Rdrama Bookclub Discussion Thread #12 . Blood Meridian (Chapter I-V)

I've read Blood Meridian a couple of times so I decided to have a look at the book that inspired it, My Confession by Samuel Chamberlaine, which is available on internet archive. It's hilarious.

>I thought in a society so dangerous I should go armed, and purchased myself a Bowie Knife with a nine-inch blade warranted to cut through bone without turning the edge. A few days later I had trouble with Scotty about the division of some money we had won at a three handed game of Poker with a commissary clerk, in which, to keep up appearances, I lost all my money to Scotty, along with the clerk. When I asked for a settlement, Scotty denied all partnership and swore he had won not only the clerk's, but my money in a fair game, and this when I had “rung in the cold deck” that fleeced us both!

>There was only one way in Texas in '46 to settle misunderstandings of this nature. We went for each other, and he very foolishly run onto the point of my “Arkansas toothpick” and was badly cut for his want of judgement. I was seized by the guard, old Spanish irons were placed on me, and I was thrust into the “Callaboose,” a room about twenty feet square, inhabited by a very select society of Indians, Texans, Horsethieves, Murderers and the vilest characters of the lawless frontier.

>The horrors of the Old Spanish Jail in San Antonio were more terrible than any scene in the Inferno of Dante. How long I remained here I never knew; it seemed years, though it could have been but a few days. I was covered with vermin, the heavy rusty irons wore the flesh of my ankles in which the lice burrowed, my jacket was stolen, and my shirt I tore into strips to bind around the irons to keep them from chafing! The place was outrageously filthy, the air hot and pestiferous, food scant and poor, with water unfit even for washing. The awful blasphemy of the wretches incarcerated with me, their horrid bestial orgies too revolting for belief, drove me in my weak state insane.

>Fortunately for me Scotty recovered and declined to appear against me, so I was turned loose, with nothing on but my pants, and wild with my sufferings. I can faintly remember flying, I thought pursued by Demons, and then came darkness and oblivion.

>From this I awoke with a most delicious sense of comfort and freedom from pain. I was in a nice soft clean bed and an old lady was sitting close knitting beside an open window through which came a sweet fresh breeze. Hearing me stir, she left the room crying out, “Carl! Carl!” and a young man entered the room. He congratulated me on the recovery of my reason and informed me that I was in his house in Castroville, thirty miles from San Antonio, that I had been found by a farmer three weeks before, lying near the road entirely nude and insensible. My host was a Doctor, Carl Ritter by name, a member of the German settlement at Castroville.

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