Foxfire 5 (1979) by Eliot Wigginton

 Book Review

Foxfire 5 (1979)

by Eliot Wigginton

   There is an elaborate scene in Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy where the Glanton gang is being pursued by Native Americans in the desert.  They are out of gunpowder and facing certain doom.  The character of the Judge leads the group to a nearby dormant volcano, where he creates gunpowder with the help of guano (bat poop) and human urine, leading the gang to surprise the attacking Native Americans.  In Notes on Blood Meridian by John Sepich, references this book, Foxfire 5 as the source for the recipe the Judge uses to manufacture the gunpowder.

 

 I was intrigued- Foxfire 5 doesn't sound like an academic journal.  I looked up the Wikipedia entry and found a copy in the LAPL system.  Foxfire was a journal put together by high school students(!) and their advisor, Eliot Wigginton.  The first issue came out in 1966.  The subject was documenting back-woods life in Northern Georgia.  A book version was published in 1972 and Foxfire became a national sensation.  Unfortunately, in 1992 founder/teacher Eliot Wigginton was convicted of some pretty horrific child sex allegations going back decades, and amazingly, got a sentence of one year in jail and twenty years of probation.  

  I surmise that was it for the national profile of Foxfire, though the Wikipedia page notes that it has continued under new leadership.  Anyway, Foxfire volume 5 is largely about iron making and gun making, which are both pretty interesting subjects but not seven hundred pages long interesting, at least to me.  The portion that relates to Blood Meridian is maybe ten pages long- it's actually a letter they receive from a certified Mountain Man living in far northern California about he makes gunpowder with his own urine and going into the different ingredients and such.  It seems clear that this, was, indeed McCarthy's source.

  The rest of the book are these hundred page long oral histories where these old coots are talking about the post-Indian removal settling of northern Georgia, and it turns out that manufacturing iron and gun-making were pretty important to the white settlers of this area.  It was/is extremely specialized knowledge and kind of incredible to visualize this process of building the first iron foundry in a given geographic area.