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Old 04-28-2004, 01:57 PM
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Default Blood Meridian

John Glanton's Gang


S. Chamberlain


Samuel Chamberlain
In his memoirs My Confession: the Recollections of a Rogue, Samuel Chamberlain narrates the demise of John Glanton's gang of scalp hunters, operating in northern Sonora and in New Mexico and Arizona (some of the particulars of this text are not accurate- dates, etc.- but it provides a first hand account of life in a scalping party). Chamberlain had left Boston and had gone West- the beginnings of an eventful life, only a small portion of which can be found here. In 1844 his father died and he traveled to Illinois; in 1846 (at sixteen) he enlisted in the "Illinois Foot Volunteers," and Private Chamberlain went to war against Mexico. Three months later he was discharged in San Antonio and immediately signed up with the First Regiment of the United States Dragoons. According to Army records on March 22, 1849, he was listed as a deserter- he had left his regiment for Glanton's gang (Chamberlain claimed that he was discharged in Mexico and had signed onto an expedition to California as a civilian when he joined Glanton). The next documented record of Chamberlain appears at the Alcalde of Los Angeles; on May 9, 1850 the survivors of the Glanton massacre, of whom Chamberlain presumably numbered, arrived there and reported an "Indian uprising" on the Colorado River.


J. Glanton

According to Chamberlain, John Glanton was born in South Carolina and migrated to Stephen Austin's settlement in Texas. There he fell in love with an orphan girl and was prepared to marry her. One day while he was gone, Lipan warriors raided the area scalping the elderly and the children and kidnapping the women- including Glanton's fiancee. Glanton and the other settlers pursued and slaughtered the natives, but during the battle the women were tomahawked and scalped. Legend has it, Glanton began a series of retaliatory raids which always yielded "fresh scalps." When Texas fought for its independence from Mexico, Glanton fought with Col. Fannin, and was one of the few to escape the slaughter of that regiment at the hands of the Mexican Gen. Urrea- the man who would eventually employ Glanton as a scalp hunter. During the Range Wars, Glanton took no side but simply assassinated individuals who had crossed him. He was banished, to no avail, by Gen. Sam Houston and fought as a "free Ranger" in the war against Mexico. Following the war he took up the Urrea's offer of $50 per Apache scalp (with a bonus of $1000 for the scalp of the Chief Santana). Local rumor had it that Glanton always "raised the hair" of the Indians he killed and that he had a "mule load of these barbarous trophies, smoke-dried" in his hut even before he turned professional.

When Chamberlain first encountered "Crying Tom" Hitchcock (one of Glanton's scalp hunters) near Tucson, the former supposedly had been tied up in the sun as punishment by a commanding officer for defying orders and sketching the Mission of San Xavier del Bac. Hitchcock cut him down and for his efforts was similarly punished. From Hitchcock, Chamberlain learned that Glanton and his army of Indian hunters had been employed by the Governor of Sonora Don D. Jos? Urrea and decided to run away and join Hitchcock and Glanton. The pair set off towards Frontreras, and on the way Chamberlain got his first taste of his new life. They encountered an Apache war party which began to charge; according to Chamberlain he "drew a bead on a big chap and fired." The wounded soldier "gave a wild startling yell, and by his hands alone, dragged himself to the brink of the deep barranca, then singing his death chant and waving his hand in defiance towards us he plunged into the awful abyss"- saving his scalp from the Anglos. Apparently, Chamberlain's shot had also dispersed the rest of the party since he makes no other mention of them; at any rate the pair soon reached the rest of the hunting party.


Judge Holden

Glanton's gang consisted of "Sonorans, Cherokee and Delaware Indians, French Canadians, Texans, Irishmen, a Negro and a full-blooded Comanche," and when Chamberlain joined them they had gathered thirty-seven scalps and considerable losses from two recent raids (Chamberlain implies that they had just begun their careers as scalp hunters but other sources suggest that they had been engaged in the trade for sometime- regardless there is little specific documentation of their prior activities). Second in command to Glanton was a Texan- Judge Holden. In describing him, Chamberlain claimed, "a cooler blooded villain never went unhung;" Holden was well over six feet, "had a fleshy frame, [and] a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression" and was well educated in geology and mineralogy, fluent in native dialects, a good musician, and "plum centre" with a firearm. Chamberlain saw him also as a coward who would avoid equal combat if possible but would not hesitate to kill Indians or Mexicans if he had the advantage. Rumors also abounded about atrocities committed in Texas and the Cherokee nation by him under a different name. Before the gang left Frontreras, Chamberlain claims that a ten year old girl was found "foully violated and murdered" with "the mark of a large hand on her throat," but no one ever directly accused Holden.


