Turns out Cormac McCathy's fiction "Blood Meridian" was based on Sam Chamerlain's account of Glanton and his gang.
Seems like Glanton started out a talented young man in many ways, more complex than just a murdering psychopath. After all he grew up in a setting where a capacity for violence was often deemd a huge plus when running for office or getting elected leader (Andy Jackson and Jim Bowie fer examples), if nothing else maybe because folks were afraid of you.
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fgl02 GLANTON, JOHN JOEL (1819�1850). John Joel Glanton, soldier of fortune, outlaw, and notorious bounty-hunter and murderer, was born in Edgefield County, South Carolina, in 1819. According to reports he was an outlaw in Tennessee before his arrival in Texas.
In 1835 he was living with his parents at Gonzales, Texas. His fianc�e may have been killed by Lipan Apaches that year. On October 2 he joined the movement to San Antonio to dislodge Gen. Mart�n Perfecto de Cos. Glanton was a free scout for the army under Col. James W. Fannin, Jr., and allegedly a Texas Ranger captain at sixteen.
He narrowly missed the Goliad Massacre. According to camp gossip, President Sam Houston banished Glanton from Texas for reasons unknown, though apparently the order was never enforced.
After the Texas Revolution Glanton joined the ranger company of Capt. John C. Hays in protecting San Antonio. He is said to have gone to East Texas during the Regulator-Moderator War. Apparently Glanton supported neither faction in the dispute, but he allegedly wounded or killed the best fighter on each side. Local residents, objecting to his actions, reportedly considered lynching him. [/quote]
Says a lot that more polished and inoffensive folks such as RIP Ford and Jack Hays were able to command Glanton's respect and got excellent service from him.
He apparently he weren't just a stereotypical Mexican hater either, or else he made an exception for attractive women:
[b]In 1849 he rode out of San Antonio for California with thirty well-armed gold-seekers, leaving his wife, Joaquina Menchaca Glanton, called "the most beautiful woman in the Republic of Texas," whom he had married in 1846, and a daughter. Left to his own devices tho, it would appear he spun out of control, concluding with homicidal acts that come across as merely pathetic: The takover of the Yuma ferry on the California Emigrant Trail, and the indiscriminate murders of some of the customers, White Americans included.
As if THAT would escape attention for very long.
By 1850, however, it became increasingly difficult for the Glanton gang to find hostile Indians, and they began to attack peaceful agricultural Indians in the vicinity of Fort El Norte. Finally they turned to taking Mexican peon scalps for profit. As a result the Chihuahua government drove Glanton and his company into Sonora and put a bounty on his scalp.
There he contracted with the authorities to fight the Indians, traded Indian scalps for bounties, and again resorted to taking Mexican scalps to increase his profit.
He and his gang seized and operated a river ferry controlled by the Yuma Indians. While operating the ferry, they killed Mexican and American passengers alike for their money and goods.
Finally, they schemed to kill a party of Mexican miners who used the ferry, but before they carried out their plot, the Yumas attacked the ferry and killed Glanton and most of his men in mid-1850. Glanton was scalped. Dead at 31, lived by the sword, died by it too.
Maybe alchohol or drug (??) abuse addled his brain, who knows?
Birdwatcher
