098: Outlaw Joaquín Murrieta with author John Boessenecker

The real story of California bandido Joaquin Murrieta is darker—and far more complicated—than the legend. Historian and New York Times bestselling author John Boessenecker joins Damian Bacich to separate fact from folklore and reveal how a Sonora-born miner became California’s most infamous outlaw.

They explore the Gold Rush’s violence, anti-Mexican sentiment, Murrieta’s gang, the California Rangers, the Cantua Creek manhunt, and the truth behind the alleged display of Murrieta’s head. 

Boessenecker also explains how newspaper accounts, vigilante claims, and popular stories transformed a fierce historical figure into a Robin Hood-style hero.

00:00 Introducing John Boessenecker and Joaquín Murrieta

02:05 John’s path into Western history

06:47 Researching the real Joaquín Murrieta

07:56 Fact, folklore, and the Murrieta legend

13:24 Gold Rush California and Murrieta’s arrival

20:55 The formation of the bandit gang

32:15 The murder of General Bean

39:22 From personal loss to outlaw infamy

43:45 The California Rangers’ manhunt

48:48 The Rangers, surviving gang members, and Murrieta’s legacy

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Today I'm speaking with author John Boesseneckr John has written by my account 13 books on the American West and various historical topics, especially related to outlaws and bandits in the Old West. He's a New York Times bestselling author and has received numerous awards and has appeared as a historical commentator on PBS, the History Channel, A &E, and other media. Now his latest book is titled Bring Me the Head of Joaquin Murrieta, the bandit chief who terrorized California and launched the legend of Zorro. Here's the book. Now this conversation is very interesting in that we get into details about this figure who's really well known in California as has become part of popular culture. At least I think he's well known. I grew up hearing about him. And in the conversation, he really helps paint a detailed picture about who this person was and about some of the misconceptions surrounding him and surrounding this time period, you know, the time period of of the gold rush and the early statehood era in California and a lot of things that we really don't understand well about what was really a ~ chaotic and turbulent time in California's history and a fascinating time.~ One slight technical note, you'll notice at a few minutes in John's video kind of freezes. If you're watching the video, you'll notice that but You can hear everything perfectly. It doesn't last for very long. And so I hope that doesn't bother you. But ~ for the rest, if you're just listening, you won't even notice. So let's go on to the interview. John, thank you so much for being here on the show on the California Frontier Show. I got in touch with you because I enjoyed your book on Tiburcio Vázquez, Bandido, which you wrote some years ago. And then I found out that you had recently written a book on another California bandido, Joaquín Murrieta. And so I thought, wow, let's see if I can reach out to him if he'd be willing to come on the show and talk about his book. So, ~ John, I want to thank you for being on. And you're more than welcome. I'm happy to be here. Thank you. Great, well, you have written a number of books on the American West, on California, on what we'd call the Old West. I guess my first question would be, how did you, you're a prolific writer and a very successful writer, how did you get into this subject matter? What got you into the West and California and its history? Well, what happened with me and with so many other people, I think, is that ~ when I was a boy, ~ more than half of, I think, all the shows on television were Westerns.~ you know, Gunsmoke, The Legend of Wyatt Earp, ~ Wanted Dead or Alive, just I could go on and on and on. And so I watched all these when I was a kid.~ My father was such a cheapskate he wouldn't buy a TV until my mother, this is in 1960 or 59, and my mother noticed that we all would disappear after dinner going to the neighbor's house to watch TV. So he finally broke down and bought a black and white TV that we had forever. And so ~ by the time I got into high school, I started to wonder whether there was a Wild West in California. And I basically went to the library, the local town where I grew up in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, and read every book on the old west that they had. Then I read every book in the county library in San Rafael. Eventually, when I got my driver's license, I drive to the San Francisco Public Library. and actually started researching to Bersio Vasquez when I was 16. I couldn't afford the back then a black and white reverse negative photo stat of a newspaper account cost 50 cents and I only earned about 50 cents a week back then so I couldn't afford photocopies but I read the ~ microfilm newspapers and the ~ bound newspaper volumes. And then when I went to college, I majored in history and received