The Night Does Not End: Episode I

The Darkness Is Where We Shine

i. We Begin in the Dark.

In the dark of rural, 19th century, Tennessee. In the dark of the womb. An unnamed boy crouches beside his drunken father—a former schoolmaster—listening to the man tell him about a meteor shower in 1833, the year of this kid’s birth, the year of his first killing.

“Night of your birth. Thirty-three. The Leonids they were called. God how the stars did fall. I looked for blackness, holes in the heavens. The Dipper stove.”

The Kid, as he’s called, doesn’t express opinions. We are never granted access to his thoughts. He sees and he hears and he sometimes feels the textures of surfaces with his fingers, but he does not think or know—not as verbs in McCarthy’s sentences, anyway.

He runs away in 1847 at the age of fourteen and drifts south to New Orleans where he lives above a tavern and where, for the first time, he is shot. Here, McCarthy slyly introduces a theme that will run through the novel as women and People of Color care for the Kid, saving his life [a group of Black, Native, and Latino cowboys rescue him on p. 21 and the Dieguenos save him on p. 312]: “He lies in a cot in the upstairs room for two weeks while the tavern keeper’s wife attends him. She brings his meals, she carries out his slops. A hardlooking woman with a wiry body like a man’s. By the time he is mended he has no money to pay her and he leaves in the night” (4) and sets out for Texas.

McCarthy (born in 1933, exactly a hundred years after the Kid) also made this journey from Tennessee to Texas (he did so in the late 1970s) and seems to have found the change of location downright transformational. So does the Kid: “Only now is the child divested of all he has been. His origins are becomes remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world’s turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man’s will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay” (4-5).

“Terrains so wild and barbarous”? What is McCarthy talking about?

ii. “Powder burn’em, boys!”—Some Historical Context for 1840s Texas.

In 1836, at the Battle of San Jacinto, Sam Houston annihilated the Mexican army led by General Santa Anna and won independence for the seven-week-old Republic of Texas, but his new nation had inherited Mexico’s Comanche problem.

Anglos had never seen anything like the Comanche, the fiercest light cavalry to ever ride upon the earth. It is not enough to say that they were master horsemen. Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest were all master horsemen and any Comanche teenager could’ve ridden circles around these generals.

Imagine an equestrian who rides with absolute wizardry and can do so without benefit of stirrups, saddle, reins, bit, or bridle. Combine this virtuosity with the talents of a professional acrobat and then further combine it with that of an expert archer who can wield his bow and arrow from horseback. Stack these skills atop each another, add reckless bravery and a Navy SEAL’s ability to shoot, move, and communicate (but without benefit of modern technology) and you might approach an idea of what the Comanches were capable of and why the Spanish, Mexicans, Apache, and now Texans feared them as they might a troop of Valkyrie.

Comanche is a Ute word meaning “enemy” or, more precisely, “anyone who wants to fight me all the time.” The latter is certainly an accurate description of how other Plains tribes felt about the Comanche—particularly the Lipan-Apache, sworn enemies of the Comanche, who’d been driven to the brink of extinction by these fierce horse warriors—but the Comanches called themselves Nermernuh: “the People.” That name can also be translated as the “Human Beings” and the connotation shouldn’t be lost on us: if you were Comanche, you were human. But if you weren’t Comanche…

They gave no quarter and asked for none. Once a small, bullied tribe, they’d been driven south by the Lakota and hunted by other Indigenous Peoples. They were shorter of stature than other Plains Indians and there were never more than 20,000 of them on the planet at any given time.

Then, in the 1700s, the Comanche found a much-needed friend. Horses, not native to the Americas, were brought to the New World by the Spanish. In time, enough of these animals escaped captivity and reproduced in the wild that horse herds began to wander and graze on the North American Plains.

Which was where the Comanche found them. There has never been a more auspicious meeting between animal and man. Soon, the Comanche were not only riding; they were raiding the communities who’d once attempted to enslave or annihilate them, performing feats from horseback that witnesses said had to be seen to be believed. They were like circus riders who would festoon any stranger they met with arrow shafts. Their policy toward the enemies they captured is well-documented. The Comanche tortured, then killed the men; raped, then killed the women; enslaved the children or adopted them into the tribe.

