Why The Beatles owe their success to Comanche Indians

The most powerful Indian tribe in American history

by Brian D. O’Leary

The Searchers was a huge film, starring John Wayne and directed by John Ford, and was named the greatest American Western by the AFI in 2008. It came in 12th on AFI’s 100 greatest movies of all time.

Set in the Llano Estacado of Texas and New Mexico, in the heart of “Comancheria,” Ford filmed the movie primarily in the Monument Valley of Arizona and Utah.

Shot in the relatively new VistaVision process, using 35mm film, the landscape shots are remarkable. Ford’s style influenced David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. A number of scenes in The Searchers went on to inform George Lucas, as well, particularly his Star Wars movies.

Ford requested, and was granted, a first-of-its-kind “making of” documentary to be filmed while the movie was in production. The finished program eventually aired on television as a promotional vehicle for the movie itself.

Let’s also be clear … the tender 21st Century populace was not the intended audience for this film. The Searchers deals with complex moral issues that most Americans are afraid to tackle. Today, such themes are generally dismissed out of hand as racist or something similar.

Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is an ex-Confederate soldier in this film…gasp! In 1868, he returns to his brother’s home in West Texas after several years away soldiering, and who knows what else.

A neighbor’s cattle are stolen soon after Ethan gets to the ranch. A few men, including Ethan, set out to recover the cattle, but find when they return home that a band of Comanches torched the Edwards ranch and home. Ethan’s brother Aaron, and Aaron’s wife and son, are found dead. Aaron’s two girls were abducted by the Comanche.

Soon, Ethan and others set out to pursue the raiders, finding the body of his eldest niece having been brutally murdered near the Comanche hideout.

The men eventually lose the trail of the Indians but come to find, a few years later, that 15-year-old Debbie, the late Aaron’s long-lost daughter, was now one of the wives of a Comanche chief, Scar.

Debbie, older and now played by Natalie Wood, says she wants to remain with the Comanche. Uncle Ethan is less than pleased with his niece’s “decision.”

The film then continues to its dramatic conclusion.

Many consider this John Wayne’s best acting performance.

Wayne’s catchphrase in the film, “That’ll be the day…” caused a couple young theatregoers in Lubbock, Texas—a principal modern city of the Llano Estacado—to go home and write a rock ‘n’ roll song.

Buddy Holly and bandmate Jerry Allison penned the track, recording it first in July of 1956 in Nashville. This version never charted, even though Holly was a budding star at this time.

Holly, Allison, and their new band called the Crickets re-cut the track in 1957 in Clovis, New Mexico. That’ll Be the Day soon reached number one on the charts.

Holly and his music were not only hugely influential in the contemporary American culture, but also in the history of rock ‘n’ roll. For, over in Liverpool, England, a quintet known as The Quarrymen—including future Beatles John, Paul, and George—cut their first demo recording in 1958, That’ll Be the Day.

The rest is history.

But the history-behind-the-history was on the southern plains of what is now mostly Texas.

The screenwriter for The Searchers, Alan Le May, wrote a novel of the same name, published in 1954, that was then adapted and turned into the John Ford film.

The surviving notes from Le May’s research suggest that the story may have been based on a man named Brit Johnson, a man who ransomed his wife and children from the Comanche in 1865 and then made it a point to search for other Americans kidnapped by Indians. Johnson, reported to be an African-American and a teamster by trade, was later killed by the Kiowa in one of the searching missions in 1871.

Another more famous story—amongst the 64 real-life cases of 19th century Texas child abductions Le May studied—was that of Cynthia Ann Parker, a bizarre tale that is explored in detail in S.C. Gwynne’s 2011 book Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History.

In 1836, a nine-year-old Cynthia Ann was kidnapped in a Comanche raid on her family home at Fort Parker, Texas that killed five men with two women and two other children captured.

The ages of the children—Cynthia Ann and the fictional Debbie—were about the same. Nothing much else is.

Parker was with the Comanche for 24 years until a band of Texas Rangers found her and brought her back to relatives near modern-day Dallas.

By that time, Cynthia Ann had married a Comanche chief and had three children, one of whom—Quanah—is considered by many as the “last Comanche chief.”

Cynthia Ann did not want to come back to “America.” She was, however, allowed to bring her daughter, Prairie Flower, but had to leave behind her two sons.

Prairie Flower died of pneumonia a few years after Cynthia Ann returned to her birth relatives and reportedly died a sad, grief-stricken woman at the age of 43.

Quanah Parker, on the other hand, being the leader of a band of what had by then dwindled to around 25,000 people and roughly 6,000 warriors, still gave the Union Army fits for years.

After the Union Army and its buffalo hunters killed off most of the Comanche food source—the plains buffalo—Quanah’s band of the Comanche surrendered in 1875.

Ultimately, Parker cooperated with the Army and federal agents, helping to settle the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation in what is now southwestern Oklahoma.

Quanah became wealthy as a cattle rancher and had bit parts in some early Westerns.

Gwynne writes:

“Quanah also had a curious and noteworthy friendship with Teddy Roosevelt. In March 1905 he rode in an open car in Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in buckskins and warbonnet, accompanied by Geronimo, two Sioux chiefs, and a Blackfeet chief. … A month later, Roosevelt traveled west on a special train to participate in a much publicized ‘wolf hunt’ on lands belonging to the Comanches, Apaches, and Kiowas in southwestern Oklahoma.”

The Comanche territory—Comancheria—was vast. This band of stone-age horsemen gave no quarter to Spanish, Mexicans, Texans, or Americans who intended to settle. Same for other bands and tribes of Indians.

Massacres, enslavement, and pillaging were widely used tactics.

California was settled well before the Texas frontier was closed, entering the Union in 1850. Oregon became a state in 1859. You usually had to take a northern overland route or sail around Cape Horn to get to the west coast, however.

Westward expansion from the 1830s to the mid-1870s through the southern plains was singlehandedly stopped by Comanche presence.

Thus, if the brutality and the wars between Comanches and Texans never occurred, John Wayne would never have uttered his famous line, Buddy Holly wouldn’t have had a hit record, and we wouldn’t be listening to the music of The Beatles today.