excellent advice and mentoring ~ from some of my professors at San Francisco State. then just sort of, found that I enjoyed writing. So I wrote my first article in 1968 when I was 15 about a stage robbery and some buried treasure. And later, of course, as I became an adult and became more sophisticated, I found that the whole story was totally bogus, just myth. And so that was sort of the beginning. And I wrote newspaper or magazine articles. fairly regularly a couple of years or so. And then in 1988, my first book was published by University of Oklahoma Press called Badge and Buckshot Lawlessness in Old California. And that was the first book written on that topic. There had been a few books that touched on it, but nothing that focused on the Wild West because everybody in that era thought that the Wild West was tombstone, Dodge City, Deadwood, and no, the entire west had an amazing history ~ that really needs to be instilled to this day. There are many, many areas of western history that really have not been adequately written or researched. Yeah, I agree with you. And that's really so you're a native Californian and this attraction to the Wild West and understanding that we are here in the West and the Wild West kind of drew you toward that. what brought you into, well, this is your latest book, right? The book about Joaquín Murrieta. What kind of got you on his trail? Well, when I was ~ very young in high school, excuse me, I read a book called Bad Company by Joseph Henry Jackson, which actually was the first book ~ written about Western ~ robbers ~ focusing on California. And he had a chapter on Joaquin Marietta. And so over the years, I basically read everything that had been published about him. and did a lot of my own research. I did a book that came out back in 1999 called Gold Dust and Gunsmoke. And I included a detailed chapter on Joaquin. And one of the things that I found was that probably, I'm guessing about 80 % of everything written about Joaquin Murrieta was fiction. that's interesting. I have on my bookshelf, both at work and at home, several books that I've come across over the years in library bookstores and things like that about Joaquin Murrieta. And he definitely is a figure that's in the air here in California in our sort of cultural milieu.~ And so it's interesting to hear that you think that 80 % of what's written about him is fiction. Before we go into that, could you just give a little ~ background or a sketch of who he was? And Joaquin was the most infamous Latino outlaw of the old West. And some folks get irritated when I use the term Latino because he came from Northern Mexico, but I'm using a broad definition because those who are familiar with early outlaw lawman history understand that the outlaws of the old West included outlaws from Peru, Chile, ~ Central America, Jamaica. So I can't, I need to use a term either Latino or Hispanic. And it seems like ~ some people don't like the term Hispanic, some don't like the term Latino. So I kind of just have to pick one. And ~ in that sense, Joaquin was really, ~ very, very notorious during his lifetime. And what happened was ~ very similar to what happened with Billy the Kid. The Billy...~ Pat Garrett ~ wrote a book that was ghostwritten a year after he killed Billy the Kid. And that book sort of ~ cemented many of the facts. It was a fairly factual book, but it did include a lot of errors. So ~ actually the first ~ Native American to write a novel, at least in the American West, I'm not sure about the whole country, was a guy named John Rollin Ridge, who hailed from the Midwest ~ Indian territory, which is what Oklahoma was called back then in Arkansas. And he was a journalist and he was fascinated by the story of Joaquin. He'd come to California in the gold rush. So he wrote a book about Joaquin Murrieta. That was a paperback novel, the first novel written by a Native American author. And ~ that was based on fact, many of the incidents that happened or described in the book actually happened. But the book, even a casual reader will understand that the book is a novel. He tells you what Joaquin is thinking. He gives you minute details about Joaquin did on a specific day.~ as I point out in my book, Joaquin Murrieta was, ~ he couldn't read or write. So there's no way that he could record.