Before the Texas Revolution, there were few quarrels between the Anglo-Texan and Comanche. Noah Smithwick, a blacksmith and Texas Ranger, decided to act as a kind of ambassador and went to live with the tribe for three months in the summer of 1837, returning to his friends with beads and moccasins, an impressive new vocabulary, and a number of wild stories. Smithwick said that, after living in a Comanche camp, he “felt mean and almost ashamed of belonging to the superior race when listening to the recital of wrongs [the Comanche] had suffered at the hands of my people.” [His phrase “superior race” is used with great sarcasm].

But after the Revolution, the sentiments of the Comanche and the Anglo-Texan began to shift. It’s as if the Comanche suddenly realized a vast new power would soon be encroaching on their ancestral hunting grounds, one with numbers they could hardly imagine.

The Comanche were right to be alarmed; their entire way of life revolved around the buffalo, a migratory animal which provided their food, clothing, shelter, sport, and the majority of their material culture. The Comanche never built structures out of stone, never made pottery, had no written language. Their lives were entirely nomadic.

Anglo incursion meant the rapid dwindling of the Comanche’s primary source of food and shelter, so the Comanche did what they’d done since they’d made friends with the horse: they declared war on these white men trespassing on their ancestral hunting grounds.

 Anglo-Texans would not be outdone when it came to declarations of violence. They formed ranging companies to ride out and meet the Comanche threat—these companies would soon be known as the Texas Rangers, a paramilitary unit that was also imbued with the powers of law enforcement. There is no other organization like this in American history, and the Rangers have a long and storied tradition, one that gleams with the light of folklore, legend, and myth.

The early engagements between the Texas Rangers and Comanche resulted in lopsided victories for the Native warriors. There are a number reasons for this two of which are weapons technology and tactics. As it turned out, the Anglos were deficient in both.

The Rangers of this early period were expert marksmen with the Kentucky long-rifle, a weapon which, as its name suggests, can’t be fired or reloaded from horseback. Encountering Comanche on the plains, Rangers would stop, dismount their horses, and take firing positions on the ground.

This was a mistake. The rifled musket of the 1830s is a very capable weapon in the right hands, lethal out to 200 yards—a sharpshooter might push that distance to twice the range—but it takes a skilled operator to reload in under a minute. And while a competent shooter can hit a stationary target two football fields away, no attacking Comanche was ever stationary.

A Comanche war party rode into battle at a gallop, wheeling their horses to the right to favor their bow arms.

Imagine the plight of the Ranger, having just dismounted his horse, staked the reins, and proned out on the prairie to take aim on a charging enemy. The Comanche horseman are 150 yards away, moving swiftly on their painted ponies, already whooping, lances glinting in the sun. You draw a bead on one of these horsemen. You have to lead your target which means guessing how fast he’s moving. You exhale a breath, get down on a good empty lung and pull the trigger, but instead of a bang you hear only a metallic snap. You realize you forgot to splash the pan with powder. You disentangle your powder horn from your belt, pull the stopper, cock the hammer again and pour gunpowder onto the steel pan, your hands starting to shake with nerves.

You locate the warrior you’d taken aim at before. He’s one hundred yards away now and closing. The war whoops of his band are louder and the braves have begun to lob arrows into the air; in several seconds they begin to fall around you, three-foot missiles with barbed tips of flint. You follow the young Comanche man with the blade sight on the end of your barrel. He carries a shield of buffalo hide with a bright orange sun painted across its surface and he has begun to rotate the shield in the circle, a strangely disorienting maneuver. You exhale to steady yourself and pull the trigger and then your ears are ringing and your field of view is obscured by an enormous cloud of white gun smoke. The air smells of cordite and sweat.

When this cloud disperses, you see you’ve missed your target. The warrior is fifty yards away now, stretched along the neck of his pony. He has begun to wheel to your right flank with several of his comrades; others are wheeling the other direction. Each of these men can pop twenty or more arrows a minute into you with surgical precision.

