John Joel Glanton (1819 – 23 April 1850) was an early settler of Arkansas, a Texas Ranger and noted 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. Biography Early life 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 (d.8 Aug. 1883) relocated her four sons to Louisiana. In 1832, she remarried to MajorJohn Roddy (1784 11 July 1847), a weathy South Carolinian veteran of the War of 1812, eventually bearing him 2 children. In 1835 she followed him to Jackson County in the Arkansas Territory, where the family established Walnut Woods, a plantation with more than 20 slaves near what is now Augusta. Texan Independence Little is certain about Glanton's youth, but he apparently 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. A fiancée was abducted, scalped, and killed by Lipan Apaches before or during his time with Stephen F. Austin at the siege of De Cos's forces in San Antonio. He was said to have been a scout under Col.James Fannin, commissioned as a captain of the Texas Rangers while still 16, and to have narrowly escaped De La Portilla's 27 March 1836 massacre of Fannin's men at Goliad. After the Battle of San Jacinto, President Sam Houston supposedly banished Glanton from Texas, although this was never enforced and no record of such an order survives. He was later said to have wounded or killed the best men on both sides of the Regulator–Moderator War without supporting either side himself. Glanton was arrested in New Orleans on 11 March 1841 for assault, having tried to shoot a police officer with his pistol in the American Theatre, but he was dismissed with little or no punishment since no one was hurt. In