~ you know, daily journal or something like that. And I'm getting off topic slightly, but that's one of the difficulties in writing about outlaws and lawmen, especially outlaws, very few of them kept written journals or records of anything they did. In fact, they try to cover up what they did and often use multiple names, very difficult to track their activities from a historical standpoint. So in any event, much of what's been written, probably the vast majority of what's been written about Joaquin Marietta since 1854 is based on Ridge's book. And I even found that many of the pioneers who later in the 1880s or 90s who I know for with Joaquin Marietta ~ that those ~ recollections were colored. by them reading the novel. And then over the next 30 years, they conflated their own experience with what they read in Ridge's book. And so Ridge's book, I mentioned Joseph Henry Jackson, whose book, Bad Company, is published initially in 1949. And Jackson was not a professional historian. So the book has an awful lot of errors. And one of the things that he did was that he concluded that Joaquin was an entirely fictional character who never existed. And this is a mortal sin because that discouraged research on the real Joaquin Murrieta for two generations. And so the thing that I wanted to do with my book is go back to the primary sources, get rid of the myth, the legend, the folklore, and find out what really happened. And so the result is a book that's 450 pages. A couple of the reviewers, think for, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times thought it was too involved, too many details or something like that. Well, that's what factual history is about. And so I tell about Joaquin, what we know about his family and about the members of his gang and the California Rangers who were very controversial, who tracked down and killed Joaquin and his Lieutenant Three-Fingered Jack. So what, can you give us a timeline of Joaquin Woody and his life? When did he come on the scene and when did he die? He was born in either 1829 or 1830 in Alamos, Sonora in Northern Mexico, the state of Sonora in Northern Mexico. And Alamos was a mining center in the Sierra Madre Mountains. And what we know about him is that as a young man about 18, he married a young girl named Rosita Feliz. And when word came of the discovery of gold, gold was discovered in California January of It took six or eight months for the word even to get to northern Mexico. know, communications were so slow in that era, ~ then ~ many, many citizens of Sonora left. The government actually thought the northern frontier was going to be entirely depopulated. That's how many people, because the news came that you can make a fortune in California. And so among the tens of thousands, I think 20,000 Sonorans emigrated in the first year or two of the gold rush. Among them were Joaquin, his wife Rosa or Rosita, ~ also his three brothers-in-law Claudio Feliz, Reyes Feliz, and Jesus Feliz, all who would ~ played prominent roles in his career as a bandit. And so in the myth, Joaquin is mining in ~ what's now Tualumne County near the town of Sonora, which is outside of Yosemite National Park. which I believe was named Sonora because of all the migrants from Sonora, right? Exactly. was the southern mines were the closest to Mexico. So generally the Mexican miners settled in what's called the southern mines, which is all the country south of the McAlmany River. And many of the mining camps, that's why they all have Spanish names for the most part Mariposa, Ornitos, Calaveras, which means skulls, San Andreas, know, just overwhelmingly Latino. And so And then within six months or so, word gets to South America and many miners are already in, there's professional miners in Peru and Chile, they immediately join the Mexican miners, most of whom came were already experienced miners from Mexico. And so what happened was Joaquin, according to the myth, created by John Rollin Ridge. He's working his claim. Anglo miners come in in about 1850 or 51 because by this time by the late 1848. news of gold discovery finally arrives on the East Coast and nobody believes it until the president says, hey, this is real. And that's when this massive explosion of ~ immigration to California takes place. so initially, I'm getting maybe too many details here, but in the very first, first or second year, 1848, 59, 50. the Latinos and Anglos get along very well in the mining country. But more and more Anglos show up and many of them are Mexican war veterans and the miners from Sonora got there first. They staked out the best claims. They're digging out the pockets of gold. They're using all their different methods of mining. And initially the Anglos were partnered with the Latinos, especially the Sonoran miners. And they taught them, the Mexican miners taught the ~ Anglo miners how to mine. But as more and more Anglos came in, they then decided, hey, this is like not right. These were our enemies just a few years ago. The Mexican war was resolved in 1848, right about the time gold was discovered. And so then this terrible racism develops. You have Anglo miners then start to become the majority by 1851. They start running Chile, they have the Chilean War where they run all these Chilean miners out of Chile Gulch in Calaveras County. There's all kinds of violence and everything like that. And so in this context, Ridge writes that Joaquin is peacefully working his claim. Anglo miners come in, I think he says they're Irish, and they beat him up, they flog him, they gang rape his wife Rosita, and then they lynch his half brother. And the problem is there's no ~ proof for any of this stuff. In fact, if these, I point out in the book, by this time there were