Cormac McCarthy's Borders and Landscapes

Louise Jillett

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501319129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Cormac McCarthy's work is attracting an increasing number of scholars and critics from a range of disciplines within the humanities and beyond, from political philosophy to linguistics and from musicology to various branches of the sciences. Cormac McCarthy's Borders and Landscapes contributes to this developing field of research, investigating the way McCarthy's writings speak to other works within the broader fields of American literature, international literature, border literature, and other forms of comparative literature. It also explores McCarthy's literary antecedents and the movements out of which his work has emerged, such as modernism, romanticism, naturalism, eco-criticism, genre-based literature (western, southern gothic), folkloric traditions and mythology.

Part One

Frontier Violence

1

Doomed Enterprise at Caborca: The Henry Crabb Expedition of 1857 and McCarthy’s Unquiet American Boys

Dianne C. Luce

Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing is a novel of stories embedded within stories, some narrated at length, others, mostly historical, briefly alluded to. The ex-priest’s tale of the heretic includes both. Early in his account of the man who was born in Caborca and returned to die under the ruined dome of the mission church, he tells Billy how the heretic had been violently orphaned at a young age: “This man’s parents were killed by a cannonshot in the church at Caborca where they had gone with others to defend themselves against the outlaw American invaders. Perhaps you know something of the history of this country.”¹ As John Sepich has shown in his Notes on Blood Meridian and John Wegner in his articles on Mexican history in The Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy’s Western works are steeped in his knowledge of the history and culture of the border, just as his Tennessee novels are subtly but deeply informed with his understanding of the region in which he grew up (aspects of which G. Wesley Morgan has discussed in a series of articles and conference papers and I have explored in Reading the World). Thus, it is no surprise that behind the ex-priest’s laconic reference lies an incompletely told story, an episode of border history that resonates with the experience of McCarthy’s American boys who in their naiveté cross the border a century later to pursue their doomed enterprises in Mexico. This particular history, which has not yet been examined in treatments of The Border Trilogy, raises issues of the permeability of the Mexican–American border, international border transgressions, intercultural contacts, and American attitudes of exceptionalism, will to empire, and blindness to the sovereignty of other countries—issues that unify McCarthy’s trilogy and indeed all his border works.

La Purísma Concepción de Nuestra Senora de Caborca in the state of Sonora withstood damaging events over the centuries, both natural and historical, both of which figure in The Crossing. Most dramatic in its physical traces was not American cannonfire, though the walls were pocked with rifle fire, but the erosion of the church foundations that left its dome precariously suspended. Set on low ground at the bend of the Asunción River, the mission was subject to repeated flash flooding during rainy seasons, floods that progressively ate away the banks at the back of the church until rooms collapsed in 1890, 1899, 1915, and 1917, when the sanctuary itself was destroyed.² McCarthy alludes to this history of natural disasters when the ex-priest notes that the town of Caborca lies on the Altar River.³ And when the heretic makes his pilgrimage back to his birthplace, his parents’ deathplace, he pauses “by the river squinting up in the sunshine where the dome of the broken transept … floated in the pure desert air”⁴—an image of the inevitability and the improbabilities that have robbed his life of joy.⁵ For the heretic, these natural disasters make of the church dome a profound emblem of the god-ordained doom forever hanging over him.

But the human events that killed the heretic’s parents and had more profound cultural effects occurred decades before the church’s near-destruction by flooding, when the outlaw band of Americans to whom the ex-priest refers, a group led by Henry Alexander Crabb, crossed into Mexico on a filibustering expedition in 1857. Having failed in his bid to win re-election to the California state senate,⁶ Crabb had formed the “Gadsden Colonization Company” and recruited disappointed men from the California gold fields and cronies from the state legislature to venture into Sonora, promising them land grants and mining opportunities.⁷ He was not alone in this. Charles H. Brown writes, “Beginning with 1851, the northern state of Sonora became a promised land to those disillusioned by California.” “Defenseless, sparsely populated and yet, according to legend, rich in minerals, Sonora was the object of a half-dozen gold-seeking and colonizing expeditions from California.”⁸ Eager to get started on his enterprise, Crabb left his friend John Cosby behind in San Francisco to raise upward of a thousand men and sailed for the Gadsden Purchase with fifty-four recruits in January. Cosby let Crabb down,⁹ but more enlistees joined the expedition in San Pedro, and from there the men traveled overland, arriving on March 1 in Fort Yuma, where they rested. En route, they had been plagued by the breakdown of mules and fraying of tempers. Deserted by roughly a third of his force, on March 12, Crabb pushed on with about ninety men forty-five miles up the Gila River to a site now remembered as “Filibuster Camp.” Here he deployed two of his lieutenants to recruit participants in the Santa Cruz Valley, while he turned southeast along El Camino del Diablo.¹⁰ During this desert crossing, the band missed the essential Cabeza Prieta tanks and lost most of their mules before local Mexicans or Indians led them to the water. Still expecting reinforcement from California and Arizona, Crabb left much of his ammunition with a company of twenty men at the tanks and forged on toward Sonoita with a party of only sixty-eight.¹¹

