Career
Glanton was involved early in military affairs in Texas and the Southwest, participating in the fight for Texas independence, and later in the Mexican-American War. While a member of Walter P. Lane's San Antonio company of Texas Rangers in the Mexican-American War, he is attributed by contemporary sources as in 1847 having killed a Mexican civilian in the city of Magdalena. Although Glanton protested he had done so when the civilian had refused to obey his commands as sentry to halt passage, other witnesses claimed it had been an act of murder. The event brought Walter P. Lane, then a major in the army, into conflict with General Zachary Taylor. As a result, Glanton was forced to flee the American army police who were sent to arrest him. He later re-enlisted in John Coffee Hays' second regiment of the First Texas Mounted Rifles, and saw action with Winfield Scott's army in central Mexico.
After the war in summer 1849, Glanton and his gang were hired in a nominally mercenary operation by Mexican authorities, to track down and kill dangerous bands of Apache Indians in the Southwest. To earn more money, the Glanton gang began murdering and scalping peaceful agricultural Indians and Mexican citizens alike to claim under the bounty for scalps. The state of Chihuahua put a bounty on the heads of the gang, declaring them outlaws by December 1849. Chihuahua authorities drove the gang out to Sonora where they wore out their welcome and moved into what is now Arizona.
Read more about this topic: John Joel Glanton
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