newspapers in most of the major mining camps as well as Stockton, ~ Sacramento, San Francisco. And a tremendous amount of violence is recounted in detail in the Gold Rush newspapers. And there's not one word about any of this stuff. It never even shows up until Ridge writes his book. What we do know is that Joaquin... had settled by his own account. He had settled in ~ several mining camps near Sonora. He is, and we know that ~ he's not just him, but several hundred miners are run out on several different occasions with Joaquin about three different times, not just him, but all the Mexican miners are driven away. And what they do is they just go down the road five miles or so camp out and eventually they the Anglos give up because they really don't, they're not good miners. And then the Mexican miners would just go back in to the various camps. The best one known is Columbia, which is now a state park just north of Sonora. And so.~ The story is that Joaquin then became a bandit and some academics call him a social bandit, like a Robin Hood character, and he's driven to this life of crime. But the fact is, first known offense... is shoplifting a pair of boots from a general store in Stockton in 1850. And when he signed the ~ court papers and records, he signed with an X, meaning he was illiterate. later there's all kinds of stories to this day that he managed to escape California, he goes back to Mexico, lives happily ever after, he wrote a multitude of letters to all of his friends and family. kind of hard to do if you're not literate. And as we know today, the educational ~ possibilities in the Mexico frontier back then were very common. Very few people were literate in Northern Mexico and including the American frontier. There just weren't schools and teachers to take care of the young people like we have today. So, so he, so how does, okay, so he, he robs a pair of boots and how does his story of robbery or crime actually begin? Well, his brother-in-law, Claudio Feliz, even before Joaquin is arrested, he gets involved with ~ theft. He steals ~ gold from some miners. in Sonora. There's a miner's trial in front of a justice of the peace and the short version is that Claudio is finally identified as the guy that robbed that stole the gold and the the miner that was accused of it had nothing to do with it. And Claudio admitted to a friend more or less that the guy was innocent and somebody else did it. then Claudio then fled Sonora. And very soon after that, he emerges as the head of this rampaging bandit gang. so Claudio is actually the first leader of the Murrieta gang. And we know that Joaquin, by this point, Joaquin has given up gambling. He's become a professional, sorry, given up mining. has become a professional gambler and he travels all over the mining region from Mariposa in the south to Marysville in the north. He learns all the wagon roads and the Indian trails and everything like that, which is something that's going to come in handy. He's also an experienced vaquero. He's good with a pistol. He's an expert horseman. And what happens is eventually he joins Claudio's gang. And the first time that we, and we know this through a confession made by a guy that was jailed with Claudio, a young guy in his late teens named Teodoro Vasquez, who gives a detailed confession later. He's convicted of crimes himself, ~ sentenced to death in San Jose. And before he gets on the gallows, he gives a long statement and he's got like a photographic memory and he's also a very impressionable young teenager. So he's with Claudio, who's older. Claudio is like an old guy. He's about 23 compared to Teodoro, who's like 17 or 18 and just remembers every detail of every crime Claudio boasted to him when they were locked up in the jail. And then later, a terrific, ~ avocational historian named James Varley, who lived in Idaho. He passed, I think about 10 years ago, he ran across this, ~ confession. And the San Jose newspapers from that era, early 1850s, are all gone. There's a few scraps here and there. But fortunately, another newspaper copied it, which we still have that. And Jim Varley found this. He then researched before the internet and confirmed that all of these incidents, he found the actual newspaper accounts just by, you know, reading newspaper microfilm for hundreds of hours. He managed to find this. Today, it's a lot quicker. because we've got digitized newspapers. We may get into that later, but in any event.~ This confession then opened the door to unraveling the early history of the Murrieta gang. And what happens is Joaquin then, he's failed as a minor, is according to family ~ lore, Rosita, they break up and she goes back to Sonora. And we do know that she's never around anymore after that. later takes on a paramour ~ named ~ Maria Ana Benitez. or Maria Ana Andrada, she used several names, but she was later known as Mariana La Loca, Crazy Mariana, and known for many, years as the widow of Joaquin, and she readily admitted it and told a lot of stories. about Joaquin and so ~ he's by this time given up. He's lost his wife. He's lost his ~ mining claim.