Go Bloody West: Blood Meridian

Abstract

Blood Meridian, Or the Evening Redness in the West is a queer piece of fiction painstakingly researched from the southwest Mexican-American wars spilling across national treaties toward The Border Trilogy taking place a century later. The main documentary sources seem General Samuel E. Chamberlain’s My Confession, John Woodhouse Audubon’s Audobon’s Western Journal, 1849–1850, and Mayne Reid’s The Scalp-Hunters. In far west tone, prairie desert locale, horseback vigilante character, marauding violence, and big sky cataclysm, Blood Meridian departs from woodland hill country, as its main character leaves Tennessee at fourteen for the wild west. So, too, McCarthy divorced his second wife and left Knoxville for good in 1976, moved to El Paso, Texas, and quit drinking. He learned Spanish and road-researched southwest history, publishing Blood Meridian nine years later.

He was broad-shouldered and deep-chested with a clear steady blue eye.

—Captain John Fremont on Kit Carson