The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 13 (2002)

Home on the Range: Space, Nation,and Mobility in John Ford’s The Searchers
Julia LEYDA

Through the process of domestication, the home contains within itself
those wild or foreign elements that must be tamed; domesticity not only monitors the borders between the civilized and the savage but also regulates tracesof the savage within itself.
—Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity”1

INTRODUCTION
Focusing on representations of mobility, space, and national identity,
this essay reads John Ford’s movie The Searchers (1956) in terms of its
deployment of American “domestic” space, meaning both “home-centered” and in opposition to “foreign.” I argue that The Searchers represents American national identity using tropes of space and mobility, inboth thematic content and cinematic form. Tracing the ways in which
this movie represents race and gender within private domestic spaces aswell as against sweeping desert landscapes foregrounds the primacy of
space in the American national imagination in the 1950s. Ford’s movies
are often cited among the quintessential Westerns of cinema history and,as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have written, the Western “played a cruCopyright © 2002 Julia Leyda. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may
be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
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cial pedagogical role in forming the historical sensibilities of generationsof Americans.”2 Space and mobility in Ford’s work bear the burden ofrepresenting the nation, not only within the movie’s narrative, but also
within the wider context of American public culture. In the following
essay, I interpret The Searchers in terms of how representations of public and private space and geographic mobility operate within the dramatic narrative and the visual economy of the movie, as well as within
its contemporaneous cultural contexts of the Civil Rights Movement andthe Cold War.
This essay presents an interpretation of The Searchers centered aroundthe movie’s representation of different kinds of space: national andfamilial, public and private, foreign and domestic, indoor and outdoor.
Because the term “space” is frequently employed in wildly divergent
interpretive and theoretical strategies, I would like to clarify my use of
the term here. As Michael Keith and Steve Pile point out in their groundbreaking essay collection, Place and the Politics of Identity:
In order to articulate an understanding of the multiplicity and ﬂexibility ofrelations of domination, a whole range of spatial metaphors are being used[in contemporary theory]: position, location, situation, mapping; geometricsof domination, centre-margin, open-closed, inside-outside, global-local; liminal space, third space, not-space, impossible space.3

Many theorists use such spatial metaphors to describe power relations,such as cognitive mapping, for example, but in the process of importing
the terminology from the discipline of geography, they often fail to fully
deﬁne those terms, using them as if space were “absolute,” a kind of“container, a co-ordinate system of discrete and mutually exclusive locations” thus eliding the relationality of social identities within particularspaces.4 According to Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, “spatial metaphors areproblematic in so far as they presume that space is not.”5
In this essay, I begin with the axiom that space is indeed problematic: within the spaces of the home as well as on the open range, “the social,
the political, and the economic do not just take place in ‘time’ and‘space,’ they are in part constituted by temporality and spatiality.”6
Throughout this essay I will discuss space in terms of material, social,
and metaphorical meanings; for example, the domestic space of the family homestead is comprised of the material, the physical house and theland it sits on; the social, the racial and gendered power relations that
operate within and around that house; and the metaphorical function thatthe home takes on as a symbol for the nation. As Keith and Pile force-

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fully argue, “we may now use the term ‘spatiality’ to capture the ways
in which the social and the spatial are inextricably realized one in theother.”7 Drawing on theories from the disciplines of Social and Cultural
Geography as well as American Studies and Cinema Studies, this essay
attempts to unravel the meanings and metaphors implicit in the spacesof The Searchers.
I

WESTERNS, SPACE, AND MOBILITY

John Ford was fond of telling the story about how, during his early
Hollywood career as an extra, he played a Klansman in D.W. Grifﬁth’s
The Birth of a Nation and fell off his horse. His fondness for this anecdote provides a useful counter-point to those more familiar with Ford’scelebrated status as a director: it links him, on horseback, with theWestern genre for which he is famous, but humorously and humbly,
while at the same time it places him ﬁrmly in the history of cinematic
representations of race. Perhaps Ford’s anecdote will take on additional
resonance for readers of this essay, which considers Ford’s The Searchers within its speciﬁc cultural contexts and its representations of mobility, public and private space, and national and racial identity.
The trope of mobility suffuses his movies of all genres, and Ford,
dubbed “America’s cinematic poet laureate” by Andrew Sarris,8 is best
remembered for his Westerns, movies in an inherently American genrethat often represent conﬂicts around gender, race, and space. Mobility inFord’s work takes the physical form of horse, stagecoach, buckboard,
locomotive, and Model T; ﬁguratively, the movements are between town
and country, civilization and wilderness. But the characters do not simply move from one discrete space to another, they also traverse spaces,
usually depicted in wide angle landscape shots of deserts, mountains,
gorges, and valleys. As Geoffrey O’Brien praises The Searchers, heemphasizes the primacy of movement across landscapes:
Ethan and Martin crossing an icy plain at night, or riding downhill throughdeep snow, or silhouetted against a red sky as they travel along a ridge; the
7th Cavalry . . . crossing a newly thawed stream, the camera moving down anarrow crevasse, the whole VistaVision image given over to a singularmoment of rocky abstraction. Not one shot felt like an interpolation or interlude; the visual life of the ﬁlm was a continuous balancing of immensity andintimacy. Movement through space, whether of a hand in close-up or of anarmy in long shot, was always in the center of the drama.9

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The crossing from one space to another, such as a man on horseback
bisecting the frame, dwarfed against a Technicolor blue sky and blazing
red mesas, has been called by Ford scholar Tag Gallagher a “Fordiansymbol of the parade . . . a formalized progression, a passage.”10
Gallagher rightly notes the importance of movement across landscapes,
but Ford’s use of doorways is equally important, signifying not only
movement, but liminal spaces, the site of a shift from one kind of space
to another. The oppressiveness of Ford’s interiors, particularly his shotsof ceilings and doorways, conveys the constricted feeling that drives
many of his characters out into the desert’s open spaces. Ford’s classic
Western draws a boundary around American domestic space, signifying
the permeable borders of both the family home and the nation itself.
The Searchers is a 1950s Western that, through its use of space andmobility, speaks to American concerns about domestic and nationalboundaries. These concerns are not always at the surface of the narrative, but I want to situate the movie within the context of the national
mood in which it was produced. At the particular historical moment
when this movie was made, the national imagination had two important
preoccupations: the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War. Boththese issues relied on one primary trope in articulating a national agenda: mobility. In the Civil Rights Movement, social, economic, andgeographic mobility became a question of survival for many African
Americans, while during the Cold War mobility was the primary enemy
as government policy centered around the containment of Communism.
The “domestic” is the center of conﬂicts located simultaneously in theprivate sphere, where racial issues take the form of fear of miscegenation and the debate around segregation, and in the public sphere, where
mounting international tensions foster the threats of nuclear war andCommunist spies. This essay argues that spatial concerns such as thesenecessitate a reading of The Searchers in terms of mobility and space,
whereby we can discern the tenacious discourses of domesticity in twentieth-century American culture as they represent concerns about citizenship and national security.
Reading Westerns in terms of landscape and identity, many critics inAmerican Studies and Cinema Studies have theorized the parameters of
race, gender, and nation. Jane Tompkins’s book West of Everything: The
Inner Life of Westerns, while provocative in its analysis of landscape andgender, brackets the discussion of race in Westerns; this omission
implies that race has no signiﬁcant bearing on her deﬁnition of the fem-