~ He's not making money as a gambler and so he decides to join Claudio who's already at the head of this rampaging bandit gang. They've already done a bunch of murders even in Willow Glen in San Jose.~ They, ~ Claudio and several other outlaws attack. this small cabin owned by an Anglo farmer. They murdered them both, chopped them to death with hatchets, set the place on fire, not knowing that there's a keg of gunpowder stored in the place and it blows to smithereens and there's a huge manhunt and they've escaped. And this is one of the crimes that Claudio boasted of to Teodoro when they're in the San Jose jail. And so we know that ~ each of the crimes that was ~ described in that confession is detailed in the contemporary newspapers. So finally Joaquin joins Claudio, they go on this bandit rampage in the mountains north of Marysville. And within the space of about a week, they murder six travelers. The ~ MO method of operation is to throw a raiata around a horseman's neck, yank him off the saddle, they'd stab him to death and steal their gold. And this is just a relentless thing. none of these robberies were generally done under the premise that dead men tell no tales. And so their victims, not always, but many, many of the victims were murdered ~ simply to keep ~ the victims from being able to identify them. And so this is the first time that we know that Joaquin Murrieta has actually joined the bandit gang. Eventually, the short version again is that Claudio and his men after doing a bunch of robberies with Joaquin up in what's now Tuolumne, or even then was Tuolumne County, they split up and. Joaquin and his brother-in-law Reyes Feliz go down to Los Angeles. Claudio and the rest of the gang decide to go over to Monterey. So they ride across the San Joaquin Valley and in a little ~ adobe on the Salinas River. just west of the city of Salinas. They hole up with some friends there and they make the mistake of robbing a California who's a native Californian, who's a local blacksmith who is riding his horse out of Monterey. And the problem for Joaquin or for in this case Claudio was the coastal regions then are overwhelmingly Spanish speaking. They're generally California with all kinds of Mexican immigrants, Peruvian, and Chilean immigrants. And everybody knows each other, unlike, and they're much more stable communities. These cities, know, Monterey, you've got cities like, or towns like Sonora or San Andreas that have existed for a couple of years. Monterey has been around for 40 years. You know, this is a... a much more stable community where you have rancheros, ~ even Anglos have moved in and you don't have the kind of ~ racism and ~ racial conflict in the mining region. Where you have that in the mining region, you have very little of it in the coastal region between, ~ Santa Barbara and San Jose. And you have lot of another thing you've had for many, many years for several generations is a lot of intermarriage where you have New England merchants and seafarers who've come to California in the 1820s and 30s and then they meet these young Californio girls, get married and they have a mixed-race family. There's a lot of that and you don't have any of that up in the mining country. but this is a mistake by Claudio. They rob a local Californio blacksmith, they steal his horses, then he immediately goes into the sheriff in Monterey, they raise a posse. They generally most part or most of the posse speak Spanish. You've got ~ mixed, you know, you've got sheriffs there that are either mixed race or you have California. constables and sheriffs in the coast region because the political power generally is in the hands of Californios because they are the majority in that era in the 1850s and 60s. So in any event, this posse quickly tracks down the outlaws, which know, you you basically have so little law enforcement in the gold region. The posses are generally a bunch of miners who've only been there six months and they don't know the country. They don't know the trails. They're not horsemen. These guys are like merchants or, you know, they have some kind of farm hands from New England or from the Midwest. And the Californios are born to the saddle. They can ride backwards, forwards. They sleep in the saddle. you're not going to be able outrun a posse of Californios. So in any event, this group of possemen, which includes an African American leader who owns a popular hotel and inn on the Salinas River about five miles down river from where this, ~ this, ~ hideout is and another thing getting off topic, but it's generally forgotten. But the African Americans played prominent roles in the California gold rush.~ Many of them came here to escape slavery. Others obtained their freedom. They worked for it and bought their freedom once they were here. And so in this case, ~ one of the leaders of the Posse, this guy named Anthony, they called him Antonio the Californios. And so the short version again is there's this huge gun battle. Claudio manages to escape. Most of his gang are shot or stabbed to death by the members of the Posse in this big gunfight at this adobe right on the Salinas River. And during the battle though, ~ Claudio is finally ~ shot dead.