"The Searchers," the novel by writer Alan LeMay on which the film is based, is in turn based on a true story. The movie story of Debbie Edwards (played by Natalie Wood in the movie), the niece of Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne), who is kidnapped by Native Americans and grows up in their culture, was inspired by the real-life story of Cynthia Ann Parker, an 11-year-old young girl who was kidnapped by members of the Comanche tribe in Texas in 1836. Parker married a member of the tribe and had three children with him even as her uncle, James Parker, looked for her obsessively over eight years. However, it was US cavalry and Texas Rangers who finally found Cynthia Ann, 24 years after she was originally kidnapped, and brought her home. Cynthia Ann's son, Quanah, often spoke in favor of reconciliation between Native Americans and whites, and today the two sides of his family still meet at family reunions.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
