Джон Джоэл Глэнтон: Американский outlaw и следопыт

American outlaw and soldier (1819–1850)
John Joel Glanton (c. 1819 – April 23, 1850) was an early settler of Arkansas Territory. He was also a Texas Ranger and a soldier in the Mexican–American War, and the leader of a notorious gang of scalp hunters in Northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States during the mid 19th century. Contemporary sources also describe him as a murderous outlaw and prominent participant in the Texas Revolution. He appears as a violent figure in the works of the prominent Western writers Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy.

John Joel Glanton was born with his twin Julian in Edgefield County, South Carolina, in 1819. His father Charles William Glanton (17891826) died while he was young and his mother Margaret Hill Glanton relocated her four sons to Louisiana. In 1832, she remarried to MajorJohn Roddy, a wealthy South Carolinian veteran of the War of 1812, eventually bearing two children by him. In 1835 she followed him to Jackson County in the Arkansas Territory, where the family established Walnut Woods, a plantation with more than twenty slaves near what is now Augusta.

Little is certain about Glanton's youth, but he developed a reputation for explosive violence. He appears in few records until his 1841 arrest in Louisiana but later authors state he fled Tennessee as an outlaw before settling in Gonzales, Texas, and taking part in the first battle of the 1835 Texian Revolution against Mexico's Centralist Republic. Glanton defended himself, saying the civilian had ignored his commands to halt. This event brought Walter P. Lanethen a major in the armyinto conflict with his general Zachary Taylor. Glanton evaded the military police sent to arrest him but then enlisted in John Coffee Hays's second regiment of the First Texas Mounted Rifles, also informally known as the Texan Rangers. He saw action as part of Gen. Winfield Scott's Mexico City campaign, during which Private Glanton was noted by Gen. Joseph Lane to have "attracted general notice for his extraordinary activity and daring throughout the actions both of the 23d and 24th" Nov. 1847 at Galaxara Pass in Puebla. Hearing of the massacre, California officials recruited a militia in the ill fated Gila Expedition against the Quechan tribe.

Jeremiah Clemens includes Glanton as a character in his novel Bernard Lile (1856), one of the earliest fictional works concerning the Texas Revolution. Samuel Chamberlain, who claimed to have been a member of the gang, wrote an account of their activities in his memoir, My Confession. Glanton, under the name Gallantin, is a character in George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman and the Redskins (1982), an installment in the long running The Flashman Papers series of comic novels. A fictionalized version of Glanton and his gang is featured prominently in Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian (1985), many of the events of which are based on Chamberlain's account. McCarthy developed the mysterious Judge Holden (Glanton's second in command according to Samuel Chamberlain's memoirs) as the primary antagonist of his book. Glanton, along with another historical scalp hunter, James Kirker, appears briefly in the opening scenes of Larry McMurtry's novel Dead Man's Walk (1995). The book is the first volume of McMurtry's Lonesome Dove tetralogy. The seven page story "A Scalp for a Scalp", drawn by Russ Heath and written by John Whalen, also based on Chamberlain's memoir, is included in The Big Book of the Weird Wild West published by Paradox Press in 1998. Hugues Micol's graphic novel Scalp: La Chevauchée funèbre de John Glanton et de ses compagnons de carnage, again based on Chamberlain's book, was published in 2017 by the French publisher Futuropolis. A 2005 episode of the History Channel series Wild West Tech featured an account of the Glanton Gang, focusing on Glanton's misdeeds as a scalp hunter. These scenes were filmed at Old Tucson Studios near Tucson, Arizona.