~ this is something that ~ is published in the newspapers, but nobody knows who they say a guy named Claudio or several accounts call him correctly Claudio Feliz, or they misspell it the Anglos who run the newspapers don't speak Spanish. So they call him Claudio Felix, F-E-L-I-X instead of Feliz, F-E-L-I-Z. But then still nobody understands who he is. They understand he's some kind of cutthroat, but it wasn't until Jim Varley put his book together in 1996 that anybody connected all of these robberies with Claudio. Although it was known from 1853 that Claudio Jesus and Reyes Feliz were Joaquin's brothers-in-law. So in the meanwhile, Joaquin has gone down to Los Angeles. He's ~ met up. with Mariana La Loca, Crazy Mariana, they get a little adobe in San Gabriel near the mission San Gabriel, or I'm a gringo, so to me it's San Gabriel. And then they go to what's called the Maromas, the Mexican circus or rope dance, which is a very popular entertainment back then. And it's being held within walking distance of the mission. And while he's there, it's pointed out to him the most famous guy in Los Angeles is General Joshua Bean. Most people today have never heard of him, but many people have heard of the Paul Newman movie, ~ Judge Roy Bean. And Judge Roy Bean was the younger brother of Joshua Bean, and the Bean brothers ended up in San Diego. Then they go to Los Angeles and finally San Gabriel, where Roy Bean runs a saloon ~ inside the old mission. now privately owned. And he's also the head of the militia in Los Angeles County in Southern California. And this militia... was active in fighting against the Native Americans who are allied against the Anglos. But people keep forgetting or they're not aware that there were large numbers of Native Americans in Southern California that were actually allied with the Anglos and supported the Anglos. There's even articles that would appear in the Los Angeles Star in the early 1850s. And if you see Chief So-and-so with his Katwea Indians coming into town, please don't shoot at them. Please don't. afraid of them. They are our friends and they try to educate people because people would just see a Native American and get terrorized. So. In any event, ~ Roy Bean is active in fighting against ~ certain Native American tribes in Southern California and against outlaws. And he breaks up the Red Irving Gang. There's a popular novel written about that blood meridian, which is ~ by Cormac McCarthy, inspired by the Gang of Red Irving, who was a bunch of cutthroat a bunch of cutthroats in Los Angeles and basically ~ General Bean and his men broke up this gang of bandits and killed a bunch of them and the rest of them fled back to Arizona where they came from. So in any event, Joaquin then has already...~ developed immense hatred for maybe not all Anglos, but many Anglos and certainly Anglos that are after Indians and outlaws. So on the way back, Roy Bean is walking back and Joaquin and ~ Mariana or Ana as she was known are in a small adobe. There's a... somebody murders ~ General Bean and Joaquin is not in the adobe. He's out somewhere around the adobe when this happens. And so this is the biggest murder in that era in Southern California. A huge vigilance committee organizes. They arrest all kinds of suspects. And again, the telling that, you know, I've got like a 30 page chapter on this whole thing because most of what's been written about the Roy Bean murder is all messed up. And the biggest problem is, I'll kind of illustrate historiography with the actual story, is that the Los Angeles Star gives a very detailed description of everything that happened. And the... the vigilantes who are a mixture of Anglos and Californios and several of the leaders are Californios, but they have a dispute because the Anglos are picking up suspects and torturing them to get information out of them and the Californios are very much opposed to that. But in any event, ~ finally they capture, the vigilantes capture ~ Mariana.~ who's using the name of Ana Benitez at the time, and ~ they capture Reyes Feliz. And apparently some kind of third degree was used at least on Reyes Feliz. And they both then said the killer, well, Reyes Feliz says the killer was Joaquin Marietta. Mariana tries to deflect, but she more or less admits as well in her confession. And so the problem then was, and up to the time my book came out, is that people in Southern California had no idea who Joaquin Murrieta was. Very few people knew who he was because he hadn't come out as a bandit chieftain yet. This is in November of 1852. He doesn't become well known until three, four, five months later. And so... and nobody knew that Reyes Feliz is his brother-in-law. And so all the writing about this, there's been much writing about the