Getting back to LeMay's work uncovers various nuances to the story. It is interesting to view the tale as an evolving mythology of competing source material. Allowing the recorded history, LeMay's work, and John Ford's movie to speak in-light of one another enables a multidisciplinary look at the intersection of mytho-reality and how the two become enmeshed in our conceptions of self and experience. While Amos (alternately Ethan) Edwards and Martin Pauley may have never walked the Earth in a traditionally western (cultural, not genre) sense, we can compare their characterizations between novel and film with one another. Though it may seem mistaken to compare the two, in attempts to find the true Amos/Ethan Edwards, how we make sense of such competing personas can offer insights into ourselves and competing mediums of art (among other issues). The characters' descent from a historical account of the search for Cynthia Parker only complicates, and enriches our sense of their place and actions.
Looking for an absolute grounded, tangible center for this conception of an evolving reality will inevitably come up short. However, our sense of discussion amongst texts enables for differing modes of truth to revolve around a central place, which itself must be empty. This is not a denigration of such an arrival: how do we delineate the absolute central aspect of any entity's identity, without which all the surrounding phenomena would be something different? The discussion which takes place within our interpretations will likely never be entirely settled. Edwards and Pauley can continue to live, grow and change in our minds and with ourselves. If the observer co-creates the world s/he inhabits, then this fluid discussion allows for the continual re-creation of the world, and the subsequent novel generation of opportunity and contingency. The frontier of the Texas High Plains is now - and not what it was before Ford's movie, or LeMay's work. How it is interpreted implicates a real change in the here and now. What is done will be owned, reinterpreted, appropriated, understood and misunderstood; to each his own. Faulkner was right: "The past is not dead. It's not even past."
