“They rode on and the sun in the east flushed… a deeper run of colour like blood seeping up in sudden reaches flaring planewise and where the earth drained up into the sky at the edge of creation the top of the sun rose out of nothing like the head of a great red phallus until it cleared the unseen rim and sat squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.”
Few writers have described the vanishing point of America's territorial unfolding, and the violence it unleashed on indigenous peoples, as evocatively as Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian (1985). Set on the Texas-Mexico border in 1849-1850, McCarthy's epic follows a group of scalp-hunters as they massacre Native Americans in a barbarous claiming of the land. Images of a crimson sun on the horizon, casting an “Evening Redness in the West”, dispel all illusions about the benevolence of empire, but rather invoke its bloody (and masculine) course, where, as Greg Grandin writes in The End of the Myth, “the endless sky meets endless hate”.
Belief in the nation's sacred mission and faith in the redemptive virtues of the frontier are the keystone mythologies of American history. Even before its independence in 1776, America was long thought of as a deathless continuum, unbounded by either geography or ethics. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes described British colonialism on the continent as being driven by an “insatiable appetite, or Bulimia, of enlarging dominion”.
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