Here, in its original English translation, is the dime-novelesque biography of one of the most infamous bandits in the history of the Old West, for decades a source of fear and legend in the state of California. To Mexicans and Indians, however, Joaquin Murrieta became a symbol of resistance to the displacement and oppression visited on them in the wake of the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), particularly by the "'Forty-Niners" who flooded into California from all over the world during the Gold Rush. In his introduction, literary critic Luis Leal has researched and written the first definitive history of the Murrieta legend in its various incarnations. Ireneo Paz's Spanish-language biography was first published in Mexico City in 1904; it was translated into English by Frances P. Belle in 1925. This edition includes several line-drawings that appeared in the original volume, heightening the strong sense evoked here of this turbulent period in U. S. history.
Biography of Joaquín Murieta, a legendary early California bandit. Through many interviews and travels, the author described Murieta's life and the locales in which he lived, and evaluated other accounts.
The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854) is a novel by John Rollin Ridge. Published under his birth name Yellow Bird, from Cheesquatalawny in Cherokee, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta was the first novel from a Native American author. Despite its popular success worldwide—the novel was translated into French and Spanish—Ridge’s work was a financial failure due to bootleg copies and widespread plagiarism. Recognized today as a groundbreaking work of nineteenth century fiction, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta is a powerful novel that investigates American racism, illustrates the struggle for financial independence among marginalized communities, and dramatizes the lives of outlaws seeking fame, fortune, and vigilante justice. Born in Mexico, Joaquin Murieta came to California in search of gold. Despite his belief in the American Dream, he soon faces violence and racism from white settlers who see his success as a miner as a personal affront. When his wife is raped by a mob of white men and after Joaquin is beaten by a group of horse thieves, he loses all hope of living alongside Americans and turns to a life of vigilantism. Joined by a posse of similarly enraged Mexican-American men, Joaquin becomes a fearsome bandit with a reputation for brutality and stealth. Based on the life of Joaquin Murrieta Carrillo, also known as The Robin Hood of the West, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta would serve as inspiration for Johnston McCulley’s beloved pulp novel hero Zorro. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta is a classic work of Native American literature reimagined for modern readers.
Joaquin Murrieta. In the California gold camps of the 1850s, his very name struck terror into the hearts of miners. A bounty was put on his head and a new law-enforcement agency created just to capture or kill him. Joaquin was a lover, a leader, and a legend. While terrorizing white miners, he earned respect and devotion from the many Mexicans and Latin Americans in the gold fields. Although he tried to live an honest, hardworking life, the racism and intolerance he encountered altered his course. Forced into a life of crime, he struck back, forming a band of outlaws and then an army of patriots, with the intent of driving the Americans from the land that had so recently been Mexican territory. The historical epic novel Blood and Gold: The Legend of Joaquin Murrieta, by Jeffrey J. Mariotte and Peter Murrieta, is the definitive account of the life and legend of the "Robin Hood of the El Dorado"--the first fictional treatment of these events that benefits from memories handed down through generations of the Murrieta family.
Killing Joaquín begins in 1519 with the arrival in Mexico of Joaquín's ancestor Juan Murrieta, who is part of the Spanish invasion force led by Hernan Cortez. The early part of the book relates the family's background in Mexico and the social reality that motivates the northward migration of the Murrietas during three centuries of avoiding the Spanish boot their own family had once worn. The political structure in Colonial Mexico is as follows: Spaniards born in Spain, Spaniards born in Mexico, Mestizos, and Indians, in order of descending power. The people in Spain think of the Spaniards in Mexico as subordinate intermediaries necessary in the extraction of wealth from the colonized country. Time widens the gap, and the colonists become separate from the people who had originally sent them to Mexico as agents of subjugation and avenues of revenue. Their lowered status compounds the far greater duality that is soon caused by the genetic blending of Spanish and Indian people throughout Mexico, whereby the majority of the population becomes both the oppressor and the oppressed, which is a major component of the Mexican Dilemma. In 1776, there are fewer than one hundred non-Indian people in the entirety of California, and not all of them are Hispanic. The children born here to the largest of these settler groups are the first generation of the Califorñios - people born in California of Spanish-speaking parents. The Califorñios, like the Murrietas, seek a life free from Spanish rule, and they are a group comprised of ethnically Spanish Mexicans and culturally Spanish Mestizos, more of the former than the latter. The earliest arrivals also include some pure Indians whose family members have intermarried with the Spaniards. The Califorñio culture develops separately from Mexican culture and establishes itself during a hundred years of living in grace, being far enough from the seats of power in Spain and Mexico to ensure the benign neglect in which that culture prospers. By the 1840s, the Califorñios have established California as an autonomous region of Mexico and are moving toward independence, hounded by the external predation by foreign nations and an internal revolution by a mostly Anglo-American group that wants to establish California as an independent republic called the Bear Flag Republic, as Texas had earlier done. All those aspirations are crushed by the United States, when the 1848 Treaty of Guadalúpe Hidalgo