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James Langton

James Langton (1850-1907) was an American bounty hunter of the Wild West who was based from Lake Don Julio in New Mexico during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Biography[]

James Langton was born in 1850, and he moved to the American West to work as a professional bounty hunter amid the chaos of the Wild West. He settled in New Mexico, and he soon claimed to be the best bounty hunter in the American Southwest; while he did often bring criminals to justice, he occasionally freed them from the law for paying customers outside of the law, and he operated as an outlaw. During the 1890s, based in a cabin at Lake Don Julio, Langton accepted contracts from employers and hired ambitious gunslingers to carry out his jobs for him. In 1898, he hired the Arizona Kid and Little Pete to track down and kill the wanted murderer Ace Burr, who had killed a man during an argument over a gambling match in New Orleans a month earlier before fleeing to Two Crows. The two men killed Ace Burr and his men for Langton, who decided to continue employing them as his proxies.

Langton was known as an unscrupulous man who would often kill other bounty hunters to steal their captured targets, and, in 1907, he intercepted the rival bounty hunter Sadie Adler near Armadillo and forced her to hand over her bounty, Shane Finley. Adler later enlisted the help of her friend John Marston to take back Finley, tracking down Langton and his men to Pike's Basin and killing all of them before taking the captive Finley to Blackwater.

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