Blood Meridian As a Guide

Fact in fiction? Looking at the 1850 Texas Scalphunting Frontier with Corrnac McCarthy's Blood Meridian as a guide. John Harley Gow B.A., University of Victoria, 2005 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of History. John Harley Gow, 2005 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This thesis may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without the permission of the author. 0 Abstract "Fact in fiction?" was begun in response to student responses to Cormac McCar- thy's Blood Meridian, as taught in Brian W. Dippie's 'American West", 2003. The class's dismissal of the novel as a mere violent fantasy launched an investigation indi- cating that McCarthy's 'violent fantasy' might just be an historically truer depiction of the 1850 Borderlands than was available in history surveys and texts. McCarthy's novel reveals a scalphunting enterprise that preyed on "Barbarous Indians," and turned lives into commodities in the form of scalp bounties. The perpetrators of this scheme were American, and the bounty money was sourced in Mexican treasuries. The scalphunting enterprise was played out on the Texas / Mexico borderlands, and Blood Meridian com- presses that history into a one-year narrative span. "Fact in fiction?" looks at Texas in 1850 through census records, travel accounts and a wide reading of secondary sources to present the historical context of those events, and make the case that a novel can be a primary source. Contents Abstract. ii . Contents. iii. Foreword. iv Preface. X. From Estevan to Bexar : Looking at History with Cormac McCarthv. Introduction. From fiction to fact? : Looking- at the Borderlands with Cormac McCarthv. 1. Chapter 1, From Tennessee to Texas : Down the Mississi~wiwith Cormac McCarthv. 8. Chapter 2. From Columbus to McCarthy : Building. a 'moving- box'. 3 2. Chapter 3, From Herodotus to Blood Meridan : "BarberingYythrouzh the apes. 55. Chapter 4. From Factual to Fictional :Who is 'real' in Blood Meridian? . 87. Chapter 5. From Naco~dochesto Castroville : Across 1850 Texas with the kid. 119. Chapter 6. From Bexar to Hell : ... and back : A brief look at Indian Texas. 184. Conclusions. From here to insecuritv : Looking. for fact in fiction. 205. Bibliography. 209. - - --- - - - -- - Foreword A: 'people' terms / language, aka ''politics". Yet the historian is obliged to choose: the use of language forbids him to be neutral.' E. H. Carr Perhaps the most overtly political act an historian can make, after choosing words, is to define them. In the interests of ready comprehension of the thesis of this paper, the following necessarily tendentious definitions are provided, as encountered in the text corpus. American. Refers to a citizen of the Republic of the United States of America. Citizen- ship was not for everyone however, and in 1850 American literally meant Anglo Saxon white, and male. Euroamerican. Refers to groups or individuals identified in source materials as "white", and also when referring to European / American institutions, practices and cus- toms. Usage of the term "white" to refer to Euroamericans is no more justifiable than using the colour designations black, red and yellow. However, this paper will respect the language of the times under consideration, and will not edit for language. Negro. Originally I used the signifier "African American." However, as my impres- sions of Texas in 1850 deepened, I realised that this term is ahistorical and completely obliterates the reality of the times. There were only a few free Negro in 1850 Texas, and they could not hold property without a special dispensation, they could not vote and they were not citizens. Slave. All of the diverse socio-genetic groups in Texas in 1850 took and held slaves, and commerce in slaves was a major part of Indian, Texican, and Texian economies. No specific ethnicity may be presumed when one encounters the term slave, and further iden- E. H. Carr, What is History? New York: Penguin Books, 1990 [1961]. v. tification will be provided when possible. Indian. Throughout this paper I will employ the term Indianb), after, without italics or quotation marks - to refer in general and collective terms to those peoples of the South- western plains of aboriginal or Native American genetic / cultural origins. Anywhere I refer to specific individuals or groups I will endeavor to identift them by their individual name and / or group appellation as would have been used on the ground in 1850s Texas.