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inine, private, domestic sphere, which she convincingly argues is central rather than peripheral to the genre. I concur with her argument thatgender is pivotal to the ideological foundation of the Western, but not tothe point of excluding other crucial factors of identity such as race andnation.11 Rather, I suggest that the operation of these terms of identity
within the power relations in Westerns are just as crucial as, and in manycases difﬁcult to separate from, considerations of gender. Richard
Maltby’s essay “A Better Sense of History: John Ford and the Indians,”on the other hand, focuses on Ford’s Native American characters andtraces a brief but thorough history of movie Indians and the debate
around their authenticity.12 Maltby’s primary concern is with the racial
dynamics of representation, but rather than completely sidestep gender,
he refers to several different women’s roles. Linking gender and race,
Maltby correctly points out that the “division of heroines into light anddark [and into] schoolmarm and saloon-girl” signiﬁes not only at thelevel of gender roles within white society, but also that, through association with Indian men, however involuntary, white women can be“degraded out of their skin color into a self-perpetuating Otherness.”13
Gender, then, interacts with race in the cinematic landscape and mythic
national home of the Western, which functions as “the primary site inwhich Hollywood could maintain a racist discourse, in which racism wasoffered and enacted as a theory of history.”14
In agreement with Maltby, I ﬁnd the Western a rich text for interrogating representations of the intersecting factors of race and gender in
American culture; absent from his essay, however, is a prolonged
accounting for the spatial dimensions of these crucial social issues in theWestern. I suggest that the grids of power implicit in the Western,whether that power is rooted in gender, race, nationality, or most likely
a combination, can best be discerned by attending to the representationof space and mobility. Ford’s wide angle shots of the desert landscapecontrast powerfully with his claustrophobic low angle interior cinematography, separating the spheres of men and women, outdoor andindoor, and quite clearly privileging the former. Ford’s vistas draw audiences into such struggles, impelling us to identify with the land, with theheroes who also identify with it, and with the nation itself. Ultimately,
The Searchers requires a spatial reading that considers the competinginterests of the American “domestic” in both senses of the word: civic,
national, and military spaces and the private, feminine site of the home.
In cinema, images exert a spatial control over the ideological location

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of competing interests as well: geographers Stuart Aitken and Leo Zonnargue for the importance of “representations of, and the meanings
attached to, places and the environment in terms of their relationship topower and contestation.”15 Audiences of Westerns expect a certain
iconography, bearing familiar ideological echoes of heroism and triumphover adversity. As Keith and Pile remind us, “simultaneously present inany landscape are multiple enunciations of distinct forms of space—andthese may be reconnected to the process of re-visioning and remembering the spatialities of counter-hegemonic cultural practices.”16 The photography of the Western landscape represents the American nation stillin its expansion westward, but also as a dangerous, still unconquered
space, justifying the need for national defense. In The Searchers, a settler homestead is attacked and family decimated: mother Martha anddaughter Lucy are raped, murdered, and mutilated, father Aaron is killed,
and the youngest daughter Debbie is kidnapped by Scar, a Comanche
warrior. Debbie’s uncle, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), and her adopted brother, Martin, were away from the home during the attack; when
they discover the ruin in its wake, they set off on a seven-year search toﬁnd Debbie. Ethan’s role is both conqueror of the enemy and defenderof the American family, located at the frontier where the contestation
over land ownership and national sovereignty takes place.
According to David Harvey, the “conquest of space . . . ﬁrst requiresthat it be conceived of as something usable, malleable, and therefore
capable of domination through human action.”17 Harvey points to theAmerican system of homesteading and land settlement, which ﬁgures
prominently in The Searchers, as an example of the “pulverization andfragmentation of the space of the United States along . . . rationalisticlines” meant to allow “maximum liberty to move and settle in a reasonably egalitarian way.”18 This kind of spatial organization of land ownership replaces earlier modes of communal land use; conversion from
Indian territory to open range to privately owned land is a feature of mostWesterns. White characters in The Searchers view this conversion as
inevitable and just, in accordance with Manifest Destiny, while the
Comanche and other Native Americans share neither their conception of
the ownership of space nor their belief in divinely sanctioned white
progress. As Harvey points out, conquest necessitates the instrumentalization of space as settlement requires the mapping and fragmenting ofspace; the ideology of American expansion is predicated upon a spatialmodel which conﬂicts with that of the Native Americans but which

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allows the white settlers to justify their cause. The question of power
relations in frontier spaces is more complicated, as the settlement process
blurs some class distinctions among whites but neglects the racial andgender inequalities upon which the community, and the nation, is founded. In this movie, the landscape is both the site and the subject of these
conﬂicts and inequalities.
II

