SOURCE: Sepich, John Emil. “‘What Kind of Indians Was Them?’: Some Historical Sources in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” Southern Quarterly 30, no. 4 (summer 1992): 93-110.

[In the following essay, Sepich documents the historical context of Blood Meridian, particularly relying on General Samuel Emery Chamberlain's memoir My Confession.]

A number of critics have remarked that Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is based on “history.”¹ In fact, the dust jacket of the novel's hardcover edition states flatly that Glanton, Holden and “a number of their followers … actually existed, and various accounts of their exploits can be found in chronicles of the period.” An under-informed reading of Blood Meridian is comparable to the kid's question to Sproule, just after their filibustering expedition to Sonora has been devastated by an Indian attack: “What kind of indians was them?” (56). In some ways, the assailant's name hardly matters. But readers of historical novels expect to know such names, to know background information and relationships.² Because McCarthy's story unfolds in a relatively forgotten mid-nineteenth century some thirty years in advance of cowboys, trail drives and rail heads in the Southwest, and because his protagonist aligns himself, for better or worse, with professional scalphunters, a glance at the historical record from which McCarthy draws for settings and characters in Blood Meridian can provide context needed for a reader's appreciation of the novel, and can provide a glimpse not before possible of McCarthy at work translating “bare historical facts” into “something rich and strange.”³

Cormac McCarthy's gangleader is, indeed, a historical figure:

The identity of [the] regions [between El Paso and Chihuahua City] with the names of certain stormy characters supports the law of the survival of the fittest. Among the hardiest of these persons were certain Apache chiefs and scalp hunters like Captain Santiago Kirker, Captain John Joel Glanton, Major Michael H. Chevallie, Major J. S. Gillett, Colonel Jaquin Terrazas, and Captain Juan de Mata Ortiz.

(Smith, “Indians” 38)⁴

John Glanton is found as a character in Jeremiah Clemens's 1856 romance Bernard Lile (226-29). As recently as 1956 he appeared in the pages of Samuel Chamberlain's long-lost personal narrative of the late 1840s, My Confession (39-40, 259-97).⁵ His name punctuates any number of histories of the mid-nineteenth-century Southwest, and even when nameless his legend is unmistakable:

[D]isplaced emigrants … [were] … turning into horse thieves, gamblers, and even murderers. One set up a business killing Apache Indians and selling scalps to the Mexican government for two hundred dollars each, and collecting two hundred and fifty for each prisoner. If Indians were scarce, he even killed Mexicans to profit from their scalps.

(Horgan 787)

His tale is unsettling, his misfit excess horrifying.

The Comanches had moved eastward into what would be north central Texas at least a hundred years before the Anglos began their settlements. They had come for the buffalo, and for the area's convenient access to trails southward into Mexico (Smith, “Comanche Invasion” 4-8). John Hughes describes them as “uncompromising enemies” (131). Annual trips into Chihuahua, as far south as Zacatecas, provided the Comanches with Mexican horses, livestock and slaves, all of which could be traded to more northern Indian tribes, and with Anglo traders on the Arkansas river:

For [the] decade [of the 1840s] columns in gazettes of north Mexican states overflowed with pitiful tales about Indians sweeping away unfortunate persons and confirm what one historian of the Comanches (Rupert N. Richardson) has described as “the most horrendous holocaust ever enacted against a civilized people in the Western World.” In exchange for their staples of trade, they received from the civilized people cloth, paints, rifles, powder, lead, knives, guns, and iron from which to make arrow and lance points. Eastern tribes moved by the United States government to the Indian Territory sold many of their government-issued rifles to Comanches for five dollars each. Mexican authorities complained about American traffic with these Indians and also saw the Yankee image behind Apache raids.

(Smith, “Indians” 41)

During the time in which Blood Meridian is set, the Comanches were following an established economic pattern based in part on the productivity of the Mexicans, but more recently fueled by what Ralph A. Smith calls “a taste for European manufactures” (“Mexican” 102-03). The Indians at this time also found swelling numbers of westward-bound caravans of gold seekers. “As the Forty-niners swarmed across the vast vacancies of west Texas, there were hardly enough warriors to go around, but the Indians did the best they could” (Sonnichsen 130).

The decade of the 1840s had seen the northern Mexican State of Chihuahua, in its attempt to break the cycle of Indian incursions, hire Anglo aliens to kill the raiders. James (don Santiago) Kirker, in particular, brought hundreds of “proofs” of the deaths of Indians and thousands of head of livestock to Chihuahua City during the first half of the decade.⁶ “Proofs”: that is, the scalps of the Indians, “receipts.” James Hobbs, a professional Indian hunter when with Kirker's gang, took scalps throughout his life. Of one later instance he wrote: “We scalped the Indians, though some of the party said it looked barbarous; but I kept on scalping, saying that business men always took receipts, and I wanted something to show our success” (409).⁷ Smith quotes Marcus Webster explaining to “those of posterity who considered scalping a ‘grewsome business … that it was a war necessity’” (“‘Long’ Webster” 106).⁸ In the absence of instantaneous electronic communication, in the absence of a photographic craft streamlined enough to travel with the band of hunters, “evidence” of the death of an Indian rested on a hunter's producing a scalp as an indication that a most-dear aspect of the Indian had been taken from them. And an Indian's scalp was dearer than is immediately obvious. Richard Dodge described “two ways in which the Indian soul can be prevented from reaching [its] paradise”:

The first is by scalping the head of the dead body. Scalping is annihilation; the soul ceases to exist. This accounts for … the care they take to avoid being themselves scalped.