Rumors of Crabb’s intentions had already reached the border towns, and Crabb became aware of Mexican defensive movements. Rather than retreating, on March 26, he wrote to the prefect of Altar a blustering letter, claiming the innocence of his motives for his armed entry into Mexico. He warned Redondo, “Should blood be shed, on your head be it all, and not on mine.”¹² Mexican and American accounts of the beginning of the bloodshed differ, but on April 1, just outside of Caborca, Crabb’s party clashed with a force of 200 Mexicans under Lorenzo Rodríguez, a force that soon grew to 600 under Comandante Hilario Gabilondo. Crabb’s men scrambled for refuge in some adobe buildings across the plaza from the mission, while Mexican soldiers and the citizens that the Americans displaced sheltered in the church itself.¹³ From this position, Crabb deployed fifteen men with a keg of gunpowder to storm the convent wing on the left of the church and to blast through its heavy wooden doors connecting to the sanctuary.¹⁴ But they were hindered by a barrage of Mexican fire,¹⁵ and Charles Evans, the youngest member of the Crabb expedition, recalled that “the slow match being damp the powder did not explode.”¹⁶

Aside from their gunfire, this abortive endeavor with explosives seems to be the only American attempt to damage the church, so the heretic’s parents’ death by American cannonfire appears to be McCarthy’s invention. It may have been suggested to him by a hearsay and backward account of the battle by John G. Capron, who was one of a party organized in Tucson to come to Crabb’s aid. On their way to Caborca, this group came upon a young Mexican with fluent English who reported that “Crabb had thrown himself into the church and barricaded the doors … We had heard several cannon shots, and he told us that they [the Mexicans] had two cannon there and that if they had not already done so they would soon demolish the church doors and kill Crabb and his party.”¹⁷ Perhaps McCarthy’s ex-priest is perfectly aware that the Americans themselves had no cannon, and this detail is to be read as intuitive fictionalizing on his part—the better to forge an emotional connection between Billy, who has just been told he is an orphan, his parents killed by Indians,¹⁸ and the Mexican child orphaned at the hands of American filibusters—parallel tragedies of the borderlands, in which parents are lost to the violence of the ethnic and cultural Other.¹⁹

By the end of the six-day siege, Crabb had lost eight or ten of his men, and the thatch roofs of the connected buildings that sheltered the Americans were afire. Hugely outnumbered and with no relief in sight, Crabb agreed to unconditional surrender. On April 7, to the self-righteous outrage of Crabb’s supporters in California, Gabilondo executed the Americans by firing squad.²⁰ The only one spared was the teenager Charles Evans,²¹ in an act of mercy to a minor that comments on the Mexican toleration of the rash boys John Grady, Rawlins, and Billy, each a mojado-reverso,²² but more guilty of ignorance and poor judgment than of outright criminal intent. In his account of the massacre, Evans claimed that two days after the execution he was taken to look at the unburied remains of his countrymen and “led to a large earthen jar placed on the ground.” Perhaps to ensure that he would never filibuster again, his captors forced him to draw out the severed head of Crabb, which had been “preserved in vinegar”²³—an incident that, as John Sepich points out, McCarthy adapted in Blood Meridian for the fate of Captain White, whose head is displayed in the plaza floating in “a glass carboy of clear mescal.”²⁴

Confronted with White’s severed head, the kid declares, “By rights they ought to pickle mine. For ever takin up with such a fool.”²⁵ He does not act on this insight, soon throwing in with Glanton’s gang, but the kid’s comment points to what may be our current-day reaction to the story of Henry Crabb in Caborca. Crabb was not John Glanton’s type of desperado. An educated man, a lawyer who had served in the state senates of Mississippi and California, he was neither unintelligent nor without resources. What could have led him to imagine a filibuster would turn out well? To ponder this question is to follow McCarthy into the murky waters of nineteenth-century attitudes in America and Mexico, attitudes that were played out on la frontrera, often in blood, and that left a cultural legacy for the young twentieth-century Americans of the Trilogy who venture their own border transgressions.

Crabb likely had both cultural and personal motives. When we consider the border today, we are likely to visualize sharp physical demarcations between the United States and Mexico: the Río Grande; a fence with checkpoints. But in the nineteenth century, the border was in flux, and the east/west boundary lines established by international law were crosshatched with traditional lines of north/south travel and commerce that were a part of the natural and cultural heritage of the region. These included the ancient hunting trail across the sierras that Billy Parham’s she-wolf travels and the old Comanche road that John Grady sees on his family’s ranch.²⁶ As Mark A. Eaton observes, the Comanche’s sense of nation was “rooted in the local geographical terrain, whereas the abstract socio-political natio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Frontier Violence
• Part 2: Comparative Literature and Landscape
• Part 3: Bioregionalism and Nomadism in McCarthy’s Western Literature
• Part 4: Liminal Thresholds
• Part 5: Interdisciplinary Approaches
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index
• Imprint