LANDSCAPE AS SYNECDOCHE FOR THE NATION

Ford’s movies all employ a marked opposition between interior andexterior space, usually privileging the exterior, often in the vast landscapes of the American West. From the audience’s point of view, theoverwhelming visual images of sublime outdoor spaces represent power
relations in a double dilemma: on the one hand, they “arouse the viewer’s desire for, wish to identify with, an object that is overpowering andmajestic.”19 The majesty of the West invites the audience to identify with
the American desert landscape and all it represents: ruggedness, natural
beauty, strength, eternity, austerity. Tompkins reads the Western’s “rejection of language and its emphasis on landscape” as signs of the genre’s inherent, assertive masculinity, arguing that the “openness of thespace means that domination can take place.”20 On the other hand, thelandscapes in Westerns can also be read as contested spaces where
Native Americans battle European Americans, with Mexicans and
Mexican Americans on either side, over the rights to the land, to theresources, and ultimately for control over the geographic, economic, andpolitical spaces of the nation.
In The Searchers, the land signiﬁes not only the nation, but the site ofnational and international conﬂict dependent on perspective and point ofview: geographer Derek Gregory argues that “the very idea of landscapeis shot through with ambivalences, tensions, and grids of power.”21
Certainly the ﬁctional settings of The Searchers bear the traces of theseambivalences, as it is set in “Texas 1868.” We know that white
Americans live in Texas only because they appropriated the land fromNative Americans and Mexicans, and in the 1860s much blood is still
being shed as the Comanche resist.22 But the characters in the movie perceive themselves as pioneers in a divinely sanctioned nation-building
enterprise. The power relations within the contact zone of “Texas 1868”are by no means stable, as the isolated homesteaders are vulnerable toraids by the embattled Indian tribes; the movie emphasizes this in the

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constant pans across the apparently empty desert, corresponding to characters in the movie vainly attempting to spot possible Comanche aggressors hiding in the desert. The wide open spaces can hide violent attackers
hoping to thwart white progress into the West, as the beauty of the wilderness also suggests danger.
The land itself occupies a prominent role in Ford’s work as setting,motivation, and subject, even when realism must be sacriﬁced for iconicity. The Searchers is set in Texas, where the land is ﬂat and grassy prairies alternate with dry sandy plains, but ﬁlmed in Monument Valley,
Utah, with dramatic, unearthly towering formations of bright red rock:as Gallagher points out, “Perhaps The Searchers’ ‘Texas 1868’ looks
nothing like the real Texas; but it does look the way ‘Texas’ ought tolook.”23 But for a thinking audience, the idea of starting small homesteadranches among the mesas and buttes of the southwestern desert seems
foolhardy: there is little water, no arable land, and sparse vegetation for
grazing herds. Ignoring the material reality of the landscape in order torepresent the visual majesty of “the West,” the cinematography of The
Searchers sacriﬁces geographic accuracy and even credibility for sublime myth-making images. Within the ideological geography of theWestern, America is a majestic, exceptional nation, whose appropriate
landscape should also be majestic and exceptional; the sublime
Monument Valley vistas are the idealized representation of all of
America, the best of America.
But as Richard Maltby points out, in the critics’ canonization of Ford’sWesterns, “Monument Valley came to represent the landscape of theWest and to encourage by the extremes of its appearance a view ofWesterns as abstracted and allegorical,” enabling the further abstractionsof interpretation that read Westerns as parables of inevitable white
progress.24 Ford’s wide angle shots of the desert signify its emptiness
which waits to be ﬁlled, occluding the presence of Native Americans
except as a threat to American manifest destiny who must be driven out
or destroyed. Furthermore, the audience is conﬂicted by the identiﬁcation of Ethan Edwards with the geography of Monument Valley,
the quintessential American hero moving across the quintessential
American landscape. At the same time the landscapes inspire audiences’admiration for the natural beauty of the land itself, the character of Ethan
complicates that admiration. This ambivalence resides at the core of myreading of The Searchers: we are simultaneously awed and repulsed by
the spectacle of the land as we are by the main character Ethan. The

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empty deserts of the cinematic West always echo with the absence of
their previous inhabitants who are being driven out or exterminated bywhite “pioneers,” and we are similarly drawn to reject Ethan at ﬁrst but
later cajoled to accept him again.
The opening scene shows Ethan riding up to his brother’s family
homestead, where his former beloved Martha now lives as his brother’swife. Ethan’s ﬁgure is framed by the dark outlines of the doorway opening onto the sunny desert landscape; similarly, the concluding shot of
the movie returns to a doorway framing the desert, again framing Ethan
as he hesitates and turns his back on home. Ford’s doorway framing
device shows the audience that the domestic environs of the home are
the dark antithesis of the bright, sunny desert landscapes; the indoor
spaces of The Searchers are constricting and tight in complete contrast
to the wide open outdoors. Ford shoots the indoor spaces as physically
cramped and claustrophobic, the dimly lit rooms shot at a low angle, withheavy, timbered ceilings that seem to be closing in on people. Most obvious is Ethan’s discomfort in the house, which critics ascribe to his love
for his brother’s wife Martha.25 This personal motivation is clear fromthe subtle actions of Ethan and Martha: for example, when she thinks
she is unobserved, Martha gingerly caresses Ethan’s coat and embraces
it as if it were Ethan. But Ethan’s awkwardness in the house also stems
from his strong sense of belonging in the outdoors, in the masculine public sphere. Borne out not only in cinematography but in dramatic action,
Ethan’s discomfort in the home ampliﬁes his belief that his life is out on
the range and he likes it that way: when he enters the house he seems
ill at-ease, jumping at the ﬁrst opportunity to ride out into the desert. The
opening theme song, too, expresses this preference: “What make a man
to wander, what makes a man to roam/what makes a man to wander, andturn his back on home?” While Ethan’s impossible love for his brother’s
wife provides one answer to the song’s question, I suggest that Ethan’sneed to be outside rather than inside, to turn his back on home, also stems
from his potential for violence, the gun in the hand, which is out of placein the private family home but which The Searchers depicts as necessary to the preservation of the national home.
This is the spatial contradiction between the public and private spheresthat The Searchers presents but doesn’t resolve: the necessity for a violent element residing outside the family home to keep the security thatdwells within the home. Ethan’s paradoxical motivation, the movie suggests, is love for that private home in which he is uncomfortable. But

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there is another home in The Searchers which also represents the national home, where Ethan is profoundly at ease: the desert landscape with acold wind blowing. The cold wind does blow through several winters
during Ethan’s search to restore Debbie to the family, but it also suggests the Cold War that is waged to protect the national home from thehostile foreign threat. The simultaneous and contradictory emphases on
private domesticity and public militarism in 1950s America are represented in the bunker-like family house that has no place for Ethan, eventhough its safety depends on his potential for violence.
The Searchers provides the audience with an urge to sympathize with
Ethan, even as they must acknowledge his violence, because Americans
in the 1950s wanted to see justiﬁcation for their aggressive foreign policy of nuclear proliferation and massive retaliation. Richard Slotkinmakes this point convincingly, although I differ with his strict separation of domestic and international:
Although the concern with racism suggests that we see the ﬁlm as addressing the domestic or “civil rights” side of contemporary ideological concern,
The Searchers is also a “Cold War” Western which addresses issues of war
and peace from the perspective of a microcosmic community forced literally to choose between being “Red” and being dead.26

