-a-half after eight hours, all of it considered a fine day’s pay by Navajo standards. Women, often with babies strapped tightly to their backs, took jobs as housekeepers and laundresses. This was the first major film production to hit the valley since She Wore a Yellow Ribbon seven years earlier, and the Navajos had no intention of missing the opportunity.

  “A lot of people came from Kayenta and Tuba City, some people who lived here tried to be part,” recalled Susie Yazzie, a Navajo woman who worked on the set as an extra. “Harry Goulding was the one who asked me to participate.” Susie, one of the tribe’s most skilled rug weavers, worked for about a month. “We used to eat a lot, we worked in different places. There was a lot of money.”

  Ford liked to frame his decision to go to Monument Valley in terms of personal benevolence toward the Navajo:

  “When we first went into the Indian reservations, they were poor and starving. The pay from the shooting of Stagecoach helped put them on their feet … I don’t mean we should take too much credit for this, or that it makes up for our treatment of them on film, but it is a fact, and it’s been important to them.”

  Ford had no patience for bleeding hearts who bemoaned the Indians’ tragic fate but did nothing concrete to improve their economic status. “People have said that on the screen I like having Redskins killed. But today other people in the cinema feel sorry for them, make humanist pamphlets, declarations of their intentions, without ever, ever putting a hand in a wallet. Myself, more humbly, I gave them work.”

  Ford believed in Navajo medicine, or at least, as a good Catholic, he believed in the power of ritual. When Ford first queried Goulding about the weather, Harry told him about an old medicine man named Hosteen Tso. “You let me know what you want about four o’clock in the evening, and he’ll fix you up with the weather the next day,” Goulding told Ford.

  The first day out filming Stagecoach, Ford asked for “a few theatrical clouds.”

  “I can’t send that to him,” Goulding replied. “I don’t know what a theatrical cloud is.”

  “Just pretty, fluffy clouds,” Ford added.

  “We’ll get it off,” said Goulding.

  And indeed, they did. The clouds appeared promptly in the afternoon.

  After that, Goulding brought Hosteen Tso—Ford nicknamed him “Fatso” for reasons that were abundantly apparent—to visit Ford every afternoon at around four. Ford would give the old man a glass of whiskey and hand in his request for the next day’s weather. Ford paid him fifteen dollars a day and claimed that Fatso never let him down.

  Ford believed in the Navajos and he believed in Monument Valley, and his sense of responsibility for their welfare was genuine even if paternalistic. He could have filmed My Darling Clementine anywhere—it takes place in a mythical Tombstone, Arizona, during the time of Wyatt Earp—
but insisted on returning to the valley despite the high cost of transporting and housing a movie crew there. After he finished making the movie, he donated to the Navajos the wooden sets, timber being a highly valued commodity in treeless Monument Valley. Two years later, after he finished making She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, the valley was buried by a massive snowfall the Indians called “Two Men Deep.” Ford used his military connections to arrange for “Operation Haylift,” airdrops of food, grain, and other supplies.

  In a letter to James Warner Bellah, Ford made clear just how handy the Indians were for his Westerns: “At Monument Valley I have my own personal tribe of Navajo Indians who are great riders, swell actors … have long hair and best of all they believe in me. We can braid their long hair in the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche or whatever hair-dress we desire … They are tall, sinewy and as the poor bastards never get enough to eat unless I make a picture there, they have no excess fat on them …”

  Ford insisted that he treated Indians with dignity in his life and in his films. “They were a very dignified people—even when they were being defeated. Of course, it’s not very popular in the United States. The audience likes to see Indians get killed. They don’t consider them as human beings—with a great culture of their own—quite different from ours.”

  He told another interviewer, “My sympathy was always with the Indians.”

  Still, there was nothing dignified about the way Ford portrayed Indians in his early Monument Valley Westerns. In Stagecoach they were stock villains whose sole narrative purpose was to present a challenge that the protagonists had to overcome.

