The Landscape: The Bigger Picture

In nearly every representation of the west, one sees any number of various things that contribute to the symbolic nature of the landscape itself. The given presences of danger, the closeness of death, and the uncertainty of the frontier all contribute to the intangible masculine desire to go out and conquer it all. Be it out of choice or necessity, the American Cowboy, time and time again fulfills his destiny.

The movie opens up with a demonstration of just how vast and empty the landscape actually was. There was one house in sight, and people came in from far on the horizon, riding horses from a place that the human eye couldn't actually see. The men, rough from the land they attempted to take on, did so without remorse. There was dirt on their sun tanned faces, and their clothes discolored and ripped from the long days they spent working to conquer the frontier.

Most of The Searchers takes place in the desert of Texas where the two protagonist cowboys battle hunger, thirst, bullet wounds, and the anguish of defeat to arrive at a goal they do not know even exists. There is a lingering possibility that Debbie, their family member, is no longer living; in the back of their minds, there is the possibility that the years they are spending searching for her are a complete waste of time and ultimately they will hit a dead end.

Ethan, like every other man, craves and yearns for one thing over all the rest: power. Power lies in the hands of those who take it. "Nature implicitly possess- power, endurance, rugged majesty- are the ones that men desire while they live" (72). The two men may have went out to the land with two different goals, but they had the same rational, power. Martin wanted to find Debbie more than anything, but that was Ethan's secondary purpose. Ethan took on the risks of the wilderness to kill and harm as many Native Americans as he could to show that he was in-fact the ruler of the land.

The landscape itself shaped the man and who he was going to become. There was two contenders, the Cowboy, "whose hardness was one with the hardness of nature"(73), and the West itself; only one could win.