When Ethan arrives back at his brother’s ranch, he finds his beloved sister-in-law raped and murdered, and his brother dead. But that is not all: his two nieces are missing.
Ethan immediately joins the posse formed to bring back the abducted girls. When the other men fall back, reluctant to carry on, Ethan becomes ignited by the obsession to continue the hunt.
For five years, Ethan chases down every clue to his kidnapped nieces. At first he wants to save them. Then he finds the ravaged body of the older girl, and he realizes they have reached the age to be taken sexually. Ethan learns that the surviving girl, Debbie (played by a young Natalie Wood), has been assimilated into Indian society, and it becomes unclear whether he wants to rescue her or kill her.
What’s at stake now is the honor of his tribe, and Ethan is just the man to uphold it. A white man who knows how to scalp an Indian, he intends to turn the tables of terror. His relentless pursuit makes him more than human: he is the dark side of the noble frontiersman, he is the cowboy as avenging demon. Ethan will make the Comanches he’s chasing fear him not just because he will kill them in this world, but because he will damn them in the next as well. He does so by shooting out the eyes of a dead brave whose grave he uncovers, thereby mutilating him beyond deliverance.
“We’ll find ’em in the end, I promise you,” Ethan says when his companion suggests giving up their grim quest. “We’ll find ’em, just as sure as the turnin’ of the earth.”
It is this unflinching commitment, fueled by the most primordial power, that grips us as we study our relentless hero. He is loyal to a tribe from which he himself stays apart. There’s something unholy about him—but also something pure.
Like Ethan Edwards, America itself has a shadowed past. The people who came here wanted land and took it from those who were here already. They used slave labor, importing men, women, whole families from Africa to do the work of growing tobacco and cotton. Those slaves were forced out to the fields with the whip and threat of worse.
It is not a pretty history. Yet it is ours.
Even today, despite our vast power in the world, America remains a misfit nation. We are not European. We are not really part of the Americas to our south, nor do we have the easy kinship with Canada that a common language and British heritage would suggest. We don’t really fit in anywhere.
This explains our fascination with outsiders. The hero who lives his life without checking the polls is the one we will always prefer.
The Searchers is about a man who has lived his life apart and will end his days that way. This is the role America plays in the world. We are a country that must live with the fact that we wiped out Indians and enslaved Africans. Yet we are the country that gallops in to save the day when it really matters. Casually dismissed by some of the older, more arrogant nations of Europe as crude and callow, we arrived like the cavalry to save the day in two world wars, and more recently in Bosnia, Kosovo, and every trouble spot brought to a boil by the old order.
The Last of the Mohicans and Daniel Boone
One of America’s earliest lone heroes, Hawkeye, made his appearance in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. With the same bloodlines as Ethan Edwards, he carried the spirit of pioneer America. Like Edwards, he knew the ways of the Indian, but unlike him, he respected him and his beliefs. It was the Indian, after all, who taught him to live in the wilderness, to survive its dangers. “God made us all, white, black and red, and, no doubt, had his own wise intentions in colouring us differently.”
It is the 1750s, and the French and Indian War is raging. Hawkeye has taken upon himself the duty to protect two young women on their way to the besieged Fort William Henry to visit their father, the fort’s commander. We see that he is a man who lives by his own rules, a code he has fashioned on the frontier. Though he lives a quarter of a century before the Revolution, he is, in character and attitude, already an American.
Indeed, Cooper’s hero is a buckskinned brother to the men who would write the rules for a new country, pen that Declaration which would include the right to pursue happiness, give us that Constitution establishing evenhanded justice.
And it is for those high standards that Hawkeye fights. “For whatever traits the Western Hero is admired, and for whatever values his world is cherished,” Warren Walker has written in an essay on Hawkeye and the American West, “his story endures as a synthesis of past and present, of fact and fiction, of the written and oral traditions. For better or for worse, he has emerged as the culture hero of America.”
“Hawkeye’s frontier spirit, his love of the wilderness, his relations with Indians, with women, with the English—all become resources for picturing our own lives. But not directly,” write Martin Barker and Roger Sabin in their book The Lasting of the Mohicans. “For example, the ‘English’ in the story won’t literally represent English people.” Instead, they can be seen as any elite ruling clique that presumes in both attitude and behavior to govern society due to birth or social rank.
