“That was the Judge the first ever I saw him”—The Origins of Holden1
In 1849, a twenty-year-old army deserter named Samuel E. Chamberlain joined John Joel Glanton’s gang of scalp hunters. Born in New Hampshire, raised in Boston, Chamberlain had run away from home at the age of fifteen and traveled west—much like the teenage runaway of McCarthy’s novel—eventually joining a volunteer unit and traveling to Texas where he enlisted with the 1st US Dragoons. Heading south to serve in the war currently raging between the United States and Mexico, he fought in the Battle of Buena Vista and a few other engagements, but went AWOL, and finally ended up with Glanton’s Gang.
Years after his experience in the American southwest, Chamberlain wrote a memoir entitled My Confession: The Recollections of a Rogue. This account would serve as the basis for Blood Meridian and was where McCarthy first encountered Judge Holden.
According to Chamberlain, who joined up with the scalp hunters in Frontreras, Mexico, Judge Holden was “second in command” of Glanton’s Gang. Chamberlain provides the following description of the Judge:
“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 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 [sic] blood and women, and terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name, in the Cherokee nation [now, the state of Oklahoma] and Texas; and before we left Frontreras a little girl of ten years was found in the chaparral, foully violated and murdered. The mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed him out as the ravisher2 as no other man had such a hand, but though all suspected, none charged him with the crime” (271).