  A scene in My Darling Clementine, Ford’s first Western after returning from the war, was equally callous. Wyatt Earp, the movie’s hero, arrests a drunken Indian who is shooting up the town of Tombstone by knocking him on the head and then kicking him in the rear. “Indian, get out of town and stay out,” Earp commands.

  But Ford’s attitude toward Indians was beginning to soften. Cochise in Fort Apache (1948) is an honorable leader seeking a peaceful accommodation with whites, but his honor is affronted by Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday (played by Henry Fonda), the callous, arrogant commander modeled after George Armstrong Custer who goads the Indians into military confrontation. In Yellow Ribbon (1949), John Wayne’s Captain Nathan Brittles beseeches an old Indian ally with whom he has enjoyed a longstanding friendship to help him prevent an all-out war. The effort fails, but the scene between Brittles and the Indian chief—played with emphatic dignity by Chief John Big Tree, a Seneca Indian who appeared in at least four of Ford’s films—is powerful and affecting. Then in Rio Grande (1950) two years later, the Indians once more are savage murderers who kidnap a band of white children and prepare to slaughter them, until John Wayne and the cavalry come to the rescue. There’s a horrifying scene where Wayne and his troopers discover the body of a soldier’s wife who had been abducted with the children and then raped and mutilated. Ford doesn’t show us the corpse, but we see the face of the officer who finds her, the wagon wheel to which she was tied and tortured, and a steaming pool of water—all of it laid out, notes the cultural historian Richard Slotkin, like a horror movie.

  “I find it troubling that he makes Fort Apache which I just love and is, among other things, pro-Indian, and then he turns around two years later and makes Rio Grande, which is a racist hate movie about Indians,” said Ford biographer Joseph McBride.

  The Navajos, who played Indians from all tribes in Ford’s films, did not mind being depicted as villains. In fact, they grew angry when Ford brought in actual Apaches to play some of the Indian roles in Stagecoach. “It was a job and we just didn’t concern ourselves about that,” Navajo medicine man Billy Yellow told McBride about playing villains. “Ford was a very generous man. He fed all the Navajos there. The pay was good.”

  The Navajos liked Ford’s generosity, his sense of humor, his patience, and the way he talked and consulted with them at the end of the day’s shooting. And they liked the fact that he didn’t do too many takes and wear out their horses. All of his favorite Navajo horsemen—the three Stanley brothers, Bob Many Mules, Harry Black Horse, Pete Grey Eyes, and Billy Yellow—were there to serve him for The Searchers. Stuntman Chuck Roberson recalled how Ford would chase ten-year-old Dolly Stanley around the wooden dining tables, growling and grimacing. “The Indian children looked on him with awe,” wrote Roberson.

  The Navajos liked John Wayne as well. Although few of them ever got to see a Western movie, they knew Wayne was a big star and they felt flattered that he spoke to them regularly and treated them with respect. Early on in the filming of The Searchers, he volunteered his private Cessna to fly a two-year-old Navajo girl with measles and double pneumonia to the hospital in Tuba City, one hundred miles away. Wayne personally carried the little girl to his plane and placed her inside. “So overnight, Wayne, the actor with the Big Eagle, has become a heap big hero to the local Navajos,” read the film company’s breathlessly condescending press release.

  ONCE THE ACTORS AND FILM CREW ARRIVED in the valley, Ford wasted no time. On Thursday, June 16, the first day of shooting, he filmed eleven setups from eight different scenes in less than four hours on a blistering hot afternoon, finishing up at 5:59 p.m. The first ones were the opening shots of the film, with Wayne as Ethan Edwards riding along a ridge and slowly making his way through an arid sea of sagebrush to his brother Aaron’s farmhouse for a bittersweet homecoming. Ford also shot scenes of Ethan and Mose, a fellow settler, galloping past a horseless Martin on their way back to the burning ranch house, and shots of Ethan and Martin escaping the Comanches after first seeing Debbie many years later.

