We're fans of Cormac McCarthy 'round here, no suprise as he is a Southern Gent (raised in Knoxville) and now resident of the Southwest and as I was consulting the road map for my move from Florida to Arizona, I realized I would be cutting across some serious McCarthy territory, so I started taking photos along the way that seemed straight out of Blood Meridian, and a few places that I knew the Glanton Gang had moved through and some other places that just seemed to fit.
At fourteen he runs away. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark. The firewood, the washpots. He wanders west as far as Memphis, a solitary migrant upon that flat and pastoral landscape. Blacks in the fields, lank and stooped, their fingers spider like among the bolls of cotton. A shadowed agony in the garden. Against the sun’s declining figures moving in the slower dusk across a paper skyline. A lone dark husbandman pursuing mule and harrow down the rainblown bottomland toward night.
(Farm fields, West Florida, HWY 301)
He works in a sawmill, he works in a diphtheria pesthouse. He takes as pay from a farmer an aged mule and aback this animal in the spring of the year eighteen and forty nine he rides up through the latter day republic of Fredonia into the town of Nacogdoches.
(Off I10, West of San Antonio, Texas)
They set forth in a crimson dawn where sky and earth closed in a razorous plane. Out there dark little archipelagos of sand and scrub…By late afternoon riders were visible to the bare eye…What do you make of that, Captain? I make it a pack of heathen stock thieves is what I make it…They don’t seemed concerned do they…We may see a little sport here before the day is out…Already you could see through the dust on the ponies’ hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers…A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeon tailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish Conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or saber done in another country by men whose bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground…and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.
Oh my god, said the sergeant.
(South Texas Desert, near Van Horn, Texas)
They rode through marl and terracotta and rifts of copper shale and they rode through a wooden swag and out upon a promontory overlooking a bleak and barren caldera where lay the abandoned ruins of Santa Rita del Cobre.
(FT Bowie, Apache Pass, Arizona)
Glanton pounded on the door with his rawhide covered club like a traveler at an inn…The echo of his knocking clapped about the stark and riven walls of rock and returned. The men sat their horses. Glanton gave the door a kick. Come out if you’re white, he called.
(FT Bowie, Apache Pass, Arizona)
Glanton and the Judge looked at the squatters and the squatters looked at the floor. Some of the roof beams were half down into the room and the floor was filled with mud and rubble. Into these ruinous works the morning sun now slanted and Glanton could see crouched in a corner a Mexican or half breed boy maybe twelve years old… Who’s this child? said the Judge. They shrugged and looked away. Glanton spat and shook his head.
It grew cold in the night and it blew stormy with wind and rain…The men on watch entered the room and stood steaming before the fire…Someone had reported the Judge naked atop the walls, immense and pale in the revelations of lightning, striding the perimeter up there and declaiming in the old epic mode…In the meantime someone had found the boy. He was laying facedown naked in one of the cubicles. Scattered about on the clay were great numbers of old bones. As if he like others before him had stumbled upon a place where something inimical lived. 
(FT Bowie, Apache Pass, Arizona)
The Judge, said Tobin…I seen him before, said the Kid. In Nacogdoches. Tobin smiled. Every man in the company claims to have encountered that sooty souled rascal in some other place. We come down off the Little Colorado we didn’t have a pound of powder in the company. Pound. We’d not a dram hardly. There he set on a rock in the middle of the greatest desert you’d ever want to see. We were thirty eight men when we left Chihuahua City and we were fourteen when the Judge found us…Glanton just studied him…They’ve a secret commerce. Some terrible covenant…but if being naked of arms in that wilderness and half of all Apacheria in pursuit worried him at all he kept it to himself entire…The Judge had been up all night…Watchin the bats…Two men deserted in the night and that made us down to twelve and the Judge thirteen. I gave him my best study, the Judge…He appeared to be a lunatic and then not. Glanton I always knew was mad…We led the horses in the dark…When we reached the cave some of the men thought that he meant for us to hide there…But it was the nitre…We filled our wallets and panniers and our mochilas with the cave dirt.
(Cave, French Joe Canyon, Whetstone Mountains, Arizona)
The Judge. We left him at a high pass, a little Clearwater creek. Him and one of the Delaware’s. He told us to circle the mountain and to return to that place in forty eight hours. We unloaded all the containers onto the ground.
(Freshwater Spring, Apache Pass, Arizona)
The next day on the far side of the mountain we encountered the two lads that had deserted us. Hanging upside down in a tree. They’d been skinned and I can tell ye it does very little for a man’s appearance. But if the savages had not guessed it already, now they knew for sure. That we’d none of us any powder.
(Oak tree, Apache Pass, Arizona)
But in those two days the Judge leached out the guano with creekwater and woodash…He got up when he seen us and went to the willows and come back with a pair of wallets and in one was about eight pounds of pure crystal saltpeter and in the other about three pounds of fine alder charcoal…he pointed to that stark and solitary mountain…He was first to the rim of the cone…Then he set down and he begun to scale at the rock with his knife…It was brimstone…most pure flowers of sulphur…went to a cupped place in the rock and dumped out the charcoal and the nitre and stirred them about with his hand and poured the sulphur in…Captain Glanton, he says. Come charge that swivelbore of yours and let’s see what manner of things we have here…The foremost of the savages was not more than a furlong on the slope…then the Judge, he steps up to the rim and he had with him a good white linen shirt…and he waved it to the redskins and he called down to them in Spanish All dead save me he called. Have mercy on me. Todos muertos…God it set them yappin on the slope like dogs…Gentlemen. That was all he said. He had the pistols stuck in his belt at the back and he drew them one in each hand and he is as either handed as a spider…and he commenced to kill Indians. We needed no second invitation. God it was a butchery.
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