The fact that Ethan the Indian-killer is the hero, however ambivalent,
makes The Searchers indisputably political, and critics for decades have
tried to decipher the movie as “racist” or “anti-racist.” I suggest here thatsuch a debate is moot: The Searchers paints a damning picture of essentialist racism while at the same time it reproduces many appalling stereotypes and privileges the white point of view. Rather than dissect the ﬁlm
in such absolutist terms as “racist” or “anti-racist,” this essay attempts
to unpack what the movie says about the contradictions and controversies of the 1950s. I read the spatial politics of The Searchers in context
of not only civil rights in the domestic, national American home, but also
in terms of the bigger picture of American Cold War foreign policy.
III CIVIL RIGHTS, WHITENESS, AND THE SEARCHERS
Ethan Edwards is a former Confederate soldier who also fought
against Juarez in Mexico; he is a virulent Indian-hater, which to an audience in the 1950s bears heavy implications in the national upheavals
around Civil Rights. The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of

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Education (1954) was a major milestone on paper, but President Eisenhower, like many politicians at the time, didn’t personally support thedecision and failed to enforce desegregation in the South until forced to
do so by the 1957 crisis at Central High School in Little Rock,Arkansas.27 In March of 1956, The Searchers opened in theaters acrossthe country, in the middle of the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott begun
by the civil disobedience of Rosa Parks in 1955. This assertion of theright to a seat, the right to public space, resonates strongly with the issuesof race and contested spaces in The Searchers, particularly in the scene
when Ethan and Martin ﬁrst meet.
When Ethan meets Martin, the adopted son of Martha and Aaron, thefamily is seated around the dinner table and Martin walks in and sits
down. They are introduced, and Ethan looks suspiciously at him, asking
Martin if he is a “half-breed,” to which Martin replies that his ancestors
are all English and Welsh except for “one eighth Cherokee.” Ethan istroubled by this answer but jokes that at least he isn’t Comanche, a tribe
he perceives (and the movie represents) as more inherently hostile thanthe Cherokees. Ethan’s shock at a suspected half-breed sitting at the family dinner table acts out a racist white’s reaction to the Civil Rights
Movement’s demands for equal rights to public spaces, particularly public sit-ins. Martin’s defensive claim that he is seven-eighths white seems
to satisfy his adoptive family, while Ethan, who represents unreconstructed American racism, is still suspicious of him. In this respect, thecharacter of Martin in the movie is markedly changed from the character in the 1954 novel, also entitled The Searchers, by Alan Le May: thebook’s Martin is orphaned in childhood by a murder raid, as is themovie’s Martin, but never described as having any Indian ancestry.28 Bychanging this character to be part Native American, the movie consciously brings the racial other into the security of the family home, anon-white presence within the nation who must be incorporated into thehome so that outside enemies can be defeated.
In 1956, when The Searchers was released, the “private” problem ofracial difference had already entered the public arena of the courts andthe public spaces of city buses. Thus Martin’s place at the family tablein the movie signiﬁes not only an orphan who is embraced by a white
American family, but a racially mixed orphan. His partial whitenessappears to be his justiﬁcation for his position in the family but theiracceptance of him also suggests that their fear of the outside enemy, thehostile Comanche, enables them to be more ﬂexible than the previous

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generation of white Americans, represented by Ethan the Indian-killer.
Even Martin’s name suggests that he is part of the white family, closely resembling Martha’s, but this resemblance may also trouble Ethan
since he loves Martha but sees Martin as a racial other, not quite white.
Ethan’s obsession with whiteness and racial purity mark his characterfrom the beginning; his deﬁnition of family and nation are very clearlydeﬁned as exclusively white.29
Throughout the ﬁrst two-thirds of The Searchers, Ethan’s character
reveals his ruthless hatred of Indians. Ethan’s hatred becomes unbearable even for the most sympathetic viewers in the scene where he
attempts to slaughter as many buffalo as possible so that Scar’s clan will
have fewer food sources. The scene is rightly noted by critics as a major
turning point in audience identiﬁcation with Ethan, when it becomes
impossible to sympathize with him because of his sadistic racism, andhere our identiﬁcation shifts to Martin, the younger, more rational man.30
The buffalo scene is immediately followed by the searchers’ discoveryof an Indian camp strewn with the corpses of women and children recently massacred by Custer’s 7th Cavalry; in both scenes, our sympathies,
and Martin’s, lie with the victims, innocent buffalo and innocent Indians,
rather than with Ethan and the Cavalry. But the parallel construction of
sympathies places the Indians at the same level as buffalo, their deaths
clearly presented to the audience to foster sympathy, not identiﬁcation,suggesting that wholesale slaughter is wrong while at the same time theIndians are animals.
Slotkin’s reading of the parallels between the buffalo and the cavalry
massacre scenes is instructive:
Martin is appalled by the mentality the massacre reveals in his own people—
they are no better than Comanches. This perception chimes with his growing realization (in the buffalo-killing passage) that Ethan is motivated by thesame “spirit of massacre” that drives both Scar and the cavalrymen.31

This moment in The Searchers marks the audience’s simultaneous distancing from Ethan and growing understanding of Scar, whose violence
has the same motive as Ethan’s: personal revenge. At the same time,
Martin is portrayed as the real voice of reason: his rejection of violenceand vengeance throughout the movie represents the peace-loving
American ideal which nonetheless needs to be comfortable with violence, embodied by Ethan. Martin recognizes in Ethan’s and Scar’s personally motivated behaviors, as well the U.S. government’s participation