  From the beginning Ford was forced to improvise. The original shooting scheme was laid out before he and Pat knew that Jeff Hunter would be delayed a week to finish a previous film. Instead, Ford shot around him, using the stuntman Chuck Hayward dressed in Martin Pauley’s outfit.

  The following day Ford shot sequences of the Indians chasing Ethan and Martin to a cave, a scene from much later in the story. Wayne and Hunter were doubled by Hayward and Chuck Roberson, who also did a series of spectacular falls dressed as Indians. Ford’s stuntmen were always the most professional and among the highest paid, and both Hayward and Roberson had worked for Ford since the Cavalry Trilogy. “They had bodies like iron, their wrists and hands and forearms were like few other men,” recalled Harry Carey Jr., himself an excellent rider. “When you shook hands with them, all you could feel was callous.”

  The stuntmen were Ford’s personal favorites. He himself had started out doing stunts for his brother Francis’s silent films, and he appreciated rugged men who followed orders and always got the job done. “I like the cowboys, I like the stuntmen,” said Ford. “… They’re a wonderful, kindly, gentle group of people. They’re charitable, they’re patriotic, and they’re easy to work with.”

  The cowboys, in turn, took pride in being Ford’s shock troops. Lee Bradley, a Navajo wrangler, had worked on fifty-seven films since 1925, eleven of them with Ford. Frank McGrath signed on to perform his patented fall and drag stunts off racing horses even though he was still recovering from breaking three vertebrae in a stunt eight months earlier. Jack Pennick, Pappy’s personal aide-de-camp and a mournful-faced actor who seemed to have played bit parts in every Ford film since the early 1930s, came along to drill the men for the horse-riding scenes. “We were his personal soldiers, as dirty and stinking as any army that ever chased an Indian across the desert in the middle of July; probably dirtier,” recalled Chuck Roberson. Ford liked to dress them up and use them in his trademark folk dance scenes, and they called themselves “Ford’s chorus girls.”

  The fact that he had to tear up his original shooting plan for The Searchers didn’t seem to bother Ford. He simply did what he had always done when commanding a film set: he plowed ahead. “He never shot in continuity, it didn’t mean a damn thing to him,” recalled Bill Clothier, a longtime colleague who served as director of photography on several of Ford�
�s later films. “He could shoot a close-up here and put it in a scene that was shot three weeks later.”

  The Searchers was Ford’s 115th film, and his daily routine was almost as immutable as the mesas themselves. It began each morning with Danny Borzage, his personal accordion player for more than thirty years, warming up the set with a selection of tunes. During the silent era, Borzage would play during the shooting itself, varying his tunes to the mood of each scene. Now Ford used him to establish an emotional climate on the set that might be called Early Americana: old folk tunes, dirges, and ditties. At around nine, Harry Goulding would pull up in his station wagon with Ford in the front passenger’s seat. When Borzage spotted the car, he would break into “Bringing in the Sheaves” to announce Pappy’s arrival.

  The man who emerged from Harry’s station wagon had aged considerably since his last journey to the valley. He was six feet tall, but he seemed shrunken, and his movements were hesitant and careworn. On the set he usually wore a flowing blue shirt and pleated khaki pants. Sometimes he held up his trousers with a leather belt with a silver buckle; other times he slipped a necktie through his belt loops and knotted it, recalled Harry Carey Jr. His socks often didn’t match and his scuffed brown-and-white saddle shoes were usually unlaced. The black eye patch stuffed behind his black horn-rimmed glasses hid the left side of his face, and his battered canvas slouch hat cast a shadow over most of the rest. In the back he wore a lone Indian feather secured by his hat-band. No matter what the temperature, he usually wore a battered sport jacket or a windbreaker. On the set he would take out a huge white handkerchief and shove the corner in his mouth, chewing away when he was worried about a scene or an actor. The rest would hang in front of his chest, said Carey, “like a big windless sail.”