The Searchers (35 page)

But that notion of the Indian as ordinary community member was quickly supplanted. As the Western film and its storytelling evolved, it quickly adopted a fixed set of ideas and images about Native Americans from nineteenth-century literature, theater, and legend. There were two dominant stereotypes. The first was the Noble Savage: the Indian who appreciated the benefits of the white man's civilization, wished to live in peace, and was often more heroic and moral than the craven whites he had to contend with. This was the role Quanah Parker had sought to play after his surrender in 1875, both to protect his people and to enhance his own stature.

John Ford, ca. 1940.

In Hollywood's first full-length feature film—Cecil B. DeMille's
The Squaw Man
, made in 1914—an English nobleman journeys to the American West to create a new life for himself after taking the rap back home for a crime he didn't commit. He falls in love with a beautiful Ute maiden who kills an evil rancher to save the nobleman's life. They marry and have a child, but when a determined sheriff comes to arrest her for the killing six years later, the doomed maiden kills herself to protect her family and prevent an Indian war.
The Squaw Man
, which was remade several times over the next few decades, presents two enduring social lessons: consensual sex across racial lines is almost always fatal to the Indian participant; and the Noble Savage is far too noble to survive in the modern world ruled by whites.

Over time this stock figure was pushed aside by a frightening and dramatically more potent stereotype: the treacherous, untamable, sexually voracious Cruel Barbarian, abductor and murderer of white women and children, and obstacle to civilization. This Indian was a much better fit for the needs and imperatives of feature-length films. And
just as Indian characters helped shape movies
, so did movies help shape our modern image of the Indian. The old myths about Indians from frontier days were readily transferred to the new medium of film, writes Wilcomb E. Washburn, a cultural historian with the Smithsonian Institution, “because the characteristics that define American Indians are all dramatically conveyed by film. In violent, exotic and dramatic terms—savage, cruel, with special identity, villain, hero, worthy foe. Objects of fantasy and fable.”

One of the first films of D. W. Griffith, founding father of American cinema, was
The Battle at Elderbush Gulch
(1913), a twenty-nine minute short starring Mae Marsh and Lillian Gish, in which a band of drunken Indians launch a war against white settlers after a misunderstanding leads to the death of an Indian prince. The Indians kill a white woman and murder an infant by crushing its skull. Marsh's character saves another white baby by racing onto a battlefield to take the infant from the arms of a dead settler and crawling back to safety. The Indians then besiege a small cabin of settlers and the end seems near; one man aims a
gun at the head of Gish's character to spare her the classic Fate Worse than Death of rape by savages. But the cavalry arrives in a nick of time to save the small band of settlers, mother, baby, waifs, and puppy dogs.

Almost from the moment he got off the train at Union Station in Los Angeles in 1914, the young John Ford worked in Westerns, first as a stuntman, cameraman, and actor.
Tornado
(1917), the first film he directed, was a Western, and he once estimated that perhaps one-fourth of his total output of movies were in the same genre. He groomed and cultivated Western film stars like Harry Carey, George O'Brien, Henry Fonda, and, of course, the greatest of them all, John Wayne. His entourage included wranglers, stuntmen, and Native Americans, and he eventually came upon Monument Valley, a remote and breathtakingly beautiful corner of Utah and Arizona, and used it as the setting for a half dozen of his finest films. His greatest silent movie,
The Iron Horse
(1924), was an epic Western, as was
Stagecoach
(1939), the film that revitalized the genre artistically and commercially after a decade of stagnation and helped make a star of Wayne. These films were rip-roaring adventure stories, with good guys and bad guys, Indian attacks and gunplay. But they were also fables about how America became great.

“
A director can put his whole heart and soul
into a picture with a great theme, for example, like the winning of the West,” he told one newspaper interviewer at the height of his silent-film career in 1925, and you can hear the enthusiasm spilling out from the page. Movies like
The Iron Horse
, he proclaimed, “display something besides entertainment; something which may be characterized as spirit, something ranking just a little bit higher than amusement.” The heights that film creators can achieve, he added, “are governed only by their own limitations.”

