The Real Wild West: A Violent, Godless Wilderness As defined by Edgar Roberts, the setting is “the natural, manufactured, political, cultural, and temporal environment , including everything the characters own.” . Characters can be helped or harmed by their environments and they can fight over possessions or goals” (Roberts 109). In Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy, this setting is the central point. Each natural event or decision made by the characters is unique to the wild platform on which it takes place. The setting of the West, including the indiscriminate violence there and the unforgiving desert it contains, shapes the story and the characters to such a great extent that the characters have no control over them. Although it is traditionally considered to be the Wild West, with its gun-wielding cowboys and treacherous bandits, this is not an accurate portrayal of the West. In McCarthy's West, the righteous cowboys don't save the day because they don't even exist. The West, which seems too terrible to be real, was real. McCarthy depicts, with minimal embellishment, the real lives experienced by real men along the U.S.-Mexico border during this era. The violence was real (Sanderson 48). McCarthy's Bloody Southwest was one of the first of its era, creating much controversy. He shows it as it really was, and not, as other writers had done before, to show it as a fun cowboy country that it simply was not (Handley 341). They are just treacherous bandits pitted against other treacherous bandits, fighting for their territory and shedding blood while shedding blood. Early on, the U.S. government disguised the culture and opportunities presented to the West to achieve greater westward expansion. The tr...... middle of paper ......s, Edgar V. Writing about literature. 11th ed. Upper Saddle River: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2006. Print. Sanderson, Jim. “Hell on Horses and Women: Stillwell, Beasley, Porter, and McCarthy on Texas Masculinity.” Southwestern American Literature 35.2 (2010): 38+. Literary Resource Center. Internet. April 1, 2014. Shaviro, Steven. "'The Very Life of Darkness': A Reading of the Blood Meridian." Bloom's Literature. Facts about File, Inc. Web. April 1, 2014. Spurgeon, Sara L. “Founding of the Empire: The Sacred Hunter and the Desert Eucharist in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.” » Bloom's literature. Facts about File, Inc. Web. April 10, 2014. Wegner, John. "'Wars and Rumors of Wars' in Cormac McCarthy's Frontier Trilogy." Bloom's Literature. Facts about File, Inc. Web. April 11. 2014.