ends what we call the Mexican War by moving forty percent of Mexico to the United States, at which time California experiences a sudden population shift, with Anglo-Americans streaming into the newly acquired territory and changing everything for the mostly Indian and Hispanic Californians. Later that same year, gold is discovered and Paradise is lost. The Mexicans native to California see this influx as a terrible immigration problem, as they themselves still are to the more than 300,000 California Indians, while our predecessors don't consider themselves immigrants. Having just taken the place from Mexico, they see themselves as moving into their own house, entitled by Divine Providence and Manifest Destiny to possess this land and supplant the long-established cultures here. To that end, the federal government passes laws encouraging Anglo settlement and driving non-Anglos from the gold fields. In 1850, California statehood finalizes the acquisition. In 1851, the Spanish and Mexican land grants are broken, negating the pre-1848 land titles held almost entirely by Hispanics. This allows those properties to be divided into homesteads and claimed by Anglo settlers without payment to the owners; thereby disenfranchising the resident population, ensuring the demographic predominance needed to consolidate the gain, and completing our nation's transcontinental expansion. That is the historical context for this true story of the transfiguration and death of Joaquín Murrieta, who comes here in 1849 to go into the wild horse business with his half-brother Joaquín Carrillo (Murrieta). The plan is to capture the horses in California and take them to Mexico, where the horses sell for half again as much as they do here. But bad things happen, including a rape and a murder. In taking revenge for those acts, Joaquín Murrieta becomes a known outlaw, with no possibility of turning back. The horse gangs (work crews) become raiding gangs, robbing the miners and sending the gold to Mexico with the monthly horse drives. Other Mexican miners, meeting with the same government-supported mistreatment experienced by Joaquín, also become outlaws, whose activities are then blamed on Joaquín. He becomes a symbol of what the Americans fear in California. The federal and state governments desperately want Anglo-Americans to move to California and settle the just-stolen state, and no one is going to move in until the bandits are moved out. If the authorities can kill Joaquín, the needed migration will occur. How this true story unfolds from there is to be found in the pages of Killing Joaquín, which is available through Xlibris or wherever else books are sold.
Noted western historian Robert K. DeArment recounts the remarkable careers of eight men--Pat Garrett, John Hughes, Harry Love, Harry Morse, Frank Norfleet, Bass Reeves, Granville Stuart, and Tom Tobin--who pursued notorious criminals.
This visual and textual study of lynchings that took place in California between 1850 and 1935 shows that race-based lynching in the United States reached far beyond the South.
Until the early twentieth century, life in the American West could be rough and sometimes vicious. Those who brought thieves and murderers to justice at times had to employ tactics as ruthless as their prey. In this follow-up to his first collection of biographies of the West’s most recognized man-hunters, noted western historian Robert K. DeArment recounts the remarkable careers of eight men—Pat Garrett, John Hughes, Harry Love, Harry Morse, Frank Norfleet, Bass Reeves, Granville Stuart, and Tom Tobin—who pursued notorious criminals. Volume 2 of Man-Hunters of the Old West shows that limited resources and dire conditions often made extralegal violence necessary for survival. Harry Love, the famous killer of California bandito Joaquin Murrieta, and Tom Tobin, who ended the murders of the Espinosa gang in Colorado, tracked their quarries to remote hideouts, shot them, and cut off their heads to prove they had been eliminated. Felon trackers, like the vigilante organizations that preceded them, on occasion administered summary justice—the on-the-spot hanging of their captured prey—especially if they believed the established court system was not working. Some of the man-hunters in DeArment’s accounts were freelance scouts and trackers; others were career officers of the law. At least one, Frank Norfleet, was a private citizen turned dedicated nemesis of con artists. Love, Stuart, and Morse began life as easterners who made their way West. All the others were midwesterners or far westerners. Some of these man-hunters wrote about their adventures, and were written about in turn. Garrett’s account of his hunt for Billy the Kid remains a best seller, for example, and both Reeves and Hughes have been credited for inspiring the Lone Ranger of TV and movie fame. DeArment discusses constant threats to the man-hunters’ survival, the federal government’s undependable presence, and extralegal violence as major themes in western law enforcement. In recounting these eight men’s adventures, this volume reveals the forces that made brutality seem commonplace.
From the two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, bestselling historian, and author of Our First Civil War—the epic story of the California Gold Rush, “a fine, robust telling of one of the greatest adventure stories in history" (David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of John Adams). The California Gold Rush inspired a new American dream—the “dream of instant wealth, won by audacity and good luck.” The discovery of gold on the American River in 1848 triggered the most astonishing mass movement of peoples since the Crusades. It drew fortune-seekers from the ends of the earth, accelerated America’s imperial expansion, and exacerbated the tensions that exploded in the Civil War. H.W. Brands tells his epic story from multiple perspectives: of adventurers John and Jessie Fremont, entrepreneur Leland Stanford, and the wry observer Samuel Clemens—side by side with prospectors, soldiers, and scoundrels. He imparts a visceral sense of the distances they traveled, the suffering they endured, and the fortunes they made and lost. Impressive in its scholarship and overflowing with life, The Age of Gold is history in the grand traditions of Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough.