Let the scalp be torn off, and the body becomes mere carrion, not even worthy of burial.

The other method by which an Indian can be cut off from the Happy Hunting Grounds is by strangulation.

Should death ensue by strangulation, the soul can never escape, but must always remain with, or hovering near the remains, even after complete decomposition.

(101-03)

The scalp is both a neutral “proof” of an Indian's capture, given the stipulation that the scalp must show the crown of the hair (and in some cases, for further specificity, the ears), and an emotional “proof” of the Indian's death, given the lengths to which an Indian would go to protect against this disfigurement (Smith, “Comanche Sun” 39). Traveling with Wild Tom Hitchcock to meet Glanton's gang, Chamberlain witnessed an incident that demonstrates one Indian's desire to keep his scalp:

The wounded warrior presented a ghastly sight, he tried to call his pony to him, but the affrightened animal stood at a distance, snorting in terror. The savage then gave a wild startling yell, and by his hands alone, dragged himself to the brink of the deep barranca, then singing his death chant and waving his hand in defiance towards us he plunged into the awful abyss.

“Cincuenta pesos gone to h—l, muchacho,” cried Tom. “The doggone mean red nigger done that thar, to cheat us out of his har!”

(263-64)

Chihuahua not only paid scalp bounties to licensed alien parties, but also to peon guerilla bands who found that the government payment on a single scalp exceeded the amount which a gang member could earn by hard labor in a year (Smith, “Scalp Hunt” 125). Even for the Anglos, the money was attractive. Pay as a private in the United States Army at about that time averaged about fifteen dollars a month, when bonuses were included (Nevin 24). A group of Indian hunters averaging about fifty men and paid two hundred dollars a scalp would have to bring only four scalps into Chihuahua City in order to exceed the army's rate of pay, and for work not much more hazardous than the army's. Kirker's group was known to have killed as many as two hundred Indians on a single trip, bringing in one hundred and eighty-two scalps. Taking the averages, this is sixty times the amount the men would have earned in other employment. At one point, Chihuahua owed James Kirker $30,000 (Smith, “King” 30). Chihuahua was desperate to have the Comanche invasions stopped. Aliens, peons, even some Indians, were paid by the scalp for their contribution to Chihuahua's protection (Richardson 202).⁹

The New York Daily Tribune notes on 1 August 1849 that:

The Government of Chihuahua has made a bloody contract with an individual named Chevallie, stipulating to give him a bounty of so much per head for every Indian, dead or alive, whom he may secure. The terms of this atrocious bargain are published in the Mexican papers, which, to their credit be it said, denounce them as inhuman and revolting. The Chihuahuans themselves are disgusted with the treaty.

(1)

Michael Chevaille had been a Texas Ranger and a volunteer in the Mexican War. On his way to California for the gold, and out of money, he took a scalp contract with Chihuahua on 27 May 1849 (Wharton 34-37). The “inhuman” aspects of such a job apparently did not stop him from applying for a license, nor John Glanton either, as he also contracted with Chihuahua on 27 June of the same year (Smith, “Poor Mexico” 90-91). Thus, Captain Glanton filled a void, did the thing the state hired him to do.

The scalphunters' business, though, is thought to have reached a “peak” in late 1849 and early 1850 (Smith, “Scalp Hunter” 20). A “depletion” of the number of Indians venturing into Mexico, due in part to Chihuahua's willingness to pay for the scalps of women and children (though at a rate below that of warriors), seems to have occurred (Smith, “Scalp Hunter” 21; “Comanche Sun” 44).¹⁰ Chihuahua's desire for an end to Indian incursions, signaled to all in the fabulous amounts of money involved, had stretched to the breaking point the state's ability to account for the origins of scalps. Chihuahua had a large Indian population antedating settlement, as well as mestizo population, whose hair was within the averages of Comanche color and texture. Fighting and farming Indians looked about the same, if one limited one's attention only to their hair. Scalpers found Chihuahua's “problem” of identifying hair to be to their benefit. A temptation thus arose in Chihuahua for the Anglo alien, a temptation to which John Glanton, historically, succumbed.

