Blood Meridian

The novel follows a nameless runaway, the Kid, out of the East Texas pine country and into the desert borderlands of 1849 and 1850, where he falls in with the Glanton gang, a company of scalp-hunters paid by Mexican authorities to bring in Apache dead. Their route runs across the real Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts, from Chihuahua City through the abandoned mines of New Mexico to the Colorado River ferry at Yuma, and closes years later on the Texas plains. The map traces that route soberly; the book's violence is historical and extreme.

The Kid

Nacogdoches, Texas

Opening

The narrative begins with a boy fleeing his family and drifting west across the South, and Nacogdoches is his first named stop in Texas. In this old town near the Louisiana line he first crosses paths with the giant, hairless Judge Holden and sees the frontier's casual violence up close before turning further west.

Early chapters

explicit McCarthy names Nacogdoches directly; the coordinates mark the centre of the old East Texas town, since the novel gives no single address within it.

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