HE WAS BORN John Martin Feeney in February 1894 in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, of Irish immigrants, the tenth of eleven children, six of whom survived to adulthood, and he grew up in nearby Portland. As he built his myth about America, so, too, would he construct his own personal myth, beginning with his own name. He would claim to have been born Sean Aloysius O'Feeney—a more emphatically Irish name. It was the first of many small fictions. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” a newspaper editor opines in
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(1962), Ford's last great Western. It could have served as his personal motto.

His brother Francis, twelve years his senior, left home early, changed
his last name to Ford, and migrated to the newly hatched moving-picture business in Los Angeles as an actor and director.
Francis acted in and helped direct
some of the first Westerns, two-reelers such as
War on the Plains
(1912) and
Custer's Last Fight
(1912) that early studio mogul Thomas Ince shot at a ranch in Santa Ynez Canyon overlooking Santa Monica. After graduating high school in 1914, John was rejected by the U.S. Naval Academy, then dropped out of the University of Maine after just a few days on campus. Before the year was out he joined his older brother in the new promised land of Southern California. Francis got him work: in one of his earliest roles
he played a Ku Klux Klansman
on horseback in D. W. Griffith's
The Birth of a Nation
in 1915. Two years later Carl Laemmle, president of Universal Studios, decided that Ford had the self-assurance, commanding presence, and loud voice required to direct a film crew.
The Tornado
was a two-reel, thirty-minute Western, and Ford, who was a gangly, awkward, pasty-faced six-footer with little physical charisma, was both star and director. The former role was a flop; the latter proved to be his destiny.

Hollywood was bursting at its seams. Gone were the barley fields that Horace Henderson Wilcox, a real estate developer from Kansas, had first carved into imaginary avenues and boulevards in 1887. The construction in 1904 of a trolley car line from central Los Angeles seven miles to the east and the incorporation of the distant village into the city six years later brought cheap municipal water and sewage and the budding film industry, which found Hollywood's open spaces and benign climate conducive to outdoor work. It was far easier logistically to film Westerns here than in the real West. Already the illusion was being spun.

Young John Ford arrived in Hollywood in time to watch pioneering filmmakers like Griffith and DeMille create the foundations of modern cinema, and he learned the craft from the bottom up. He saw quickly that Westerns would be his ticket to success. Soon after he started working at Universal,
he teamed up with a dark-eyed actor
from the Bronx with a long, soulful face. Harry Carey was a law school graduate, semi-pro baseball player, actor, and writer who had come out to Hollywood from Long Island City with Griffith's Biograph company in 1913. Carey was sixteen years older than Ford and knew his way around film sets, ranches, and horses. The two men ground out a series of low-budget, twenty-five-minute two-reelers, then defied their bosses by making
Straight Shooting
, a full-length feature, without prior permission. Carey plays Cheyenne Harry, a hired gun who starts out working for a corrupt
cattle boss but changes sides to support a beleaguered farmer. Carey's character is deliberate, solemn, measured, and thoughtful. There are no wasted gestures or actorly flourishes. He wears an unadorned dark shirt, crumpled hat, and rolled-up denims. Ford admired Carey's naturalistic style—as did
a strapping teenager named Marion Morrison
growing up in nearby Glendale who, after watching Carey's films, began to adopt it as his own.

When Universal's moneymen found out what Ford and Carey had done, they wanted to cut the film to two reels and fire both men. But Irving Thalberg, executive assistant to studio head Laemmle, intervened, and
Straight Shooting
became Ford and Carey's first hit.
The two men went on to make
a total of twenty-three Westerns using classic dime-novel plots with titles like
Three Mounted Men
,
The Phantom Riders
,
Hell Bent
, and
Roped
. “
They weren't shoot-'em-ups
, they were character stories,” Ford later recalled. “Carey was a great actor, and we didn't dress him up like the cowboys you see on TV.”

