John Joel Glanton

John Joel Glanton was an American frontiersman and mercenary who became notorious as the leader of a scalp-hunting band operating in northern Mexico and the borderlands around 1849–50. His group was employed to kill hostile Apache warriors but was accused of murdering peaceful Indigenous people and others for bounty payments.

Glanton’s gang later seized control of a ferry on the Colorado River near Yuma and preyed on travellers. In 1850 Quechan warriors attacked the settlement and killed Glanton and several members of his band, ending one of the most violent episodes in the early borderlands scalp trade.

In Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, After surviving a disastrous filibustering expedition, he joins the historical John Joel Glanton’s company of scalp hunters, men employed by authorities in Chihuahua to collect bounties for Apache scalps.