Don’t let craggy Central Texas mountains deter you from ‘News of the World’ By Joe Holley
I’m hoping you’ll see “News of the World,” the new Tom Hanks movie based on the award-winning novel of the same name by Paulette Jiles, a poet, novelist and memoirist who lives on a hilltop near Utopia in the Hill Country. The novel was a National Book Award finalist in 2016, and the movie likely will win awards, as well.
“News of the World” is the story of Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Hanks), a 72-year-old widower who makes a meager living by reading newspaper articles to paying audiences (a dime apiece) in frontier towns across North Texas. Born in Georgia, Kidd was a teenage private during the War of 1812 and was made a captain during the Mexican War. Before the Civil War, and before his wife’s death, he worked as a printer in San Antonio.
Parker and I followed the cattle trails near the creek and river. We stopped only once, when we flushed about twenty wild turkeys from the brush. As we walked on, Parker shared the version of the “battle” he’d been taught by the Comanche.
“Pease River was a Ranger-led massacre,” Parker told me. His great-great-grandfather Peta Nocona, he said, was nowhere near the action. “At the time, Nocona was with his teenage sons Quanah and Pecos and other warriors.” Nocona died several years later near the Antelope Hills in Oklahoma, Parker said. “He died of an infection.”
Parker, a Vietnam War vet, is also director of the Quanah Parker Society, headquartered in the nearby Hardeman County town of Quanah, named after his great-grandfather. His version of events definitively contradicts Ross’s story and accounts in history books. (The same account Ross provided DeShields also appears in John Wesley Wilbarger’s