* The terms Apache(s) and Comanche(s) refer to large linguistic groupings we know today as nations - each nation included many smaller sociopolitical-cultural groups which were known as tribes, and which were in turn composed of family groupings known as bands. This naming system will be used herein as it most effectively conveys how 1850s Southwestern Indians groups functioned socially and economically. Apachean sub - groupings included the Lipan, Mescalero, Gila, Jicarilla, Paloma, and many other specific and highly differentiated tribes. It is worth noting here that these tribal names were often generated in complex interrelations with explorer / settler groups and were both linguistically and geographically sensitive. In other words, the term Gila Apache owes as much to Spanish perceptions and language as it does to Apachean ones. It is a given that, when this tribe - or some group that looked like this tribe - was identified by Spanish observers, they were first encountered on the Gila ~&er- these Eu- roamerican signifiers are then both context, and contact, sensitive. Given the intense state of flux that was Texas in 1850, there is no guarantee that Indian tribal names used herein bear any relation to the physical area in which they are en~ountered.~ Thanks as always to Val Napoleon for "on the ground" - this very useful phrase I endeavor to always keep in mind as an antidote in confronting the Marxist objection to cultural history as tending to exist entirely "in the air." Peter Burke, What is Cultural His- tory? (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2004): 23. ' An example of the naming phenomenon is given by Pekka Hamiilainen (in "The West- ern Comanche Trade Center: Rethinking the Plains Indian Trade System." Westm His vi. In justifying my usage of the term Indian, I would first note that, regardless of one's own politics, this is still the preferred self-identifjring term used by a majority of American Indians - one current exemplar being Philip J. DeLoria's Indians in Unexpected Places (2004), with its unapologetic usage by DeLoria, himself of "Dakota Sioux Heritage." Of course using Indians as an identifier does automatically, in the words of Michael Yellow Bird, identify one as a "European American colonizer," one of the "White-skinned people of European origins ... racial group" who so stupidly view all North American aboriginals as comprising "one racial group: Indian~.''~Yellow Bird conducted a poll of Indigenous Peoples academics as to "What terms(s) [of self-identifi- cation] do you prefer?" and found that of the nineteen respondents (out of 345 ap- proached) there were fifteen different responses, and that of those American Indian was a refer red.^ I will here confess that I regard the term Indians as a functionally useless fiction except when used as a signifier to explain Native / Newcomer interactions, and spe- cifically, European attitudes towards the indigenous peoples of the Americas where the term is absolutely indispensable. Secondly, in spite of many obvious cultural, physical, economic, social, linguistic, and political differences between Southern Plains aboriginal groups, one unifting term seems unavoidable, particularly since recorded accounts of 1850s Westers make clear tmical Quarter@ 29: Winter 1998 (485-513): 488.) "The southern route brought the Shoshones in contact with the Utes, who named them komantcia, and when the Spanish encountered them in 1706, they followed the Ute practise and called them Comanches." Michael Yellow Bird, "What We Want to be Called." (1 - 2 1) American Indian Quarter@ 23: 2 (Spring 1999): 3. Yellow Bird finds Charlton Heston, the NRA's celluloid Moses, to be a useful exemplar of a typical "European American colonizer." Op cit. 5 Yellow Bird's essay reveals some of the problems involved in a greater society's (America's) attempts to identify as a group (Indians) those who do not wished to be identified as a group (First Nations). He points out that one of the politically motivated as- pects of this attempt is the "threat to trust responsibility," which could conceivably re- sult in the federal government treating with Indians as individuals at the expense of economic benefits accorded to Indians groups at the treaty level (nations). vii. that they thought of all aboriginals as comprising and representing Indians. American Indians appear to have had no inclusive term for anyone outside their individual clan / family / tribal unit that acknowledged commonality, and Gila Apaches had no notion of, and therefore no term for, Indians generally until given one by Europeans. However, regardless of how Gila Apaches perceived themselves, they were regarded as Indians by the westering Europeans, and treated with accordingly. Genizaro(a)s. Detribalised Indians. Those indigenous people who either by choice or other sets of circumstances, including tribal decimation by disease and warfare, were found on the Borderlands existing outside what one thinks of as 'traditional' sociopolitical Indian groups. Texan (Texian). Refers to the non-aboriginal, and non-Spanish speaking settlers of Texas, and is generally synonymous in the ethnic sense with what the term American meant in the 1850s (i.e., white, "the accepted ante-bellum definition of the worP6). Po- litically, most Texans highly differentiated themselves from Yankee Americans, and would be solidly be on the Confederate side in the Civil War.

Load more