Few Mexican-American folk heroes are as tall as Joaquín Murrieta. An outlaw of the California Gold Rush era, Murrieta and his exploits were posthumously fictionalized in The life and adventures of Joaquín Murieta (sic) by novelist John Rollin Ridge in 1854 – a year after Murrieta was allegedly killed by California rangers in a shootout in Fresno County. In the years since his death, Murrieta’s legend grew: he was the protagonist of a play by Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda, and he was credited with inspiring fictional vigilantes from Zorro to Batman.
Its bloody history lives at the murky intersection of history, myth and folklore. According to legend – first compiled in Ridge’s book – Murrieta was just a teenager when he left Mexico for California with dreams of earning gold in the Gold Rush. . But the young Mexican was the victim of a litany of racist injustices shortly after entering the country: tied up and whipped, then forced to watch his wife gang-raped and his brother hanged from a tree after a mob de Blancs falsely accused him of theft. horse. Vowing revenge, Murrieta turned to a life of banditry, stealing from Anglo-Americans until he was found by law enforcement and killed.
But while most fictionalizations about Murrieta contain these story elements, there is a lot of debate about Murrieta’s real life – starting with whether or not he existed in the first place. California rangers killed someone – maybe Murrieta, maybe not – and then marinated that person’s head in alcohol and marched around the state to celebrate their ability to catch an hors- the legendary law. But debate over the veracity of Murrieta’s story persisted from his days of banditry until well after the beheading. It was clear that someone had lost their mind. What was much less clear was who it was and what crimes could be attributed to him.
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Why 1850s California was a hotbed of racial tension
Under Joaquín Murrieta’s story hides the racial atmosphere of 1850s California, where violence frequently erupted between the (mostly white) settlers entering the new state and the Mexicans and natives who had lived there for a long time. Whether Joaquín Murrieta existed or not, this racial tension certainly existed. It was born out of the American-Mexican War of 1846-1848, which ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, an agreement that ceded California to the United States.
Between 1848 and 1850, non-Hispanic settlers flocked to California, their population growing from 15,000 to 93,000 around that time, according to Becoming Joaquín Murrieta: John Rollin Ridge and the Creation of an Icon (2011) by Blake Michael Hausman. Meanwhile, the 1850 Foreign Miners Tax Act effectively excluded Hispanics from the gold rush. In response, many left the state even as the white settlements exploded. Many so-called Californios – Spanish speakers who were in California while it was still part of Mexico – found themselves economically marginalized and some turned to banditry as a result.
READ MORE: 10 Things You May Not Know About The US-Mexico War
Joaquin Murrieta
Zuri Swimmer / Alamy Stock Photo
How the legend of Joaquín was born
As early as 1850, newspaper articles reported that outlaws named “Joaquín” were terrorizing California, according to Ireno Paz The life and adventures of the famous bandit Joaquín Murrieta. But it is impossible that all the crimes attributed to “Joaquín” were committed by the same person, because sometimes crimes occurred hundreds of kilometers from each other on the same day.
Joaquín Murrieta’s full name first appeared in the Los Angeles Star November 27, 1852 – although the bandit “Joaquín” continued to have several surnames in the press until the infamous beheading. A story in the San Francisco Daily Herald April 18, 1853 was the first to explore the origin story of Murrieta’s vigilantes: he had been whipped and robbed of $ 40,000, and his outrage at this injustice inspired his subsequent career in crime, according to a breeder white interviewed for the story, which Murrieta had allegedly spoken about. But the Daily herald The story is not exactly of credible origin: the breeder of the story and the journalist who wrote it have retained their names.
Yet dozens of unsolved bandit murders have piled up: a general in San Gabriel in November 1852; six Chinese gold miners near Big Bar in February 1853. Anglo fears over the mysterious “Joaquín” intensified and people demanded that the Californian rangers bring the outlaw to justice. And as much debate raged over whether “Joaquín” really existed (or was just a mixture of outlaws, narratively mixed into a singular scarecrow), fear prevailed: at In the spring of 1853, the California legislature awarded a reward of $ 6,000 to Joaquín’s head. A team of California rangers, led by Los Angeles Deputy Sheriff Harry Love, attacked an outlaw camp in the wee hours of July 25, 1853, killing eight men, including Murrieta.
READ MORE: The brutal history of anti-Latino discrimination in America
John Rollin Ridge, the Native American novelist behind Joaquín’s story
The entirety of Murrieta’s tale – starting with his vigilante story – would never exist without the fictionalized biography of John Rollin Ridge. But Ridge wasn’t just a writer – his life is a remarkable part of the story itself, with many details in his biography fitting in with the legend of Murrieta. A Cherokee Indian, Ridge (tribal name Yellow Bird) is considered the earliest Native American novelist, but his legacy with Indigenous people is complicated.
When Ridge was still a child, his father John Ridge sold tribal lands to the federal government, explicitly defying the law of the Cherokee Nation. In turn, Ridge’s father was stabbed to death by other members of the Cherokee tribe in 1839 – in front of Ridge, then just 12 years old. Ridge’s grandfather and uncle were also killed. In 1849, Ridge killed a Cherokee judge, David Kell, over a horse dispute. Ridge successfully supported self-defense, although it’s worth mentioning that Kell was a staunch supporter of the Cherokee group who killed several members of Ridge’s family. After Kell’s murder, Ridge left for California, where he tried his hand at gold mining. Finding the work unsatisfactory, he turned instead to a life of letters.
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