Blood Meridian

The gang resumes its journey. It passes a dilapidated estate with “wild bulls so old that they bore spanish brands” (154). One of the bulls gores a horse; the men shoot the bull and the horse and then ride on. As they pass a church, Holden delivers a lecture on its “history and architecture” (155). Inside, they find two hermits. They shoot one, and the other escapes. When he is found, however, they realize that he is “not altogether sane” (155). Later, Glanton regrets not shooting the second hermit because he is pained to see white people “that way” (156). They carry on through woods, villages, and the desert until they eventually find lost members of the gang, including two of the Native Americans, Bathcat, and a man named Gilchrist. However, the men are already dead, and their corpses have been mutilated by Elias’s cavalry. They cut the men down from the tree and then ride on.

The gang comes across a group of more than 100 Apache, who send a delegation to talk to Glanton. A scuffle breaks out when Glanton’s horse bites an Apache horse, but Holden restores calm. The delegation is joined by Mangas Colorado, the chief of the tribe, who demands a barrel of whiskey as compensation for the horse’s bitten ear. Glanton promises to return with the whiskey in three days. The gang rides to Tucson and finds the leader of the local American garrison named Lieutenant Couts. After recently returning from an expedition, Couts was surprised to see so many Apache in his town. Although all the bars in the town are closed, Glanton enters a closed one and demands that the half-naked owner serve his men. In Tucson, Glanton and Holden begin recruiting to replenish the gang’s depleted numbers. One potential recruit is Cloyce Bell, who insists that he be able to bring his mentally disabled brother whom he keeps in a cage and exhibits for money.

The drunk gang members search for a place to eat. A man named Owens owns a restaurant, but he insists that non-white people sit at their own table. He implies that the entire gang is non-white, pointing at Black Jackson as evidence. After a disagreement, Jackson shoots Owens. The men serve themselves and then go to a bar. There, Couts and his men confront the gang members. Glanton defends Jackson, and Holden launches into a lyrical defense of the men. Couts, annoyed, takes his men away. Holden takes an interest in Cloyce and measures the dimensions of Cloyce’s head. Later, Couts confronts the gang again, but Holden intervenes once more with his intellectual arguments. The next morning, the townspeople search for a missing Mexican girl. They find her bloodied, ripped clothes. That night, the drunken gang members steal whiskey and cause chaos. The following day, they visit the blacksmith and discover that he owns an enormous meteorite. Holden lifts the meteorite, showing off his strength as part of a bet. He then delivers a lecture about “the ferric nature of heavenly bodies and their powers” (165). He accepts and succeeds in another challenge, throwing the meteorite more than ten feet.

When Glanton’s gang leaves Tucson the next day, it has recruited five men. Cloyce and his brother–referred to as “the idiot” (166)–are also with them, having paid to be taken to California. The men top up a nearly empty whiskey barrel with water and take it to Mangas Colorado, using it to settle their debt. Then, the gang rides west. When the men camp at night, Glanton stares “long into the embers of the fire” (167). Holden writes in his notebook while examining Cloyce’s brother. Two days later, they pass a column of Mexican soldiers heading in the other direction to search for an Apache leader named Pablo. Glanton orders his men to ride past the Mexicans without incident.

One day, Holden disappears on “some obscure mission” (168). The men talk about the Moon, God, and the universe. Holden returns during the conversation and lectures the men on the nature of the disordered, chaotic universe. He uses a magic trick with a coin to prove his point. The next day, Glanton beats his dog for disobedience. The gang rides past dead animals, a dried lake, and an Apache man who has been “crucified” (170). When the men make camp, Holden delivers another of his lectures, this time about war, which he likens to the ultimate kind of trade or game. War, he concludes, is “God” (171). When some men disagree, Holden rebukes them by insisting that morality is “an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak” (171). He turns to Tobin, a former seminarian, to prove his point, and the men discuss the matter. Tobin curses Holden’s “blasphemous tongue” (172).

