I came across this article today on
The History Blog about the recent discovery and restoration of a silent picture starring Comanche and Kiowas. Starring in it were the son and daughter of the Comanche chief Quanah Parker.
The Daughter of Dawn, an 80-minute feature film, was shot in July of 1920 in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge near Lawton, southwest Oklahoma. It was unique in the annals of silent film (or talkies, for that matter) for having a cast of 300 Comanches and Kiowas who brought their own clothes, horses, tipis, everyday props and who told their story without a single reference to the United States Cavalry. It was a love story, a four-person star-crossed romance that ends with the two main characters together happily ever after. There are two buffalo hunt sequences with actual herds of buffalo being chased down by hunters on bareback just as they had done on the Plains 50 years earlier.
The rest of the article gives a history behind the making of the movie, the storyline, key actors and their roles, its loss and discovery as well as identification of a tipi shown in key scenes.
Here is a link to the first ten minutes of the film.
http://youtu.be/pVU3L39cU8s