Glanton's “second in command,” and Blood Meridian's most imposing character, Judge Holden, is also historically verifiable, but only through Samuel Chamberlain's My Confession, a personal narrative unknown until its publication in 1956.¹¹ Chamberlain, later a decorated Union general in the Civil War, had entered the nineteenth-century Southwest as a private during the war with Mexico, and his adventures during the 1846-1848 conflict comprise the bulk of My Confession. War Department records list him as an army “Deserter” as of 22 March 1849 (Chamberlain 4). He had met Holden as he joined Glanton's gang of scalphunters in the process of this desertion (Chamberlain 259-97).¹² Little of Chamberlain's introduction of Holden is a surprise to McCarthy's readers:

The second in command, now left in charge of [Glanton's] camp, was a man of gigantic size called “Judge” Holden of Texas. Who or what he was no one knew but a cooler blooded villain never went unhung; he stood six feet six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression. His desires was blood and women, and terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name, in the Cherokee nation and Texas; and before we left Frontereras a little girl of ten years was found in the chapperal, foully violated and murdered. The mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed him out as the ravisher as no other man had such a hand, but though all suspected, no one charged him with the crime.

Holden was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico; he conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandango would take the Harp or Guitar from the hands of the musicians and charm all with his wonderful performance, and out-waltz any poblana of the ball. He was “plum centre” with rifle or revolver, a daring horseman, acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in Geology and Mineralogy, in short another Admirable Crichton, and with all an arrant coward. Not but that he possessed enough courage to fight Indians and Mexicans or anyone where he had the advantage in strength, skill and weapons, but where the combat would be equal, he would avoid it if possible. I hated him at first sight, and he knew it, yet nothing could be more gentle and kind than his deportment towards me; he would often seek conversation with me and speak of Massachusetts and to my astonishment I found he knew more about Boston than I did.

(271-72)

Interestingly, the complete book version of My Confession includes a black and white illustration of Chamberlain and Holden in the desert after the massacre—Holden with what appear to be eyebrows and a moustache (293), suggesting that it is Chamberlain's description of Holden's “face destitute of hair” which has been generalized by McCarthy into Holden's total, infant-like baldness. The cowardice Chamberlain observes in the man “‘Judge’ Holden” is not reflected in McCarthy's character judge Holden, though Blood Meridian's sustained interest in “deceptions,” if they are viewed as non-confrontational winning, may in fact be related to “cowardice.”

Of particular note in Chamberlain's introduction of his Judge are the words that “terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name, in the Cherokee nation and Texas.” “When bearing another name” seems a particularly apt point of departure for McCarthy's enhancement of the historical Judge Holden. Holden's ability to appear, disappear, reappear, in McCarthy's novel, an ability which tends to reinforce the reader's belief in his claims of a life which will never end, is first suggested in Chamberlain's mention of the Judge's routine change-of-name.¹³

The reader's next view of Holden in My Confession seems to inform at least two incidents in the novel:

Glanton proved that he was well fitted to be the master spirit of the fiendish band. Drinking deeply, he swore with the most fearful oaths that we were all sinners bound to eternal Perdition, that it was his mission to save us. He then knelt down and in well chosen words prayed with all the fervor of a hard shell Baptist for the salvation of all. Suddenly he sprang up and drawing his revolver opened fire on us right and left. One of the Canadians received a shot in the leg, as a gentle reminder to flee from the wrath to come. Judge Holden seized the madman in his powerful arms, laid him down and soothed him as a mother would a fretful child, and Glanton soon sank into a drunken sleep.

(274)

In Blood Meridian, at Jesus Maria, Glanton

in his drunkenness was taken with a kind of fit and he lurched crazed and disheveled into the little courtyard and began to open fire with his pistols. In the afternoon he lay bound to his bed like a madman while the judge sat with him and cooled his brow with rags of water and spoke to him in a low voice. … After a while Glanton slept and the judge rose and went out.

(191)

A second scene in the novel probably shaped by this passage from Chamberlain occurs as the idiot James Robert nearly drowns at the Yuma crossing. There, the judge

stepped into the river and seized up the drowning idiot, snatching it aloft by the heels like a great midwife and slapping it on the back to let the water out. A birth scene or a baptism or some ritual not yet inaugurated into any canon. He twisted the water from its hair and he gathered the naked and sobbing fool into his arms and carried it up into the camp and restored it among its fellows.

(259)

When the novel's gang rides through “sandstone cities in the dusk” (113) on their way to the mines of Santa Rita del Cobre, another set of Chamberlain influences may be discerned. Riding with the gang in search of Cibola, Chamberlain found the “golden mirage” of El Dorado, which “for three hundred years haunted the misty frontiers of Spanish America” (Lister 133):

We sat in silence gazing on this realization of our hopes, when the mocking laughter of Judge Holden broke the spell. “So, Glanton, this is El Dorado, is it? The city of gold and fair women! I wish you joy of the discovery—a city of sandstone built by dame nature!”