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in retaliatory murder via the Cavalry massacre, the “cycle of victimization and revenge from which it is possible that no one will escape alive
and untainted.”32 Douglas Pye also points out that the juxtaposition of
the two massacres “marks eloquently the way in which Ethan’s racial
hatred is repeated at the institutional level in the genocidal actions of the
U.S. cavalry.”33
Reading the buffalo slaughter and Cavalry massacre scenes, and inparticular Ethan’s unrepentant white warrior persona (he never surrendered his Confederate saber after the Civil War), in terms of theAmerican Cold War strategy, the simultaneous sympathy for and dehumanization of the Indians makes more sense. The U.S. announced its
policy of “massive retaliation” in 1954, which held that any attack, however limited and whether conventional or nuclear, would be answeredwith a nuclear attack.34 If provoked, wholesale slaughter would thus be
unavoidable, and the Soviets, like the Indian women and children, would
remain at the level of buffalo, whose deaths the U.S. cannot prevent.
Together with the overt comparison between the slaughter of Indiansand buffalo, Ethan’s blunt questioning of Martin about racial ancestry
signiﬁes his obsession with race. His seeming adherence to the “one droprule”35 deﬁnition of whiteness marks his contemporary signiﬁcance forthe audiences of the 1950s, who can read him as a staunch segregationist. Maltby cites critics’ habit of reading Ethan as a scapegoat racist character: “ ‘Our racial prejudice and our guilt for it,’ says Brian Henderson,‘are placed on [Ethan’s] shoulders, then he is criticized, excluded, or
lampooned, mythically purging us of them . . . Ethan is excluded for oursins; that is why we ﬁnd it so moving.’ ”36 But Ethan’s gradual acceptance of Martin, and his indifference to Martin’s engagement with
Laurie, a white woman, prevent us from believing that Ethan sees Martin
as “pure Indian” and therefore not white. Ethan’s character development,from staunch racist into a more ﬂexible variety, prevents him from being
merely a scapegoat. Ethan is, after all, played by John Wayne at the peakof his popularity. I suggest that Ethan’s role shifts from racist scapegoat
to sympathetic loner. That shift itself demonstrates the function of
Ethan’s character: ﬁrst, to show that white racists can be rehabilitated toaccept non-whites into the domestic spaces of the family home, and second, that even rehabilitated racists have an important role in the nation’s
defense against foreign enemies.
Allowing the “mostly white” Martin into the private sphere of thehome allows Ethan to concentrate on the real enemy outside the home,

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in the public sphere: he can still hate Comanche and be a good American.
The audience’s split sympathy, with Ethan and with Martin, is never fully
resolved, but the complicated ending of the ﬁlm gives some clear signals about who really holds the authority over the home: the man who
declines to cross its threshold at the end. As a Cold War Western, The
Searchers must demonstrate the need for Ethan’s violent presence on thescene just outside the home: the Red menace, which is more important
than “domestic” matters.
IV DISCERNING THE COLD WAR CONTEXT IN THE SEARCHERS
Richard Slotkin points out that the number of feature-length Westerns
produced during the years immediately following World War II increased dramatically, “from 14 in 1947 to . . . 46 in 1956.”37 Even after
the movie Western’s peak in the mid-1950s, Westerns became enormously popular with growing American television audiences.38 The continued national interest in the myths of the West demonstrates anenduring sense of pride in that segment of American history. This interest is especially noteworthy when we consider that most Westerns only
concern themselves with a relatively narrow window of time in the history of the United States: “Westerns privilege a period of roughly ﬁfty
years, and return time and again to particular sites and events” in the latter half of the nineteenth century.39 At this point in history, the nation isbusily developing the vast spaces of the west, from the early pioneer
towns to the Gold Rush to the consolidation of the country with the railroad.
The historical time and place of the isolated Texas frontier homestead
surrounded by murderous Comanche engages a familiar narrative in theWestern genre: the terror of a lone outpost encircled by enemies about
to attack. This “imagery of encirclement” common in Westerns rests on
the notion that the frontier whites are surrounded by hostile savages, and,because the Western’s “point-of-view conventions consistently favor theEuro-American protagonists,” the sense of encirclement creates an atmosphere of tension as the family nervously awaits attack.40 Portrayedas vulnerable and outnumbered, the family is forced into self-defense
and struggles to stay together against the onslaughts of savage attackers.
In the tense, silent scene as the family wordlessly prepares for the
Comanche attack, the teenage daughter Lucy ﬁnally deciphers the unspoken fear of her parents and screams in horror.

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Most American audiences in 1956 were familiar with the feeling of
being surrounded by hostile enemies waiting to attack: the demonizationof the Soviet Union had only escalated since the 1948 Gallup poll inwhich “76 percent of Americans believed that Russia was out to rule theworld, and . . . 63 percent expected a full-scale war within the next twenty-ﬁve years.”41 The certainty of coming nuclear war lasted through the1950s, and the fear of outside attack pervaded the private domestic
sphere that was so much a part of American national identity during that
decade. This combination of exalted domesticity and escalating national defense manifested itself in strange ways: Elaine Tyler May begins
her book Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War with astory, originally published in Life magazine, of a newlywed couple
embarking on their two-week honeymoon in their bomb shelter, which
she rightly calls “a powerful image of the nuclear family in the nuclear
age.”42 The Searchers participates in the convergence of these two popular Cold War discourses by evoking the feeling of encirclement and thesense that the family is digging in to protect itself from a coming attack:the Edwards’ homestead ranch house resembles a bunker designed for
self-defense: it has small shuttered windows, thick adobe walls, low ceilings, and a heavily timbered overhanging roof. The ending of the movie,
with the nuclear family reconstructed as the reunited couple Martin andLaurie (his ﬁancee) walk back into the house with the rescued Debbie
while Ethan remains aloof and outside the house, reinforces The
Searchers’s message about the convergence of domesticity and national defense.
Richard Slotkin interprets The Searchers as a Cold War Western,meaning that it can be read as an allegory of U.S. foreign affairs during
the postwar period, and my reading shares this premise. However,Slotkin’s assessment of the movie’s participation in Cold War discourses differs from mine in its speciﬁcs, in that his focuses only on American
foreign policy, which vacillates between “search and rescue” and “searchand destroy” in the escalating conﬂicts in Vietnam:
Through Ethan Edwards, Ford metaphorically explores the logic of the “savage war”/Cold War analogy . . . and ﬁnds that it produces an overwhelming,and ﬁnally malign, pressure to choose “destruction” over “rescue.” American
policy-makers would explore that same logic in articulating and putting into
practice a new doctrine for counterinsurgency in the Third World.43