Indian Warfare

The day after Chamberlain arrived, Glanton and several others left Frontreras to cash in the scalps; on the way they encountered a camp of Sonorans. The desperadoes disguised themselves as Apaches and raided the camp for supplies. Three Mexicans were killed and scalped (to be redeemed by their government); five women were "collected"- three of whom were scalped (for the same purpose) because they were old and ugly. The Sonorans returned to battle the "Indians," interrupting their orgy, and the remaining women were killed and scalped. The Sonorans were driven off, but several of Glanton's party were injured too. After this the gang decided to follow rumors of gold and El Dorado and began north towards New Mexico. On their way, they terrorized Arizona, impersonating Apaches, killing and scalping farmers (presumably to maintain their contract with the government), and cashed in their scalps too. From this point on Chamberlain narrates the events leading to the end of Glanton and his group. In New Mexico (after finding no El Dorado), they were attacked by an Apache war party; they lost fourteen of their party (out of about forty). The scalpers fought and then ran and secured a small wooded position around the only source of water in the area; from there they were able to drive off their attackers.
Chamberlain with an Apache in his Sights
(from S. Chamberlain's sketches)
At the end of the battle, Chamberlain counts about twenty-five Indian fatalities but makes no mention of scalping in this encounter. As a result of the fight though, an additional four scalpers were deemed too badly injured to continue. The party was forced to draw straws to assign the gruesome duty of executing their partners.


The Yumas

From there the headed north, losing two more of the party from injuries sustained in the previous battle. By this time they had reached the Colorado River and decided to follow it to the Gila River- path that would take them through the Grand Canyon. Eventually they wound their way to the Gila and a new plan. The Yuma Indians there had set up a ferry about four miles south of the junction of the two rivers to take settlers into California. Glanton and Holden came upon their new El Dorado; the gang would "seize [the ferry], kill the Indians if they objected, capture the young girls for wives etc." The gang seized the ferry and nine girls and drove off the unarmed natives; they then began constructing a rock fort to defend their new possession. When a party of Indians came demanding the return of their possession and women, Glanton proposed that he would keep all he had taken and that the natives should provide him with food or he would raze their village and kill all of them. The Indians attacked, but Glanton and his men killed four with concealed pistols- they were subsequently scalped "by force of habit." Glanton left briefly to get provisions; he ran afoul of the law and returned empty-handed but with an interesting piece of information. A group of Sonorans were traveling home from the gold mines with plenty of gold; Glanton's plan to ambush them was struck down, but Chamberlain had had enough. He and three others plotted to desert.



Chamberlain Rescues Holden from the Yumas

On the day that they were to escape, the Yumas attacked- Glanton had been killed- and Chamberlain and his companions set out over the 130 miles of desert toward California. Twenty miles from their camp, they saw Holden fleeing from the Yumas. They had surrounded him armed only with clubs; he had "brained" one using his rifle as a club, but a dozen had cornered him. Chamberlain killed one and chased the others off, and so Holden briefly joined their escape party which ended at Los Angeles in 1850.

The party had abandoned Holden by that point, and the fate of the other three fugitives remains unknown. Chamberlain stayed in California for a while, then returned to Boston and married. He joined a volunteer regiment during the Civil War and was named a brevet brigadier general of volunteers in 1865. Samuel Chamberlain died in Massachusetts in 1908.
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Old 04-28-2004, 02:01 PM
Beau Beau is offline
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Default The Scalping Party

By Mike Davis

In his dark masterpiece, Blood Meridian (1985), novelist Cormac McCarthy tells the terrifying tale of a gang of Yanqui scalp-hunters who left an apocalyptic trail of carnage from Chihuahua to Southern California in the early 1850s.