(275)

Looking back, the summit of the hill from which we first espied this El Dorado appeared crowned with a frowning fortress with plumed warriors on its walls! The illusion was perfect, yet it was only walls of marl with yuccas and cactus growing behind them.

Judge Holden mounted a rock for a rostrum and gave us a scientific lecture on Geology. The Scalp Hunters, grouped in easy attitudes, listened to the “Literati” with marked attention. The whole formed an assemblage worthy of the pencil of Salvator Rosa. Holden's lecture no doubt was very learned, but hardly true, for one statement he made was “that millions of years had witnessed the operation producing the result around us,” which Glanton with recollections of the Bible teaching his young mind had undergone said “was a d—d lie.”

(276)

The sequence of events and the characters' responses are similar in McCarthy's novel. The “sandstone cities in the dusk” in McCarthy almost immediately precede the judge's disquisition on “geological evidence” (108, 113, 116). And in both stories the judge's remarks are rejected on scriptural grounds, although in his phrase “a few would quote him scripture,” McCarthy declines to make the historical Glanton's religious upbringing a part of his fictional character's background.

Another of Chamberlain's Holden stories contributes to Blood Meridian's “geological evidence” section. On the gang's trip to the junction of the Colorado and Gila rivers, as they follow the Colorado River west, Holden advises Glanton that a particular route will be best. Once started on this path Chamberlain writes:

Judge Holden rode with me and stated that he knew that we would be obliged to retrace our steps, but that Glanton's plan gave him an opportunity of seeing the greatest natural wonder of the world, the unexplored Great Canyon of the Colorado, reported by hunters as a “cut through the plain from one to five miles in depth, and extending some three hundred miles.” As we rode along Holden, in spite of my repugnance of the man, interested me greatly by his description of the great cut and how it might have been formed. He also was fluent regarding the ancient races of Indians that at a remote period covered the desert with fields of corn, wheat, barley and melons, and built large cities with canals bringing water from rivers hundreds of miles distant. To my question “how he knew all this,” this encyclopaedian Scalp Hunter replied, “Nature, these rocks, this little broken piece of clay (holding up a little fragment of painted pottery such are found all over the desert), the ruins scattered all over the land, tell me the story of the past.”

(283-84)

The judge's statement in McCarthy that “Books lie,” but that God's “words” are spoken “in stones and trees, the bones of things” (116) echoes Chamberlain's story.

Chamberlain's depiction of Holden as a child molester, quoted in his introduction of the judge, is not his only notice of this depravity:

While I was sketching an uproar arose in the village caused by Holden's seizing hold of one of the girls and proceeding to take gross liberties with her person. A dozzen cocked rifles brought to bear on him drove the brute from his prey, but the whole village was in ferment, and it seemed as if we stood a chance of being wiped out. However, Holden made some explanation to the crowd in Spanish that appeased them.

(287)

Chamberlain's closing thought, that Holden appeases his adversary in Spanish, and his remark that Holden “conversed with all in their own language” (271), are reflected throughout the novel, especially in McCarthy's scene of the judge's convincing Sergeant Aguilar, in Spanish, that the sale of guns from Speyer to the gang is not to be disturbed (84-85), and in his scene of Governor Angel Trias's banquet for the Anglos.

Of Angel Trias, governor of the Mexican State of Chihuahua who hired Glanton for scalp hunting, McCarthy writes that he “had been sent abroad as a young man for his education and was widely read in the classics and was a student of languages” (168). A similar description of Trias is given by John Russell Bartlett, who was in charge of a United States Boundary Commission in 1851-53 which surveyed the eventual border between the United States and Mexico in advance of the Gadsden Purchase, and who published a thousand pages on his experiences:

General Trias, who was for several years Governor of the State of Chihuahua, is a fine gentleman of large wealth and fine accomplishments. After receiving his education he went to Europe, where he spent eight years travelling in various parts, although he remained most of the time in England and France. He is well versed in several of the European languages, and speaks English with great correctness. Of English literature he told me he was very fond; and he considered that no native appreciated the beauties of Shakspeare and Milton better than he. With Addison and the belles-lettres writers of England he was also familiar.

(2:426)¹⁴

It is little wonder that the judge sits at Trias's right hand “and they at once fell into conversation in a tongue none other in the room spoke at all saving for random vile epithets drifted down from the north” (169). Tobin says in the novel that Holden “speaks dutch” and that “Him and the governor they sat up till breakfast and it was Paris this and London that in five languages, you'd have give something to of heard them” (123).

McCarthy stresses the judge's erudition by contrasting with it the ignorance of the rest of the scalphunters, departing from his historical source to do so. At the fictional banquet:

Patriotic toasts were drunk, the governor's aides raising their glasses to Washington and Franklin and the Americans responding with yet more of their own country's heroes, ignorant alike of diplomacy and any name at all from the pantheon of their sister republic.