While the “English” clearly represent the ruling elite, in the same sense, Hawkeye is clearly one of us. Two decades before the Revolution we see him confront the English and dictate his own course for the new land. His strengths are his marksmanship and his honesty. They are the arms he uses to defeat both the Indians and the English. They are the engine and the compass of the new country that he champions by his very being.
Looking back at him, we can see that Hawkeye personified the youth and spirit of a country that was only beginning to reveal itself.
James Fenimore Cooper admitted that the hero of The Last of the Mohicans was inspired by the authentic American hero, Daniel Boone.
In 1773, Indians attacked Boone and a large group of settlers attempting to pass through the Cumberland Gap. Boone lost his son, James, in the attack, and the surviving settlers decided to turn back. The trip was a failure, but Boone would not accept defeat. He would return to the frontier continually, eventually making it his home.
Two years later, Boone trailblazed a path through the Cumberland Gap that eased the strain of travel from the east to the west side of the Appalachians, opening the frontier to thousands. After completing the Wilderness Road, he built a fort at Boonesborough, where he settled with his family. It was three years later that Cherokees kidnapped Boone’s daughter Jemima while she was canoeing on the Kentucky River. The frontiersman successfully led a rescue party to free Jemima and two other girls.
The Last of the Mohicans was written at a time when America was divided between the established East and the untamed frontier. People living in the “West”—Kentucky, Tennessee—resented the Eastern banks that controlled their money and the Washington politicians who tried to control them. They resented the social elite of the big cities for looking down on them, in effect becoming the new “English.” To the man on the frontier, the Easterner was a “dude,” an overdressed, overeducated man of the office and the city.
The Turner Thesis
In 1890, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner published a thesis about the power and allure of the western frontier. As long as America was expanding westward, he maintained, there would always be a part of the country living in less developed circumstances.
This “return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier,” he wrote, worked a powerful influence on the country as a whole. “This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.”
Turner saw this as a gradual process that was neither Indian nor European—it was uniquely American.
The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt an
d the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick, he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.
At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. Each new frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history. . . .
Turner argued that the frontier created a “new order” where “immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality nor characteristics.”
Steadily the frontier of settlement advanced and carried with it individualism, democracy, and nationalism, and powerfully affected the East and the Old World. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier.
Turner presents a romanticized picture of the frontier and its effect on our character. I would carry his argument further. Through the eighteenth century and all but a decade of the nineteenth Americans lived at the edge of a wild, uncivilized western territory.
But that wasn’t the end of its influence.
Through the entire twentieth century, we Americans celebrated that frontier life in film and fiction with a reverence approaching ancestor worship. Every young boy from Brooklyn to Beverly Hills wore cowboy clothes and imagined owning a pony. The thrill of the American West—enshrined by Remington’s bronzes, Zane Grey’s pulp novels and John Ford’s movies—remains our nation’s great collective memory. Lonely on the range, the cowboy remains a robust American archetype.
Travis Bickel
Twenty years after The Searchers came Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. Its hero Travis Bickel is an angry outcast, a Vietnam veteran, a human time bomb who becomes obsessed with saving a young teenage runaway.
Bickel, who drives a cab at night in New York, is a modern-day Ethan Edwards. (The screenwriter, Paul Schrader, admitted as much.) Like that veteran of an earlier lost-cause war, he has a flawed but faithful heart. He wants to find the young teenager, played by Jodie Foster, who has fled her family to sell her body on the mean streets. Bickel, alone, is determined to save her.
In the terrifying buildup to the film’s climax, our hero turns and glares at himself in the mirror to then recite conversations in which he challenges imaginary enemies, rehearsing his gunslinger’s quick draw: “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?” In an urban jungle where even eye contact can be deadly, Travis Bickel will dare the predator he stalks to not avert his glance.
Against the backdrop of an urban hell, we are watching a disquieting but oddly comforting figure from our frontier past. If we cannot clap at Travis Bickel’s hair-trigger violence, we still are drawn hypnotically to his edgy generosity, his readiness to give all in the struggle that decent folk have too easily abandoned.
Shane
George Stevens’s Shane, another Western classic, has a storyline straight out of Frederick Jackson Turner.
A lone gunslinger arrives one day at a Wyoming homestead. Like The Searchers, it’s the story of a stranger who shows up in the nick of time. Shane—the only name he’s known by—sides with the farmers against the big rancher, a tyrant bent on running them off land he considers his own.