You have to stand up to reload your rifle. You just make it to your feet when one of your friends hits the earth screaming, an arrow embedded in his ribcage. You pour gunpowder into your trembling palm and, standing the butt of your rifle on the ground, funnel this into the barrel of your weapon. An arrow whistles past your ear like a lethal bird. You take a lead ball from your shot pouch, wrap it a cloth patch, and set it atop the muzzle, then remove the ramrod from the underside of the rifle and begin to pound the bullet down the barrel, inch by inch. If you don’t get it all the way down, you’ll have created a pipe bomb that will explode in your face when you pull the trigger.

Arrows are striking your friends, some of whom lie dead or dying, some who have started to run. But the Comanche riders have encircled your company, cutting off all possibility of escape. You’ve raised your weapon, cocked the hammer, and started to shoulder the rifle when the tip of a razorous lance enters your navel and exits your back. You kneel on the prairie, gripping the bois d’arc handle of this weapon that’s impaled you, your heart pumping bright arterial blood between your fingers, the feathers that decorate the lance catching the breeze, fluttering.

The tribe that virtually annihilates Captain White’s party on pages 55-57 of Blood Meridian?

They are Comanche.

Nermernuh.

The People.

*

Then a small, delicate-looking man entered this battle between Texan and Comanche. In 1836, at the age of nineteen, Jack Coffee Hays immigrated to Texas from his native Tennessee. The war for Texan independence had just ended, but there was still ample opportunity to court danger in this fledgling nation.

Hays quickly found work as a surveyor: few occupations could have been more perilous. Though today Texans love to opine about the glory days of the Republic (a period that lasted less than a decade—March 2nd of 1836 to January 1st of 1846 when Texas was annexed by the United States), the truth was that its government had no money, little economy to speak of, and no public works. The Republic paid its officials, employees, rangers, and settlers in land.

Land was precisely what had brought the majority of Anglo immigrants from the United States, but even after they were awarded their headrights—as those parcels of 177 acres were known—the property had to be surveyed to make sure one man’s claim didn’t encroach on another’s. This meant a surveyor would have to venture even farther west into Comanche country with his compass, chains, and levels to “certify the claim.” Enter teenage Jack Hays, with his “smooth, boyish face and sad eyes and high-pitched voice.”

It was terribly dangerous work. The Comanche tortured all their adult prisoners before killing them, but three professions received their special attention: Texas Rangers, buffalo hunters, and surveyors. Every Anglo surveyor was visible proof that more whites would soon be appearing in an area and to the Comanches this meant further shrinkage of their hunting grounds.

By 1840, Hays had moved from the second-most hazardous trade to the one that was, in many cases, a death sentence. That year, he was appointed captain of a company of Rangers and the men who served with him would quickly learn that here on the frontier, looks were no measure of a man’s mettle. Hays would prove the fiercest fighter and most effective tactician the embattled republic had ever seen. He remains, to this day, the Texas Ranger nonpareil.

Descriptions of the slender captain warrant examination. John Salmon Ford, a ranger who enlisted in Hays’ regiment of the Texas Mounted Rifles during the Mexican American War had this to say:

John C. Hays was a deceptive man. He was small, standing just under five feet eight and carrying barely 150 pounds on his wiry frame. He couldn’t grow a beard or a mustache; he wore modest clothes, usually a black leather cap, a blue roundabout, and black pants; he spoke little and ate little; he was nervous and walked slightly stooped; his cheeks were gaunt and his hands were thin and pale; beside his bewhiskered rangers in their huge, wide-brimmed hats and loud garbs, most of them over six feet and solidly built, Hays looked “more like a boy than a man.”

Ford clearly had difficulty reconciling Hay’s physical qualities with the man’s fighting prowess. Others did as well.

Texas Ranger Charles Wilkins Webber noted that in company of young rangers, Hays was “the most boyish looking of them all.” Then he went on to say something a good deal more interesting, though it perhaps says more about Webber and the other men that served with Hays than it does Hays himself:

His figure, though scarce the average height, was stout, and molded with remarkable symmetry—his hands and feet were womanishly delicate, while his Grecian features were almost severely beautiful in their classic chiseling. The rich brunette complexion and sharp black eye, indicative of Italian blood, would have made the fortune of a city belle. The softness of his voice, and his caressing manner, increased the attraction of his appearance; and, but for a certain cold flash of those brilliant eyes, I should have been entirely in love with him at once.