(169)

This detail springs from Bartlett's mention that at a dinner given in his Boundary Commission's honor, hosted by General Trias:

Patriotic toasts were drunk, and among those given by the Mexicans were Washington and Franklin. In return we gave the heroes of the Mexican revolution, Iturbide, Hildalgo, Allende, and Jiminez.

(2:427)

McCarthy's adaptation of Bartlett's detail underscores the gang's ethnocentrism, and so distances his reader from them.

John Woodhouse Audubon, a son of artist John James Audubon, traveled the Southwest at mid-century, keeping a journal, and is the apparent source for the Tarot reading tent show which travels with McCarthy's gang to Janos (89-99). Audubon's 13 June 1849 entry at Cerro Gordo describes a similar troupe:

Here we were visited by a member of a Mexican travelling circus, who asked our protection as far as El Valle, which we promised them. The party consisted of five, one woman and four men. The lady rode as we used to say in Louisiana “leg of a side,” on a small pacing pony; the two horses of the ring carried only their saddles, two pack mules, four small trunks, and four jaded horses the rest of the plunder. The four men went on foot, driving the packs and continually refitting and repacking, the other three riding. One man had two Chihuahua dogs about six inches long, stuffed in his shirt bosom, another a size larger on the pommel of his saddle. A second man was in grand Spanish costume, on a small but blooded grey horse, with a large dragoon sword on his left, and a Mexican musket made about 1700, which would have added to an antiquary's armory. They told us they had everything they owned with them, so that if alone, and attacked by the Apaches, whom we hear of continually but never see, their loss would be a very serious one to them.

(100-01)

The Mexican party traveled with Audubon for several days, and he later writes:

Our circus party left us [at El Valle on 17 June:] the woman who was really the queen of the show came to thank us for our protection, which she did most gracefully, and gave us a courteous invitation to her show and fandango, the termination to every Mexican entertainment, wedding, christening, and even battle. I could not go, but several of the party did, and pronounced the senoritas quite good looking.

(102)

Audubon's account contains none of the ominous quality of Black John Jackson's performance with the Gypsies in Blood Meridian (99), but the relentless winds that contribute so dramatically to the atmosphere of McCarthy's scene may derive from Bartlett's note that during his survey expedition “one of the tents was hurled from its fastenings [by a storm] and blown more than a hundred yards before it was arrested” (2:302).

The germ of the idea for McCarthy's scene of the “conducta” of quicksilver heading east into Jesus Maria, which Glanton's gang decimates (194-95), may also be found in Audubon. His entry for 14 July reads:

Everything used [in Jesus Maria] is brought from the Pacific side, quicksilver, irons, wines and liquors; even flour is sometimes brought, but most of that comes from Sonora which is ten days' travel to the east.

(121)

West of Jesus Maria on 28 July, Audubon writes that his party was delayed by an unusually long quicksilver train:

We did not leave camp until nearly noon, waiting for a train of one hundred and eighty-two mules packed with nothing but flasks of quicksilver; the usual length of trains is about forty to fifty, with six or eight men.

(129)

In the novel, Glanton displays no such patience. Angry at his losses in Jesus Maria, on treacherous mountain trails Glanton simply shoves past the pack-mules and “methodically rode them from the escarpment, the animals dropping silently as martyrs” (195).

Grannyrat's story of the Lipan mummy burials in Blood Meridian (77-78) can be found in the memoirs of the German doctor Adolphus Wislizenus, who traveled in the Southwest during the years of the Mexican War. Grannyrat, the veteran, recalls:

There was a cave down there [towards Saltillo which] had been a Lipan burial. Must of been a thousand indians in there all settin around. Had on their best robes and blankets and all. Had their bows and their knives, whatever. Beads. The Mexicans carried everything off. Stripped em naked. Took it all. They carried off whole indians to their homes and set em in the corner all dressed up but they begun to come apart when they got out of that cave air and they had to be thowed out. Towards the last of it they was some Americans went in there and scalped what was left of em and tried to sell the scalps in Durango. I dont know if they had any luck about it or not. I expect some of them injins had been dead a hundred year.

(77-78)

Wislizenus's description of a find in a cave, in the area between Chihuahua and Saltillo, is similar in detail if not in tone:

On the right hand, or south of us, a chain of limestone mountains was running parallel with the road. At the foot of a hill belonging to that chain, Senor de Gaba pointed out a place to me where some years ago a remarkable discovery had been made. In the year 1838, a Mexican, Don Juan Flores, perceived there the hidden entrance to a cave. He entered; but seeing inside a council of Indian warriors sitting together in the deepest silence, he retreated and told it to his companions, who, well prepared, entered the cave together, and discovered about 1,000(?) well preserved Indian corpses, squatted together on the ground, with their hands folded below the knees. They were dressed in fine blankets, made of the fibres of lechuguilla, with sandals, made of a species of liana, on their feet, polished bones, &c. This is the very insufficient account of the mysterious burying place. The Mexicans suppose that it belonged to the Lipans, an old Indian tribe, which from time immemorial has roved and is yet roving over the Bolson de Mapimi. I had already heard in Chihuahua of this discovery, and was fortunate enough there to secure a skull that a gentleman had taken from the cave. At present, I was told, the place is pilfered of everything; nevertheless, had I been at leisure, I would have made an excursion to it.

