Quanah Parker, John Ford, Karl May, and Llano Estacado

Quanah was a Comanche warrior, and the son of Cynthia Parker, an Anglo women kidnapped by Comanches in the 1850s. That story certainly was part of the inspiration, 100 years later, for John Ford's The Searchers. The film makes many "10 Greatest Films of All Time" lists--including Martin Scorcese's. The critic and scholar Gerry Peary suggests The Searchers is perhaps "the closest we come to 'the great American film.'" 

 The photo was taken in 1910 on the Matador Ranch, on the Texas Panhandle. (The bluffs of  Llano Estacado are in the background in the photo) Those are Quanah's three wives in the buggy. I've just completed a novel set mostly in Germany 1919-38, but my characters--like many Germans of that era, including Einstein and Hitler--were obsessed with el llano, having grown up reading the fabulously popular Winnetou novels of Karl May.