Hays’ men often spoke of him lovingly—if not with Webber’s overtly romantic musings. Jack Coffee Hays brought his men victory. And unlike many of the Ranger captains before him, he managed to keep them alive.

Hays grasped the glaring tactical problems in the Rangers’ previous engagements with the Comanche right away. Whenever his company sighted a war party out on the plains, he didn’t order his men to dismount, stake their horses, and take aim with their long rifles. Instead, he ordered his men to draw their pistols and charge, holding fire until they were in contact-distance.

Then he’d turn to the Rangers galloping beside him and say, “Powder burn’em, boys!”

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iii. What We Talk About When We Talk About Glanton.

The Comanches practiced a war of annihilation against the Lipan Apache, driving them down below the Rio Grande and into Mexico. In 1825, the Mexican government had invited Anglos into Texas as a way of putting a meat barrier between themselves and the Comanche. But by the mid-1840s, Mexico had lost Texas to the Americans and had traded their Comanche problem for an Apache problem (about which, more later).

And then there was war. Looking for an excuse to invade Mexico and wrest what would become New Mexico, Arizona, and California away from the Mexican government, President James K. Polk sent General Zachary Taylor and his army down to the Rio Grande to ride around until they were attacked by Mexican soldiers.

The Mexican soldiers soon obliged them and war was on. Lacking an effective cavalry with knowledge of the region, the US Army allowed companies of Texas Rangers to muster in. Many Rangers would make their names in the Mexican-American war (several would lose their lives): Jack Hays, Samuel Walker (the Walker Colt—the first “six-shooter”—was named after him), Bigfoot Wallace, RIP Ford, and a surly sociopath named John Joel Glanton.

The Ranger captains didn’t much like Glanton; John Salmon (“RIP”) Ford hated him. RIP Ford—a legendary Texan who got his sobriquet by writing “Rest in Peace” after every Ranger’s name on the casualty lists during the Mexican-American War—had no patience for Glanton’s insolence and his burgeoning criminality. In a footnote from Ford’s memoirs, historian Stephen B. Oates has this to say:

“Only 26 when he joined the United States Army in January, 1847, John Joel Glanton got into trouble for shooting a Mexican civilian [during the War]—Glanton claimed he did it in self defense, eyewitnesses said he did it in cold blood. When army police sought to put him in irons, he borrowed food and ammunition from his friend, Walter P. Lane, and rode for Texas. Later, he reenlisted in Jack Hays’ second regiment and saw action throughout the Mexico City Expedition. [After the War], in 1849, Glanton, attracted by the stories of gold in California, left his wife and two children in San Antonio and headed for the Pacific Coast. He paid his way by killing Apaches and selling the scalps at fifty dollars apiece to the Mexican authorities. Some said the scalps were not always Apache.” (quoted in Rip Ford’s Texas, p. 64).

I cannot believe that McCarthy didn’t read this exact footnote while doing research for Blood Meridian: it’s something of an elevator pitch for his novel. When we first encounter Glanton pages 82-83 of Blood Meridian, he and his gang are being hired by the Chihuahua government to hunt those Lipan Apaches who the Comanche had forced south of the Rio Grande.

When Toadvine and the Kid—held prisoner at this point in the book by Mexican authorities in Chihuahua City—enlist in Glanton’s Gang, Blood Meridian shifts into high gear and doesn’t slow down until readers reach a certain ferry in Yuma, Arizona.

iv. The Spring of the Year Eighteen and Forty-Nine:

This is the environment that the sixteen-year-old Kid rides into on page 5 of the novel, aback his aged mule. He enters the town of Nacogdoches on the eastern border of Texas and walks out of the rain into the revival tent of the Reverend Green.

The Kid has barely begun listening this preacher’s sermon when an enormous man enters the tent right behind him: “bald as a stone” with “no trace of a beard” and “no brows to his eyes nor lashes to them,” “close on to seven feet in height.”

The character’s name is Judge Holden and McCarthy did not invent him out of whole-cloth. In my next entry for The Night Does Not End, I’ll explore the historical and literary ingredients that McCarthy combines to create the explosive mixture that is the Judge.

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