(69-70)

McCarthy's note that some of the mummies had been scalped foreshadows the introduction of Glanton's hunters only a few pages later in his book.

John Hughes, a soldier during the Mexican War, kept a journal which appears in several places to be another of Blood Meridian's sources, most strikingly in McCarthy's scene of the kid's experience in the mountains as he and Tate attempt escape from Elias's scouts. McCarthy's Anglos have “rolled in their blankets” to sleep in the foot-deep and still falling snow that night. The Mexican scouts are “five men and they came up through the evergreens in the dark and all but stumbled upon the sleepers, two mounds in the snow one of which broke open and up out of which a figure sat suddenly like some terrible hatching” (211). In Hughes, McCarthy could have found a mountain setting with men sleeping in falling snow, a consequent invisibility of the sleepers and a hint toward his scene's birth imagery:

Having no tents, the soldiers quartered on the naked earth, in the open air; but so much snow fell that night, that at dawn it was not possible to distinguish where they lay, until they broke the snow which covered them, and came out as though they were rising from their graves; for in less than twelve hours the snow had fallen thirteen inches deep in the valleys, and thirty-six in the mountains.

(70)

The Englishman George Frederick Ruxton, again a mid-nineteenth-century witness in the Southwest, writes, “The stranger in Mexico is perpetually annoyed by the religious processions which perambulate the streets at all hours” (Adventures 35). He continues:

A coach, with an eye painted on the panels, and drawn by six mules, conveys the host to the houses of dying Catholics who are rich enough to pay for the privilege: before this equipage a bell tinkles, which warns the orthodox to fall on their knees; and woe to the unfortunate who neglects this ceremony, either from ignorance or design. On one occasion, being suddenly surprised by the approach of one of these processions, I had but just time to doff my hat and run behind a corner of a building, when I was spied by a fat priest, who, shouldering an image, brought up the rear of the procession.

This passage presumably informs McCarthy's paragraph of the kid and other Chihuahua prisoners who observed, as they moved about their work in the streets of the city:

A small bell was ringing and a coach was coming up the street. They stood along the curb and took off their hats. The guidon passed ringing the bell and then the coach. It had an eye painted on the side and four mules to draw it, taking the host to some soul. A fat priest tottered after carrying an image. The guards were going among the prisoners snatching the hats from the heads of the newcomers and pressing them into their infidel hands.

(75)

The “annoyance” Ruxton describes may also contribute to the tension resulting in McCarthy's scene of the bar fight at Nacori (178-80), as this event is prefaced by a Mexican religious procession (177-78).

McCarthy's use of the unusual dialect word “thrapple” in the scene of Glanton's death (275) links him to Mayne Reid's 1850s romance The Scalp-Hunters. In a scene late in Reid's book, a Coco Indian, El Sol, a member of scalp-hunter Seguin's band, has killed an attacking Indian. A witness, one of the white scalpers, answers the main character's question about the outcome of the fight:

“How was it?”

“'Ee know, the Injun—that are, the Coco [El Sol]—fit wi' a hatchet.”

“Yes.”

“Wal, then; that ur's a desprit weepun, for them as knows how to use it; an' he diz; that Injun diz. T'other had a hatchet, too, but he didn't keep it long. 'Twur clinked out of his hands in a minnit, an' then the Coco got a down blow at him. Wagh! it wur a down blow, an' it wan't nuthin' else. It split the niggur's head clur down to the thrapple. 'Twus sep'rated into two halves as ef't had been clove wi' a broad-axe! Ef'ee had 'a seed the varmint when he kim to the ground, 'ee'd 'a thort he wur double-headed.”

(212-13)

“Hack away you mean red nigger,” Glanton says in McCarthy, “and the old man raised the axe and split the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple” (275).¹⁵ In addition to the obvious correspondences between passages, it is of note that Reid's “Coco” Indians are the Coco-Maricopas who inhabit the Gila River area only a short distance from McCarthy's Yumas (Eccleston 211; Chamberlain 287).

Although McCarthy worked extensively with nineteenth-century eye-witness sources, the twentieth-century historian J. Frank Dobie seems to have recorded the information on which one of McCarthy's characters' conversations is based. Relating the words of a western treasure hunter, Dobie writes:

I had my hat over my face so as to shut out the fierce light and was dozing off when all at once something aroused me. I think it was the sudden ceasing of the horses to graze. A grazing horse makes a kind of musical noise cropping grass and grinding it, and men out, with their lives depending on horses, often notice that music or the absence of it. Anyhow, when I raised up, I saw every animal with head up and ears pointed to the range of mountains we had last crossed. I looked too and saw a thin, stringy cloud of dust.