The gang crosses a lava bed and then hills made of granite. When Holden finds a bone, he lectures the men about paleontology. In the background, Cloyce’s brother begs for food. When Holden states that the true mystery of the world is that “there is no mystery” (173), Tobin suggests that Holden himself is the mystery. Eventually, the gang reaches the Colorado River. The men see Native Americans searching through a wagon train that once belonged to people now dead from cholera. At the river, they find a ferry run by a doctor named Lincoln. Glanton, Holden, and five others ride Lincoln’s ferry downriver to meet the Native Americans’ one-eyed leader, Caballo en Pelo. Though Glanton dismisses the Native Americans, Holden wonders whether they might be useful.

Glanton, Holden, and Pelo’s Native Americans hatch a plan to steal the ferry. At the same time, a group of women is preparing to cross on the ferry when they see Cloyce’s caged brother. One of the women tells Cloyce that he should be “ashamed” of himself (176), so Cloyce turns his brother over into the women’s care. The women release the man from the cage, bathe him, and then dress him in a “coarsewoven woolen suit” (177). They order his cage to be burned and then, later, lay Cloyce’s brother to sleep in a bed. He wakes in the night, strips naked, and runs into the river. He slips into the water just as Holden passes by. Holden walks into the river and takes hold of the man as though he were conducting a “birth scene or a baptism” (178) and leads him to safety.

Glanton and Holden meet with Lincoln, who inherited the ferry “for the most by chance” after it was left behind by the military (179). They warn Lincoln not to trust the Native Americans, and Lincoln enlists the gang to build defenses around his ferry, including the incorporation of a howitzer cannon he owns. When the Native Americans attack two days later, the gang fires its guns and the cannon into them. The Native Americans are furious, crying out “in rage at their betrayal” (180), but they are slaughtered. As always, the gang remove the scalps of the dead. Taking advantage of the situation, Glanton seizes control of the ferry crossing as Lincoln vanishes into his quarters and refuses to come out. Glanton immediately raises the fare, and soon the gang robs anyone who wants to cross. They give Lincoln enough money to keep him quiet and, as their transgressions increase, he continues to lock himself in his rooms.

An American military leader named General Patterson builds a new ferry crossing and, when he leads his men elsewhere, the Native Americans take it over, employing a man named Callaghan to run it. The gang burns the new ferry and kills Callaghan. The kid and Toadvine cut willow for the camp and see a group of Sonorans burning an effigy of Judas Iscariot. Gradually, Glanton begins to enslave many of the local Sonorans and puts them to work on his ferry crossing; he does not care how his men act and gives them “terrible latitude” to be as violent as they please (181). The gang amasses a fortune and enslaves many prisoners, including young Mexican and Native American girls.

Toadvine is sent to San Diego along with gang members David Brown and Long Webster for “the purpose of obtaining supplies” (181). After a night of heavy drinking in the city, Toadvine and Webster are jailed, so Webster tries to break them out. He saws off the barrels of a shotgun and argues with a local farrier, who unsuccessfully tries to enlist the police. Before Brown can use the gun, however, he meets the recently freed Toadvine and Webster. They start drinking again. They visit the ocean, and then Brown burns a man in a bar, so is sent to jail. After two days, he bribes the prison guard using the gang’s money. Brown then shoots the guard, cuts off his ears to add to his necklace of ears, and then rides away.

Hearing from Toadvine and Webster what happened in San Diego, Glanton leaves Holden in charge of the ferry and takes five men in search of Brown. They torture anyone who might know the whereabouts of Brown and the gang’s money. After torturing people, they begin drinking and Glanton returns to the ferry two days later, alone. On the road back, people try to warn him of what lies ahead. He sees a Mexican girl chained to a post. He sees Lincoln wandering the road in rags, raging against the actions of “that man” (187). When he reaches the ferry crossing, he finds that Holden has turned himself into some sort of religious leader, “like some great balden archimandrite” (187). Nevertheless, the men resort to drunken debauchery. Black Jackson, wandering the camp in rags the next day, is shot by an arrow and then clubbed to death by a Native American. The Native Americans attack. They kill Lincoln and many members of the gang. They find Glanton in bed and cave his head with an axe. In Holden’s rooms, they find Cloyce’s brother and a naked girl “of perhaps twelve years cowering naked in the floor” (188). Holden is with them, stripped naked and holding the cannon. He threatens the Native Americans and, with Cloyce’s brother, escapes into the forest. The Native Americans burn the dead and divide their loot.