The carving up of the Third World by the Cold War superpowers was

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certainly worrisome for many Americans in the 1950s, but hardly as
much cause for wide public concern as other fears that posed threats closer to home, such as the possibility of Soviet attack or nuclear war.
Slotkin’s Vietnam interpretation is convincing insofar as it identiﬁes
a similar logic in the movie and in U.S. foreign policy, but I have two
problems with it. First, my interest lies more in how The Searchers participates in familiar public discourses about foreign policy with whichaudiences could identify in 1956: not whether to rescue or destroy
Indochina, but how to fortify America against the enemies outside andwithin the national home. Second, and more important, I propose thatrather than adopting an exclusively “foreign policy” framework for reading the movie as Slotkin does, we should attend to both foreign anddomestic. Only then can we discern how the movie articulates the ways
in which foreign policies are inseparable from “domestic” policies, bothin the sense of the American national home and private family home.
V

THE CONVERGENCE OF COLD WAR AND CIVIL RIGHTSDISCOURSES

Along with the fear of nuclear war with the U.S.S.R., internal problems also worried Americans in the 1950s, as Billy Graham warned of“barbarians beating at our gates from without and moral termites fromwithin.”44 The Searchers constructs a complicated picture of theAmerican home: the Indians (“Reds”) are indeed poised for attack, butthere are also “domestic” threats to unity, including racial others
demanding to be seated at the family dinner table. Moreover, the intimate
connections between these concerns appear frequently in the reactionary
political discourse of the time: Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge
claimed that African American Civil Rights protests were motivated by“Communist doctrines from outside the state.”45 I argue that the movie’s
representations of mobility and domesticity communicate the national
concerns about an international threat—Communists attacking America
and inﬁltrating the nation with spies—as well as a “domestic” threat—increasing tensions about civil rights. In this reading, I depart from
Slotkin’s interpretation of the ﬁlm because his focus brackets the domestic in order to elaborate American anxieties over international enemies,
re-enacting the separation of spheres that I suggest limits our understanding of the text. As Amy Kaplan and Elaine Tyler May argue in thecontexts of the American nineteenth century and the 1950s respective-

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ly, private and public spheres—domestic and international—are twosides of the same coin.46 National concerns about international military
threats become implicated in “domestic” concerns about allegedly private issues: segregation and racism in American society and institutions.
Domestic unity, including racial desegregation, makes a stronger nationthat can stand up to the outside threat and better combat the “moral termites from within.” I read The Searchers as a 1950s Western that expresses American fears of the threat from outside the “home” or nation,
as well as the growing anxieties about black demands for the full rights
of citizenship, for equal membership in the national “family.” The factthat both internal and external threats are portrayed as Native Americans,albeit of different tribes, only underscores the racial and ethnic undertones and the inseparability of these two seemingly “separate” spheres.
Anti-communism, according to historian Eric Hobsbawm, “was genuinely and viscerally popular in a country built on individualism andprivate enterprise where the nation itself was deﬁned in exclusively ideological terms (‘Americanism’) which could be virtually deﬁned as thepolar opposite of communism.”47 In my reading of The Searchers as aCold War narrative, nationalistic and xenophobic anti-communism takes
the form of nationalistic and racist Indian-hating, which motivates
Ethan’s character. Ethan’s deﬁnition of American is white, deﬁned as
the polar opposite of Indian (or black, recall his loyalty to the defeated
Southern Confederacy), but we discover that his deﬁnition of white is
not purely biological in the scene where he and Martin look for Debbie
among a group of former captives of the Comanche.
These white women are visibly traumatized and when a soldier
remarks, “It’s difﬁcult to believe they’re white,” Ethan replies, “They
ain’t white anymore—they’re Comanche.” The scene suggests that the
women’s insanity derives from their captivity: this representation of theirmadness creates a problem of perspective that Pye argues is, when readalongside Debbie’s seemingly assimilated life with the Comanche witnessed later, a contradiction within the ﬁlm’s racial-ideological narrative:
At the heart of this troubled and troubling process of negotiation is miscegenation itself, the sexual act which is the focus of Ethan’s and Laurie’s fear
and hatred. . . . In the material we have looked at here, two attitudes are present: in one, inter-racial marriage can produce the well-balanced Martin andapparently well-integrated Debbie; in the other, miscegenation can be imagined only as rape and its results as madness, violence and death.48

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The white captives scene does indeed trouble any reading of the ﬁlm as“anti-racist,” as Pye points out, because the point-of-view shots structurally equate Ethan’s reactions to the captives with Martin’s and thesoldier’s even as, portraying the horror of the women’s situation, theobjective shots of the captives evoke the same reaction from the audience.49 Ethan leaves the scene with his hatred of Comanches and miscegenation justiﬁed, even intensiﬁed, while Martin is silent and upset. Bothmen appear to be wondering whether Debbie will be insane when theyﬁnd her, and if so, whether her insanity will signify a sexual relationshipwith a Comanche. This fear is verbalized by Martin’s ﬁancee, Laurie, inwords that horrify Martin: when he explains to her that he wants to bringDebbie back to live as part of their white community, Laurie replies
viciously, “Fetch what home? The leavin’s of a Comanche buck soldtime and again to the highest bidder with savage brats of her own?” To
Martin’s dismay, Laurie argues that they should kill Debbie because thatis what Martha, Debbie’s mother, would have wanted (recall that Martha
was raped and murdered by Comanche at the beginning).
Like Laurie’s appalling tirade, Ethan’s response to the fear of miscegenation is to declare his intention to kill Debbie when they ﬁnd her,because whether she is insane or happily partnered with a Comancheman, she will no longer be white, as the captives “ain’t white anymore—
they’re Comanche.” When the searchers do ﬁnally see Debbie, she wears
Indian clothing with her hair in braids and doesn’t show any signs that
she recognizes them; afterwards, Ethan echoes his reaction to the captives when he shouts at Martin, “She ain’t Debbie—she’s Comanch’!”Reading this response in terms of the Cold War, Slotkin argues that thisis Ethan’s turn from “search and rescue” to “search and destroy,” mirroring American foreign policy in Vietnam and other Third World
spheres of inﬂuence.50 But here is where a combined reading of foreign
policy with domestic civil rights discourse makes the text more coherent than Slotkin’s approach: Debbie as the object of the search signiﬁes
the problem of the other, both as an ally of the “Reds” and as a racialized other within the “white” nation. The two men’s views of her represent the two attitudes available to Americans in the 1950s: Martin’s
acceptance of racial difference and love for Debbie as a family member
even though she is not his blood relation, and his abhorrence of therevenge massacres mark him as a liberal integrationist. Ethan, on theother hand, is a violent Indian-hater who would kill his niece rather thanlet her live as a “Red,” thus combining anti-integrationist with anti-com-