The partnership eventually fell apart over money, jealousy, and competition for recognition—recurring themes in many of Ford's wrecked friendships. But his work with Carey established Ford as a dependable action film director, and his career flourished. When his contract with Universal expired, he moved to Fox, a bigger and more respectable studio.

In 1920 he met and married a dark-haired Irish woman named Mary McBryde Smith, and they moved into an unassuming stucco house on Odin Street in the Majestic Heights section of Hollywood. They quickly had two children, Patrick, born in April 1921, and Barbara, in December 1922. Life seemed good. Ford worked steadily at Fox, grinding out feature-length Westerns according to a tried-and-true formula, including two films with cowboy star Tom Mix.
By 1923 he was making almost $45,000 per year
. But his restless ambition pushed him further. In 1924 he made
The Iron Horse
, an epic tale of the building of the first transcontinental railroad. It set the story of a young man's quest for revenge for the murder of his father against the backdrop of a great historical event that celebrated national pride and manifest destiny.

Ford had found his future.
The Iron Horse
is pure entertainment, crammed with evocative compositions and action scenes, patriotic fervor and passionate hokum. It's got buffalo herds, cattle drives, stampedes, drunken brawls, shootouts, crass humor, easy women, villainous businessmen, new towns springing out of the barren Plains, Buffalo
Bill, and Abraham Lincoln. And it's got Indians—brutal, treacherous, and picturesque symbols of a way of life being pushed inevitably toward extinction.

Early on in
The Iron Horse
there is a harrowing scene in which the leader of a band of Cheyenne Indians cruelly murders a white man with an axe while the man's young son watches from hiding. Ford stretches the moment for maximum terror, crosscutting between the smiling, sadistic killer swinging the axe in his hand, the cowering soon-to-be victim, and the horrified young onlooker. After the killer strikes, he rips off his victim's scalp and the frenzied Cheyenne celebrate with an orgy of dancing and elation. It is one of the ugliest moments in early American cinema and one that seems calculated to make Indians seem at once both fiendish and pathetic. Their leader turns out to be a renegade white man who goads his Indian followers into acts of barbarism and serves the will of a villainous white entrepreneur seeking to sabotage the railroad project. The Indians are obstacles to progress and they are doomed. Ford used hundreds of Sioux, Cheyennes, and Pawnees for
The Iron Horse
, most of them outfitted in their own native garb. They are a breathtaking sight careening down the warpath to attack the railroad construction crew. Still, whatever reverence or respect Ford would later hold for Native Americans, something more malign is on display in
The Iron Horse
.

After
The Iron Horse
, Ford continued to alternate studio potboilers and more ambitious works such as
3 Bad Men
and
Four Sons
. By 1927 he had directed some sixty films, nearly three-quarters of them Westerns. He prided himself on his productivity and the iron control he wielded on his film sets. “
When he walked on the set
, he knew that he was God,” said director Andrew McLaglen, whose father Victor became one of Ford's favorite actors.

Many silent film directors found it difficult to adjust to the new era of sound, which inevitably changed the character of visual setups and the nature of film acting. Ford was only thirty-three when
The Jazz Singer
premiered in October 1927, but some of the studio bosses considered him washed up. He had a few more small hits, but he was developing a reputation as a serious drinker and a difficult man to work with. When Fox loaned him out to the Goldwyn Company in 1931 to shoot the Sinclair Lewis novel
Arrowsmith
, Ford got into a creative dispute with Sam Goldwyn, stormed off the set, and later showed up for work “
bruised and battered
, spoke incoherently, and couldn't remember what had been
said minutes before,” according to a Goldwyn Company memo. Goldwyn not only fired Ford, he forced Fox to refund $4,100 of the money he had paid for Ford's services.