We first meet Shane as he rides in from nowhere. He is obviously a man with a past. When questioned merely out of friendly curiosity, he isn’t forthcoming.
STARRETT: I wouldn’t ask you where you’re bound.
SHANE: One place or another, some place I’ve never been.
Joe Starrett hires Shane to live and work with him. Shane trades in his gun and buckskins for the quiet life, only to find himself embroiled in a range war. Rufe Ryker, a cattle baron intent on regaining his grazing land, harasses the homesteaders. But led by Starrett, they refuse to quit.
The gun battle between Shane and Jack Wilson, the villainous gunslinger hired by Ryker—the movie’s high point—is one of Hollywood’s great scenes. It also says a helluva lot about how we Americans view good and evil. A Joe Starrett can farm the land, even lead his community. But the reason we cheer Shane and fear for his survival is because we know how much we need men like him. It takes a hardened outrider to clear the trail of reptiles like Wilson.
In all these stories from Casablanca to Shane, we understand intuitively that once these heroes have taken up our cause, they are destined to leave us. Just as Rick Blaine’s power lies in his sacrifice, so does Shane’s.
“I gotta be goin’ on . . . Joey, there’s no living with, with a killing. There’s no going back from it. Right or wrong, it’s a brand, a brand that sticks. There’s no going back.” This is what he tells Starrett’s young son, who idolizes him.
When he’s among us, this man of dark pedigree can show a courage and commitment beyond that of ordinary mortals. What we don’t know about him becomes irrelevant. His courage and the gift he makes to us—as generous as it is dangerous for him to make—overwhelm us. This is the figure we Americans cherish. Could his be the role we want our country to play?
CHAPTER 8
Pioneers
What do you say? Let’s try it!
CHARLES LINDBERGH, 7:51 A.M., MAY 20, 1927
John F. Kennedy grasped beautifully the notion of the frontier. The author of Profiles in Courage understood our love of the pathfinder, the leader so at ease in the world that as each grand new territory opened before him it quickly became his own. JFK challenged a generation that had fought alongside him in World War II to join him in facing a “New Frontier,” enshrining the phrase in our political lexicon.
“Today some would say that those struggles are all over—that all the horizons have been explored, that all the battles have been won, that there is no longer an American frontier,” he said in accepting the 1960 Democratic nomination in Los Angeles. “No one in this vast assemblage will agree with those sentiments. For the problems are not all solved and the battles are not all won, and we stand today on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of the 1960s—a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.”
Kennedy knew America: “What I see is a country which finds its happiness in moving forward.” Just as we love men of action, we crave for the country itself to be on the move. Like a boat in a fast current we are a country that drifts when the engine’s turned off—and Americans don’t like the feeling.
Let’s “get this country moving again,” he said. And America was thrilled, a little nervous, but thrilled, definitely, all the same.
Our readiness to pull up stakes and head out for the new territories is as deep in our dreams as in Huck Finn’s. We are, for all our faults, an adventurous people. I think it explains why we celebrate those who l
ead the way. A country that always wants to move forward has an especially high regard for the scouts sent out to mark the trail.
Daniel Boone and the Western Frontier
Daniel Boone was the prototype for every Westerner, from James Fenimore Cooper’s Hawkeye to the many John Ford heroes. “It was too crowded back East,” Boone explained in what would today be a perfect sound bite. “I had to have more elbow-room.”
This desire to see and experience the wide open spaces for oneself was captured by Mark Twain in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest,” Huck says at the end. “Because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and civilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”
It’s the same freedom-loving zest we catch in the step of Rick Blaine at the end of Casablanca when he heads off with his friend Captain Renault to that “Free French garrison at Brazzaville.”
This vision of America chasing the horizon started with Daniel Boone. “With his native capacity for leadership and decision, his enduring tranquility despite setbacks, his love of hunting, trapping, and the outdoors, he was one of the great un-machined men of our frontier days,” writes the biographer Marshall Fishwick.
“Possessing a body at once powerful, compact, and capable of tremendous activity and resistance when roused, a clear eye and a deadly aim, taciturn in his demeanor, symmetrical and instinctive in understanding, Boone stood for his race, the affirmation of that wild logic, which in times past had mastered another wilderness and now, renascent, would master this, to prove it potent.”
Chris Matthews Complete Library E-book Box Set: Tip and the Gipper, Jack Kennedy, Hardball, Kennedy & Nixon, Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think, and American Page 173