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munist sentiment. Given this split into opposite corners, Ethan’s subsequent change of heart and Debbie’s return to the fold become the keys
to the cultural meanings of The Searchers’s ending.
Ethan’s change of heart—he doesn’t kill Debbie when he has theopportunity, but instead swings her in the air like a girl—is tempered byhis abrupt and solitary departure at the end of the ﬁlm. We can read him
as less monstrous than he was at the beginning, but he still isn’t “domesticated” enough to join the happy family. Instead Ethan walks away, having saved Debbie and returned Martin to his future wife, and the door
closes. Ethan is “partially redeemed,” in Stowell’s words, because hedoesn’t follow through with killing Debbie.51 But he also still remains
outside the family home. Ethan isn’t a family man, a ladies’ man, or acompany man: we are made to believe that he belongs “out there,” riding the range, alone with his gun and his horse, ready to ﬁght Indians
and rescue white women. His role as security force protecting the home
gives him the authority to control membership in the family, and his decision to allow certain racial others into the fold suggests that they do live
up to his standards of whiteness after all.
The younger generation in the character of Laurie is just as racist as
Ethan though in the end she too is willing to allow Debbie back into thefamily, as Ethan eventually relented in his vow to kill her. But the“white” family at the end of the movie depends on Ethan’s power to protect their home. As the nation in the 1950s began to make concessions
to Civil Rights, accepting African Americans into the white nationalfamily, American militarism continued to escalate the arms race using
the Red threat as justiﬁcation. In this light, domestic stability depends
on the military muscle that keeps outside threats at bay, embodied in the
public imagination as John Wayne52 and in the movie as his character
Ethan Edwards, whose dogged pursuit of Debbie he sees as his nature.
He describes himself to Martin as “a critter who just keeps coming on”
regardless of hardship or passing time. Ethan’s perseverance and determination has sinister overtones, because his determination to persist in
his search, his revenge, and ultimately his defense of the white family,
is represented as a justiﬁcation for genocide.
Critics have debated the ending of The Searchers for decades, and I
ﬁnd Pye’s argument, along with Slotkin’s, most compelling.53 I concurwith Pye’s premise that “The Searchers allows no comfortable identiﬁcation with or disengagement from its hero (who is both monstrous andJohn Wayne).”54 Slotkin’s interpretation is also convincing in his

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recognition of the unresolved audience identiﬁcation. Rather than argue
for an absolutist ideological reading of “racist” or “anti-racist,” making
Ethan fully sympathetic or unsympathetic, he points out the ambivalenceof the ending:
The moral confusion of the ending is responsible for two recurrent misreadings of the ﬁlm. A “left” misreading sees it as an exemplar of the very racism
it decries. A “right” misreading sees Ethan Edwards as an entirely heroic ﬁgure whose harsh manner and personal isolation are the consequences of his
devotion to his mission and his unique understanding of the red menace.55

Slotkin aptly points out that a left misreading would focus on race andthe ﬁlm’s relevance in the debates over civil rights, whereas a right misreading would take Ethan as a valiant defender of America against theSoviet threat. I suggest that each of these two (mis)interpretations on its
own is indeed a misreading, but that if we allow for both readings at once,
we may ﬁnd what shred of resolution the ﬁlm will allow. Because of themovie’s insistent contrasts between indoor and outdoor, private and public, family and nation, we are drawn to interpret these spaces in terms of
one another. The play on the meaning of domestic throughout this essay
is an attempt to weave together these seemingly discrete spaces byemphasizing the social relations that connect them.
Ethan’s violent presence outside the home makes possible the domestic scene at the end of the ﬁlm, just as the renewed fervor for domesticity in the 1950s also depended on the military-industrial complex,
including nuclear arms. In other words, audiences in 1956 could read themovie as a parable showing how the restoration of the private sphere andits continued security is only feasible if the public sphere is secured byforce. As Amy Kaplan points out, “The idea of foreign policy depends
on the sense of the nation as a domestic space imbued with a sense of athomeness, in contrast to an external world perceived as alien and threatening.”56 The emphasis on the external threat gives even racist whites areason to accept racial difference: knowing that the home must be strong
and secure allows the racist Laurie to accept Debbie and Martin although
she knows Debbie has been living with an Indian husband for years andmay have mixed-race children and Martin is one-eighth Cherokee. This
domestic scene has obvious integrationist and assimilationist overtones,
but the presence of the warrior patrolling the periphery makes the happy
reunion seem somehow ominous, like the honeymooners in the bomb
shelter. Ethan turns away and disappears into the landscape as the door
closes and the ﬁnal frame fades to black.57 Ethan’s location outside theHOME ON THE RANGE

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home doesn’t prevent him from exercising authority over the family: heidentiﬁes its limits, deciding who lives, who dies, and who remains in
the family.
CONCLUSION
In The Searchers, Ethan is always in motion: riding up to the house,
across the western states, into the desert. The landscapes that frame his
obsessive search for Debbie and his self-identiﬁcation as a “critter whojust keeps coming on” suggest that he is a natural stalker and conqueror,
even though we know he has been on the losing side of at least two wars.
Ethan’s nature is to kill, and the movie suggests that he is as “savage”
as he claims the Indians are: he is a classic Indian-hater “whose knowledge of Indians engenders profound and undying hatred rather than sympathetic understanding.”58 The movie portrays Ethan as a nomadic
killing machine, set against the backdrop of Monument Valley landscapes that Ford made into visual icons of the American West, signifying the open spaces of the growing nation and the western territories
waiting to be conquered. The Searchers portrays a Western landscapewithin whose time and space we can read signs of an ongoing struggle
for a renegotiation of national identity along racial lines, taking place ina context of an ongoing, albeit cold, war.
Beginning with his part as extra in The Birth of a Nation, John Ford
has played a role in American cinematic representations of race andnation. This essay has argued that Ford’s representations of American
national identity during the 1950s are intimately bound up in questionsof space, mobility, and domesticity. In its movements between foreign
and home, public and private, The Searchers articulates the ideologicalcomplexities of the 1950s. His attention to the mobility trope in
American history offers a geographic and social narrative of the power
relations that reside in the landscapes of the movie as well as the “domestic” and foreign policy issues plaguing the country at the time of its production. As John Wayne makes his way through the landscapes ofMonument Valley, audiences have access to the contested spaces thathave always made up the United States, both within its borders and inits relations with other countries. The desert setting in Monument Valley
memorializes the American landscape, and Ethan in the middle distancecompletes the vision: the lone ranch house, occupied by the family andprotected by the abrasive but loyal warrior.