Commissioned by Mexican authorities to hunt marauding Apaches, the company of ex-filibusters and convicts under the command of the psychopath John Glanton quickly became intoxicated with gore. They began to exterminate local farmers as well as Indians, and when there were no innocents left to rape and slaughter, they turned upon themselves with shark-like fury.

Many readers have recoiled from the gruesome extremism of McCarthy's imagery: the roasted skulls of tortured captives, necklaces of human ears, an unspeakable tree of dead infants. Others have balked at his unpatriotic emphasis on the genocidal origins of the American West and the book's obvious allusion to "search and destroy" missions ? la Vietnam.

But Blood Meridian, like all of McCarthy's novels, is based on meticulous research. Glanton - - the white savage, the satanic face of Manifest Destiny -- really existed. He's simply the ancestor most Americans would prefer to forget. He's also the ghost we can't avoid.

Six weeks ago, a courageous hometown paper in rustbelt Ohio -- the Toledo Blade - tore the wraps off an officially suppressed story of Vietnam-era exterminism that recapitulates Blood Meridian in the most ghastly and unbearable detail. The reincarnation of Glanton's scalping party was an elite 45-man unit of the 101 Airborne Division known as "Tiger Force." The Blade's intricate reconstruction of its murderous march through the Central Highlands of Vietnam in summer and fall 1967 needs to be read in full, horrifying detail. Blade reporters interviewed more than 100 American veterans and Vietnamese survivors.

Tiger Force atrocities began with the torture and execution of prisoners in the field, then escalated to the routine slaughter of unarmed farmers, elderly people, even small children. As one former sergeant told the Blade, "It didn't matter if they were civilians. If they weren't supposed to be in an area, we shot them. If they didn't understand fear, I taught it to them."

Early on, Tiger Force began scalping its victims (the scalps were dangled from the ends of M-16s) and cutting off their ears as souvenirs. One member -- who would later behead an infant -- wore the ears as a ghoulish necklace (just like the character Toadvine in Blood Meridian, while another mailed them home to his wife. Others kicked out the teeth of dead villagers for their gold fillings.

A former Tiger Force sergeant told reporters that "he killed so many civilians he lost count." The Blade estimates that innocent casualties were in "the hundreds." Another veteran, a medic with the unit, recalled 150 unarmed civilians murdered in a single month.

Superior officers, especially the Glanton-like battalion commander Gerald Morse (or "Ghost Rider" as he fancied himself), sponsored the carnage. Orders were given to "shoot everything that moves" and Morse established a body-count quota of 327 (the numerical designation of the battalion) that Tiger Force enthusiastically filled with dead peasants and teenage girls.

Soldiers in other units who complained about these exterminations were ignored or warned to keep silent, while Tiger Force slackers were quickly transferred out. As with Glanton's gang, or, for that matter, Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi mobile extermination squads, in the western Ukraine in 1941, atrocity created its own insatiable momentum. Eventually, nothing was unthinkable in the Song Ve Valley.

"A 13-year-old girl's throat was slashed after she was sexually assaulted, and a young mother was shot to death after soldiers torched her hut. An unarmed teenager was shot in the back after a platoon sergeant ordered the youth to leave a village, and a baby was decapitated so that a soldier could remove a necklace."

.................................................. .........
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Old 04-28-2004, 04:29 PM
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The Bloody Southwest

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"Blood Meridian": The first in our infrequent series of Southwest classics.
By Gregory McNamee

MAY 18, 1998:

Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (Vintage Books). Paper, $12.

FORGET THE SCRATCHY-voiced aw-shucksisms of Andy Devine, Duke Wayne's solitary steadfastness, Debbie Reynolds' virtuous warbling at the close of yet another sweet-tempered oater. Put Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill, and Davy Crockett far from your mind. Dispel even the slightest thought of the Ponderosa and the Big Valley, of frontier schoolmarms and bashful cowboys. Do not remember the Alamo.

The American West was not brought into the nation by the clean-living, brave, square-jawed individualists our movies, schools, and other myth-making factories portray. No, the West--our West--was created by scavenging armed gangs whose horses and carts forded the rivers of blood they spilled.

Such is the history that Cormac McCarthy urges on us in Blood Meridian, perhaps the greatest of the countless little-known novels the Southwest has inspired. In its pages William Shakespeare meets the Wild Bunch, and human savagery finds an epic language of its own. No one who reads it will ever again watch Gunsmoke in quite the same way.

