after finishing Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian I was surprised to learn that not just the setting of the novel but also some specific characters and events had been adapted from historical sources
the novel’s Glanton Gang segment is populated by characters and events based on the 1856 memoir My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue by Samuel Chamberlain, a soldier, painter, and author who allegedly rode with the real-life John Glanton’s gang between 1849-1850.
a passage from Chamberlain’s memoir is also the source of the novel’s infamous Judge Holden character:
spoiler CW
The second in command, now left in charge of the 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 Fronteras 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 the 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 center” with a 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 else 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.[5]
while the memoir is the only primary source directly attesting to a historical Judge Holden, and admittedly uses an exaggerated literary style popular of the time, amateur historical researchers have still tried to identify candidates that may have been the man Chamberlain wrote about, or merely inspired him:
Blood Meridian is one of the best candidates in my mind for The Great American Novel. There’s something genuinely mythical in how it captures how, and by what kind of men, the USA was really created.
And McCarthy’s mastery of language. Christ. Makes me feel like I don’t speak anglo.
Still haunts me almost daily years after reading it.