(282-83)

McCarthy makes from Dobie's observation on men and horses an analogy expressing the ex-priest Tobin's continuing sense of God's presence, no matter that his vocation in America is scalp-hunting. The kid asserts that he has never heard God's voice, and Tobin contradicts him:

At night, said Tobin, when the horses are grazing and the company is asleep, who hears them grazing?

Dont nobody hear them if they're asleep.

Aye. And if they cease their grazing who is it that wakes?

Every man.

Aye, said the expriest. Every man.

(124)

A bare fraction of the correspondences found between McCarthy's Blood Meridian and the literature, historical and contemporary, on the American Southwest, these few items nevertheless allow the “history” mentioned on his book's dust wrapper to be more knowledgeably approached. The sense of McCarthy's novel is fully available, for me, only with the recognition that the book is founded to a remarkable degree on the reports of firsthand observers traveling in the mid-nineteenth-century Southwest.

Many of the novel's scenes (the lottery of arrows, the bull's goring of James Miller's horse, Jackson's death in the river) are essentially found objects: available for explication (Shelby as articulate and romantic, the bull as a mythic creature, death by water), and yet an explication of any particular matter in the novel vies with the sense that McCarthy may have included many of the book's details out of a concern for (and, in fact, some need of) historical confirmation. If its historical base is overlooked, McCarthy's novel might appear as nothing more than three hundred pages of circumstantial evidence (all gory) to assert Judge Holden's claim of war's dominance as a metaphor in the lives of men.

Nothing can “be said to occur unobserved” (153) the lawyer in judge Holden, or, more relevantly here, a historian, might say. The wounded Shelby wants to hide from his fate at the hands of Elias's troops (208). When Tobin and the kid cross the desert west of the massacre, late in the book, and the “path” of their footprints, by which Holden trails them, is taken by the wind (296-97), yet their “fates” unshakably find all three.¹⁶ Fundamentally—and even to account for Holden's view that the kid's negligence contributes to his fellow gang members' deaths at the ferry (306-07)—observers, arriving by separate routes, are essential to the novel. Chamberlain, Bartlett, Audubon, Wislizenus, Reid, Ober, Smith, Dobie and what appear to be a host of sources, are such observers. McCarthy has gone out of his way to lock a great deal of Blood Meridian to them. Of the items here, source to novel, McCarthy's character Holden has undergone a minimal departure from the “history” which Chamberlain's narrative provides. Yet it is also in this diabolical character, ubiquitous, immortal, laced with arcane allusion, that McCarthy's genius at ordering his universal romance Blood Meridian is most apparent.

Notes

1. Arnold notes that both Glanton and Holden are “apparently historical figures” (Review 103). Mills writes that in the novel “all but a handful of the named characters are historical figures” (10), and Winchell proposes that “Blood Meridian is loosely based on history” (308; see also Witek 60). Bell, with a textual approach, does not touch on this point. Some of this “history” is presented in my masters thesis “Notes Toward an Explication of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” A revised and much expanded version of that work exists as “Notes on Blood Meridian.” Good historical information on Glanton is contained in the thirty-page “Appendix C” of Thomas D. Young, Jr.'s dissertation “Cormac McCarthy and the Geology of Being.”

2. A grasp of what is historically verifiable in Blood Meridian brings to light, for instance, the fact that eight of its characters are named after Tennesseeans: The Reverend Robert Green (Carroll 113); Governor Peter Burnett (Melendy 25; Burnett 1); Captain John Glanton (Woodward, “Side Lights” 7; Martin 142) though Glanton's birth is more properly placed in South Carolina (Chamberlain 268; Smith, “John Joel Glanton” 14); Doctor Able Lincoln (Woodward, Feud 26) though his birth is better placed in New York (Martin 138-39); Ben McCulloch (Samuel Reid 23); Lt. Cave Couts (Martin 128); General Patterson [also known as Anderson] (Foreman 336; Woodward, Feud 24); and Sarah Bourdette (Woodward, “Great Western” 4). Both filibustering William Walker and freebooting Henry Alexander Crabb, sources and analogs for the novel's Captain White, are also natives of Tennessee (Rosengarten ix; Forbes 7). Information of this sort necessarily qualifies the assertions that Blood Meridian is McCarthy's first novel set outside the South (Arnold, “Cormac McCarthy” 1036; Winchell 307), in that McCarthy's story surrounds his Tennessee “kid” with a good many others claimed to have his same Old South birthplace. No other state, in fact, is as well represented in this novel of the opening years of the American Southwest.

3. Dust jacket, Blood Meridian.

4. Much of the supporting documentation for this section is based on the works of historian Ralph A. Smith. His works are, of those I have seen, the only articles routinely based on both Mexican and United States documents of the period. This attention to the Mexican perspective, when taken with some evidence that McCarthy had seen at least one of Smith's bibliographies (that of “John Joel Glanton”), makes him the authority of choice here.

