Emil Frederick “Dutch” Wurzbach’s Memoir as a New Historical Source for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

Abstract

This article argues that the memoir of German immigrant Emil Frederick Wurzbach is an important but previously unrecognized historical source for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Wurzbach’s memoir records a sequence of mid-1800s adventures that parallel several locations and episodes of the kid’s pre-Glanton gang journey. It also includes other emigration anecdotes adopted in the novel, particularly, the German brothers at the mission of Tumacacori. This new source offers a narrative template for the early kid and sheds light on McCarthy’s dark aesthetics of transforming hopeful immigrant testimony into an anti-Bildungsroman governed by war, dispossession, and violence.