Author Alan Le May's surviving research notes indicate that the two characters who go in search of a missing girl were inspired by Britton Johnson, an African-American teamster who ransomed his captured wife and children from the Comanches in 1865.[17] Afterward, Johnson made at least three trips to Indian Territory and Kansas, relentlessly searching for another kidnapped girl, Millie Durgan (or Durkin), until Kiowa raiders killed him in 1871.[18]
Several film critics have suggested that The Searchers was inspired by the 1836 kidnapping of nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker by Comanche warriors, who raided her family's home at Fort Parker, Texas.[19][20] She spent 24 years with the Comanches, married a war chief, and had three children (one of whom was the famous Comanche Chief Quanah Parker), only to be rescued against her will by Texas Rangers. James W. Parker, Cynthia Ann's uncle, spent much of his life and fortune in what became an obsessive search for his niece, much like Ethan Edwards in the film.
In addition, the rescue of Cynthia Ann, during a Texas Ranger attack known as the Battle of Pease River, resembles the rescue of Debbie Edwards when the Texas Rangers attack Scar's village. Parker's story was only one of 64 real-life cases of 19th-century child abductions in Texas that author Alan Le May studied while researching the novel on which the film was based.
The ending of Le May's novel contrasts to the film's, with Debbie running from the white men and the Native Americans. Marty, in one final leg of his search, finds her days later, only after she has fainted from exhaustion.
In the film, Scar's Comanche group is referred to as the Nawyecka, correctly the Noyʉhka or Nokoni,[21] the same band that kidnapped Cynthia Ann Parker. Some film critics have speculated that the historical model for the cavalry attack on a Comanche village, resulting in Look's death and the taking of Comanche prisoners to a military post, was the well-known Battle of Washita River, November 27, 1868, when Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer's 7th U.S. Cavalry attacked Black Kettle's Cheyenne camp on the Washita River (near present-day Cheyenne, Oklahoma).[22] The sequence also resembles the 1872 Battle of the North Fork of the Red River, in which the 4th Cavalry captured 124 Comanche women and children and imprisoned them at Fort Concho.