5. Besides Chamberlain, the best sources of information on Glanton, as McCarthy has written him, are Douglas Martin's Yuma Crossing (138-50) and Arthur Woodward's Feud on the Colorado (20-30). McCarthy read scores of books in order to write Blood Meridian; as an abbreviation of several hundred pages of the “Notes on Blood Meridian” manuscript: Chamberlain, himself youthful and compassionate (280, 288-89, 293), appears to be a historical analog, in many instances, of McCarthy's “kid,” as is Ruxton's character La Bonte (Life 73, 111). The historical massacre survivor William Carr's deposition supplies McCarthy with some details: for instance, the historical Carr, Blood Meridian's “Billy Carr” (263), takes an arrow in his leg escaping the ferry massacre, a wound analogous to the kid's (277, 308). Theodoro Goodman's letter (also quoted in Woodward, Feud) supplies information on David Brown's escape from the San Diego jail. George Evans notes Glanton's murder of a lone and “very aged squaw” (133; Blood Meridian 97-98). Jay Wagoner (306) provides McCarthy with historical verification for his unusual choice of an axe as the weapon with which to kill Glanton. And, among other parallels, Chamberlain's narrative (280-81) is McCarthy's source for his lottery of arrows scene (205-09). Glanton's use of a Bowie knife in Chamberlain (39-40) may inform Blood Meridian's scene of White John Jackson's death, and the knifing of Grimley at Nacori. Frederick Ober (287, ills. 286) supplies color-detail for McCarthy's “Serenos” (100, 103). John Russell Bartlett's sentences on floating mountains and “playas” (1:218, 2:371) are likely the origin of McCarthy's similar sentence (108, see also 46). Bartlett's Tucson meteorite (2:297-98, illus. facing 298) partly informs McCarthy's scene at Pacheco's blacksmith shop (240). David Lavender's book on western traders (98-99) probably assists McCarthy's description of Mexican “ciboleros” (120).

6. McGaw's is the only book-length biography of Kirker; Smith (“King”) and Brandes provide article-length information.

7. General Elias's troops had nine pairs of ears tacked to their cannon trucks when they met John Coffee Hays in 1849 (Greer 243). The tradition of “trophies and verifications” continues into the present day. Drinnon writes that “Once bagged, [the Viet Cong] were statistics fed into Westmoreland's computer, with their severed ears on occasion tied to the antenna of a troop carrier as trophies and verifications of the body count” (451). Also see McWhiney on southern troops beheading enemy dead during the Civil War (182).

8. Also worth considering is a twentieth-century interest in translating dead enemies into numbers (nineteenth-century “scalps”) in war. Lifton writes: “When at some future moment, ethically sensitive historians get around to telling the story of the Vietnam war … I have no doubt that they will select the phenomenon of the ‘body count’ as the perfect symbol of America's descent into evil. What better represents the numbing, brutalization, illusion (most of the bodies, after all, turn out to be those of civilians), grotesque competition (companies and individuals vie for the highest body counts), and equally grotesque technicizing (progress lies in the count) characteristic of the overall American crime of war in Vietnam” (Falk 25). The literature of “atrocities” in Vietnam seems consistent, in its language, with that of Glanton's “atrocities.”

9. Many of the most intelligent backed [the payment-for-scalps] scheme for dealing with the Indians, but others looked upon it with horror. The national government never sanctioned it. In this it followed a course similar to that of the government of the United States, which never bought Indian scalps; although many American states, counties, and cities did” (Smith, “Mexican” 102). Bourke notes an 1870s instance in which Indians found it necessary to carry the heads of slain criminals to General Cook for identification (220).

10. In Blood Meridian Glanton must deal with an absence of raiding Indians (148).

11. Life published an abridged version of Chamberlain in three installments in the summer of 1956, of interest to the reader for a color plate published of Chamberlain's watercolor of Sarah Borginnis (6 August: 72). The complete narrative, published in book form in the same year, includes the illustration in black and white (242).

12. My Confession concludes as Chamberlain exits the desert west of the Yuma Crossing within days after the massacre.

13. McCarthy's weaving of Tarot and Masonic symbolism into his story, and particularly into his Holden character, is explored in my essay, “The Dance of History in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.”

14. Bartlett's Narrative was published as two volumes in one binding. Page citations here refer first to volume (1 or 2) and then page.

15. The “mean red nigger” phrase McCarthy includes in this sentence is present in Chamberlain (264).

16. The fight in the novel's first chapter between the kid and Toadvine in Nacogdoches, on batboard walkways laid on mud, is, for me, a graphic representation of Holden's claim of intersecting, conflict-ridden destinies (330). Not all dancers take or long hold the center stage. The novel's dust jacket speaks of paths crossing and of fates: the setting for their fistfight is a very simple representation of that concept. Holden's murder of the kid at the jakes in the book's last chapter also occurs at the end of just such a path as had appeared in the opening of the book.

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