The year is 1849, the initial setting eastern Tennessee, where four of McCarthy's earlier, equally bleak novels--The Outer Dark, The Orchard Keeper, Suttree and Child of God--take place. Blood Meridian opens by introducing us to its narrator, known only as the kid, an abandoned 14-year-old, a wild child. "He can neither read nor write," McCarthy instructs, "and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence." The kid wanders aimlessly to Memphis, then up the Mississippi to St. Louis and down to New Orleans, mayhem always in his path. Eventually, having killed more than once, he arrives in Nacogdoches, Texas, the capital of the newly declared Republic of Fredonia. There he meets for the first time the sinister Judge Holden, the Ahab who will take him to the gates of hell.

The kid moves on. In San Antonio, he confronts Manifest Destiny in the person of one Captain White, who has taken it upon himself to renew the Mexican War with a ragtag band of filibusters. "We fought for (possession of Mexico)," says White. "Lost friends and brothers down there. And then by God if we didn't give it back. Back to a bunch of barbarians that even the most biased in their favor will admit have no least notion in God's earth of honor or justice or the meaning of republican government." Declaring himself and his scruffy militia to be "instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land," this Oliver North illegally crosses the border to conquer Mexico anew, only to be dispatched along with his troop by an unimpressed Comanche war party.

The kid, the very definition of a survivor, lands in a Chihuahua jail, with Captain White's jarred head for company. He is freed, however, at the demand of the ever-present Judge Holden, whose attention nothing escapes. ("What's he a judge of?" the kid later asks, only to be hushed lest the judge hear him.) Holden, accompanied by a party of renegades--among them an earless, branded outlaw named Toadvine, a psychopathic entrepreneur named Glanton, and an Australian who once hunted aborigines for a living and has merely transferred his skills to a new arena--is bound for the state of Sonora, where 14,000 French colonists have recently arrived. If a foreign flag is to fly over Mexico, the judge declares, it will be the stars and stripes.

McCarthy's history in all this is thorough and accurate; in many particulars he simply retells the story of American freebooter William Walker, who in the late 1840s invaded Sonora and, having failed there, Nicaragua, only to be executed for his troubles. The real Glanton, too, ran the Colorado River ferry at Yuma; in order to consolidate his holdings, he murdered both his partner and the crew of a competing ferry run by Yuma Indians. The Yumas in turn killed Glanton and thereafter enjoyed a monopoly on ferry crossings for another decade.

Judge Holden's apocalyptic band meanders throughout the Southwest and northern Mexico, destroying everything in their path: Mexicans, Indians, Anglos, penned goats, dogs, chickens, cacti, forests, even ancient petroglyphs. They gather scalps, teeth, heads, and hearts as the receipts of their trade; the kid, the gentlest of the lot, proudly wears a necklace of human ears, blackened and shriveled by the desert sun. The judge, the dark heart of Blood Meridian, pontificates all the while, cheering his companions onward with a homespun philosophy of doom: "It makes no difference what men think of war.... War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way."

And so the homicidal band, "itinerant degenerates bleeding westward like some heliotropic plague," slashes and burns its way across the face of the West, across seas of decaying buffalo bones and burning pueblos, losing a member here and there, indiscriminately visiting death and destruction on an already tortured land, reveling in their unchecked power. In the end, even the bloodthirsty kid seems to have had enough, and the judge's parting words to him offer the promise of at least some sort of redemption: "You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen."

Blood Meridian is a dark, cheerless novel that aims to destroy a few myths--not only the cherished and carefully engineered icons of our national past, but also any hint whatever of the fundamental goodness of the human animal. In its pages, lone trees burn in the Biblical desert of Sonora, ghosts and angels haunt the dark fringes of the hills, and we are bludgeoned into understanding that Judge Holden, dancing like a maenad on his tiny feet while crying to the winds that he will never die, is none other than the Devil himself.

It's a far cry from the world of Louis L'Amour and John Ford. Of our contemporary Western fabulists, McCarthy alone exposes the heart of darkness in our history, summoning it in a language and manner that are without peer. There is as much nobility in the pages of Blood Meridian, the Southwestern classic of our time, as you'll find in a crack house.

But that, he might say, is just the way we savages are.
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