One of the most striking things about reading Blood Meridian now, almost 40 years since its release, is that it anticipates some of the major historical turns of the past decades. Take Native American history as an example. For much of the 20th century, scholars approached Native American history in one of two ways. The older tradition rehashed the trope of the “vanishing Indian,” casting indigenous tribes as barbarous savages inimical to American progress and assuming that they would eventually “vanish,” or die out, when confronted with the racial superiority of white settlers. This is the narrative commonly found in popular dime-store novels and frontier films like Disney’s Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier (1954–’55).
The second camp revised this older tradition. Starting in the 1960s and epitomized by Dee Brown’s classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), native peoples became not the villains but the victims. The aggressors in this story were not bands of raiding indigenous horseman but rather the settlers who drove away buffalo herds, built railroads, broke treaties, and put up fence posts in prime grazing lands. Chastened by the Vietnam War, scholars of this generation were also more willing to implicate the US army as a reckless, invading force, an army of conquest that, as at My Lai, had massacred innocents at places like Sand Creek, Camp Grant, and Wounded Knee. Little Bighorn, in their telling, was simply a case of Custer getting what he deserved.
The field is now in a more complex position. Thanks to the rise of what’s known as “New Indian History,” scholars no longer treat indigenous peoples as either villains or victims, instead seeing them as people who had agency — as people, in other words, who didn’t just “vanish” or suffer but who waged war, wielded power, and fought rival tribes over territory, treaties, and trade routes. Some tribes, scholars have argued, even commanded their own empires and, as such, had their own imperial struggles, which made the frontier an ambiguous zone where violence reigned and alliances tended to shift. There’s even now an entire field of “borderlands” or “frontier studies” that aims to reflect the complexity of these kinds of spaces and interactions.
This is the world of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Well before this shift seeped into historical scholarship, McCarthy imagined a vast border region where colonial empires clashed, tribes went to war, and bounty hunters roamed. These historical conflicts provide the shape and form to an otherwise meandering plot: Comanche bands descending on Texas haunt soldiers and scalphunters alike, Mexicans and Americans fight over a seemingly nonexistent border, and it’s Apache raids into Mexico that prompt the governor to hire a gang of scalphunters in the first place. Moreover, the ongoing action that drives the story reflects this turn to indigenous agency, for while the Glanton Gang hunts native warriors, native warriors hunt them right back, creating the terrible spasms of violence that the novel has become famous for.
