Episode X: War Is Your Trade
Blood Meridian & the American Civil War
1. As If They’d Never Been At All
In the final chapter of Blood Meridian, the Kid has metamorphosed from a teenager into a forty-five-year-old drifter that the narrator calls the Man and McCarthy’s narrative has leapt from the California of the early 1850s to the plains of north Texas in 1878, jumping the apocalypse of 1861-1865.
On the Texas plains, McCarthy’s protagonist meets an old buffalo hunter who tells him of the oceans of bison he first encountered when he came west after the Civil War and of how, in the span of thirteen years, those magnificent creatures have all but vanished:
“On this ground alone between the Arkansas River and the Concho there was eight million carcasses for that’s how many hides reached the railroad. Two year ago we pulled out from Griffin for a last hunt. We ransacked the country. Six weeks. Finally found a herd of animals and we killed them and come in. They’re gone. Ever one of them that God ever made is gone as if they’d never been at all” (330).
The hunter seems struck by the disappearance of these animals, but the reader isn’t. We know what happened to the bison.
In the years after the Civil War, men and their families flooded west. 700,000 Americans had died in the unspeakable carnage that shocked a divided nation from 1861-1865. The Southern States were in ruins, especially Virginia, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and both Carolinas—those last three because of the vengeance campaign of William Tecumseh Sherman.
The North had lost 365,000 military-age men; 300,00 more had been horribly maimed and disabled for life, many more bore psychological scars from the combat they’d seen.
For the able-bodied men who’d survived the horrors of modern warfare, the world looked like a drastically-different place. Seeking a new beginning, tens of thousands of veterans—Northern and Southern alike—began to make their way west.
Many were looking for redemption in a land unspoiled by war, but they ended up reenacting the same hell they’d witnessed at places like Shiloh, Antietam, and Cold Harbor.
These are the men who killed off the buffalo and drove Native People into a nightmarish existence on reservations.
It is interesting that McCarthy’s novel, certainly no stranger to bloodshed and horror, skips the American Apocalypse of 1861-65.
I’d like to take a look at what Blood Meridian passes over, focusing our attention on the McCarthy-esque Battle of Shiloh, then thinking about how traces of this terrible war are present in the book’s final chapter.