104

JULIA LEYDANOTESAmy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” American Literature, no. 70 (1998): 582.
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and theMedia (New York: Routledge, 1994), 115.
3
Michael Keith and Steve Pile, “Introduction Part 1: The Politics of Place,” in Placeand the Politics of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1.
4
Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, “Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics”
in Keith and Pile, 75.
5Ibid., 75.
6Michael Keith and Steve Pile, “Introduction Part 2: The Place of Politics,” in Keithand Pile, 27.
7Keith and Pile, “Part 1,” 6.
8
Andrew Sarris, The John Ford Movie Mystery (London: Secker & Warburg-BFI,
1976), 90.
9Geoffrey O’Brien, “The Movie of the Century,” American Heritage, no. 49(November 1998): 19.
10
Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and His Films (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1986), 384.
11
For example, Tompkins describes the moment, while watching The Searchers, when
she realized that representations of Native American women in Westerns complicate herreading of women as icons of domesticity: the character Look “is treated so abominably
by the characters—ridiculed, humiliated, and then killed off casually by the plot—that
I couldn’t believe my eyes.” Tompkins realizes that Look and many other stereotyped
Indian characters have offended her to the point that her “unbelief at the travesty of native
peoples that Western ﬁlms afford kept me from scrutinizing what was there.” Unfortunately, Tompkins maintains the book’s focus exclusively on gender because she“couldn’t bear to take [Look] seriously; it would have been too painful.” See Jane
Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992), 8, 10.
12Richard Maltby, “A Better Sense of History: John Ford and the Indians,” in The Book
of Westerns, eds. Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye (New York: Continuum, 1996), 35.
13
Ibid., 43.
14
Ibid., 37.
15
Stuart C. Aitken and Leo E. Zonn, “Re-Presenting the Place Pastiche,” in Place,
Power, Situation, and Spectacle: A Geography of Film, eds. Stuart C. Aitken and Leo
E. Zonn (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littleﬁeld, 1994), 6.
16
Keith and Pile, “Part 1,” 6.
17David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins ofCultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 254.
18
Ibid., 255, 257.
19
Tompkins, West of Everything, 76.
20
Ibid., 57, 74.
21
Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 99.
22
The movie couches the violence in more individualistic and emotional terms, as the
Comanche warrior Scar seeks revenge against the whites who murdered his family;
Ethan’s murderous revenge mission also places him on equal footing with the Native
American, while at the same time any legitimate grievance is elided.
23
Gallagher, John Ford, 329.
24
Maltby, “A Better Sense of History,” 39.
1
2

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25
See Richard Slotkin, Gunﬁghter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 464–65;
Gallagher, John Ford, 324.
26
Slotkin, Gunﬁghter Nation, 462.
27
Ibid., 154–55.
28
Alan Le May, The Searchers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954).
29
For a revealing reading of the character of Ethan in the novel, the script, and the ﬁnished movie, see Arthur M. Eckstein, “Darkening Ethan: John Ford’s The Searchers(1956) from Novel to Screenplay to Screen,” Cinema Journal 38. 1 (Fall 1998): 3–24.
Eckstein’s research shows that not only is the character of Ethan made much more negative (violent, racist) in the transition from novel to script, but also Ford introduced signiﬁcant changes during ﬁlming to further demonize Ethan’s character.
30
Gallagher, John Ford, 327.
31
Slotkin, Gunﬁghter Nation, 468.
32
Ibid., 469.
33
Douglas Pye, “Double Vision: Miscegenation and Point of View in The Searchers,”
in Book of Westerns, Cameron and Pye, 229.
34
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (NewYork: Vintage, 1996), 235.
35
The legal convention of “hypodescent” in U.S. racial categorization in which a person with “one drop” of African American blood cannot be considered white, even if amajority of the person’s ancestors are white. For a thorough examination of the onedrop rule including its history and in current debates, see Christine B. Hickman, “The
Devil and the One Drop Rule: Racial Categories, African Americans, and the U.S.
Census,” Michigan Law Review, no. 95 (1997): 1161.
36
Maltby, “A Better Sense of History,” 41.
37
Slotkin, Gunﬁghter Nation, 347.
38
Ibid., 348.
39
Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 115.
40
Ibid., 120. This kind of tension is also used to excess in countless horror movies, inwhich the heroine realizes that a killer is stalking her just outside the house.
41
William H. Chafe, The Unﬁnished Journey: America Since World War II, 3rd ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 109.
42
Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (NewYork: Basic, 1988), 3–5.
43
Slotkin, Gunﬁghter Nation, 472.
44
Chafe, Unﬁnished Journey, 109.
45
Ibid., 107.
46
Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity”; May, Homeward Bound.
47
Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 235.
48
Pye, “Double Vision,” 234.
49
Ibid., 233.
50
Slotkin, Gunﬁghter Nation, 471.
51
Peter Stowell, John Ford (Boston: Twayne, 1986), 131.
52
For an excellent analysis of the cinematic meanings associated with Wayne, see
Deborah Thomas, “John Wayne’s Body,” in Book of Westerns, Cameron and Pye, 75–87.
53
Gallagher reads Ethan’s change of heart as evidence that Ethan’s character is a symbol of the racist society, citing other characters including Laurie who endorse his plan
to kill Debbie. Thus he can interpret Ethan’s reversal of that decision as evidence thatwhite racist society can also change. This doesn’t account for Ethan’s departure at the

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end; in fact, according to this logic, Ethan would be welcomed into the home by the family that he has restored. See Gallagher, John Ford, 333.
54
Pye, “Double Vision,” 229.
55
Slotkin, Gunﬁghter Nation, 472.
56
Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 582.
57
Gallagher reads the doorway shot that begins The Searchers as a sign of sex: thedarkness of the womb, Ethan’s ambivalent feelings for Martha, who opens the door, butthat doesn’t explain the ﬁnal doorway shot as Ethan turns away; see Gallagher, John
Ford, 334–45.
58
Slotkin, Gunﬁghter Nation, 462.