murder of General Bean, but why would Joaquin's brother-in-law and his paramour both implicate him in a murder that he wasn't involved in? Just use standard lawyer lingo, it's like a preponderance of the evidence is that Joaquin did it because they said he did it. And so Reyes Feliz is taken up on top of Gallows Hill, which has now got apartment buildings overlooking La Plaza right off of the freeway in downtown Los Angeles, which is a great place if anybody in Southern California hasn't visited, they really should because the old Mission building is there. The La Plaza Museum is there. A bunch of the old adobes are still standing, thank goodness. But if you look just north, you'll see these apartment buildings and that was called ~ Fort because there was a fort there in the early days. And then it was called Gallows Hill because that's where the Flanders put their gallows and lynched numerous suspects during the 1850s. So Joaquin then flees Los Angeles. At some point he finds out, because everybody, this is in the newspapers, and the newspapers were published in English and Spanish in various cities. And then by word of mouth, it got out that Claudio Feliz was dead. Joaquin learns that. And so this is when he goes off the rails because he's lost his wife, he's lost his occupation, he's been subject to racial discrimination. His brother-in-law is lynched in LA and his other brother-in-law is shot and killed on the Salinas River. And so within just two months of that time, he raises a bandit gang. They start rampaging through the mother-load country. And the myth of Joaquin is that he basically robbed from the rich and gave to the poor. Again, this tells you how bad racism was in that era because even I point this out with Tibercio Vasquez, who's later 1860s and 70s. At the time, Tibercio Vasquez was hanged, legally hanged in San Jose. The governor of California was at California, but The hero that was held up ~ by many ~ Latinos in California in that era was not the governor of California. It was Tibercio Vasquez who was robbing and raiding for 20 years in California until he was finally captured ~ and sentenced to death for a murder and a murder robbery. And this is a similar thing that happened or began to happen after Joaquin became well known because as I point out in my book, when people are subject to racism, they're gonna grasp out at anything that gives them hope. And in this case, even if it's a notorious outlaw, then what people tend to do is they use the preconceived notion even in the 1100s in England, ~ Robin Hood comes to the forefront and there've been various studies of this Robin Hood and social bandit concept where people take an actual character and then they put these mythical ~ input into his fictional persona and then out comes somebody like Robin Hood. And this is why people to this day, kind of sometimes deify Bonnie and Clyde. And Bonnie was just this innocent young woman who happened to fire a Browning automatic rifle at a school bus full of children in Oak. people don't, they forget, don't either want to know about it, they don't know about it. And so I'm getting a little off topic talking about Bonnie and Clyde, but it's the same sort of concept. The real Joaquin, what he and his gang did was they murdered approximately 30 people on this rampaging, the worst bandit spree in the history of the American frontier. More than 20 of the people that they murder are unarmed. Chinese miners. And the reason Chinese miners were targeted, we had about 20 Chinese emigrated to California just the first few years of the gold rush. came from Guangdong province in southern China, also called Canton province. And working class Chinese did not have horses. They didn't have American firearms. The only people that had matchlock weapons, which are kind of older antique style even at that era. and had horses were the upper classes in China. The ones that came to China were the working classes who wanted to come to what was called in Chinese Gold Mountain. And so you had the Chinese were very well known in California as law abiding. The people didn't they were kind of fascinated by the Chinese because of their hair. They were so distinctive. The clothing, the men wore long queues. Very, very few Chinese women came in that era. you And so they were very diligent miners so that it was well known that the Chinese had gold. They didn't have horses so they couldn't flee. They didn't have guns so they couldn't defend themselves. They were sitting ducks. And so the thing I point out in the various talks I give about Joaquin Marietta is I'm not clear who they're rebelling against by murdering more than 20 unarmed Chinese miners. And so their MO would be to ride into a camp, open fire, If anybody resisted they'd shoot them dead if they've tried to flee with gold they shoot them dead Or stab them to death and then they'd loot the entire mining camp and this happened over and over and over again and caused this massive manhunt and Finally there was so much ~ uproar about Joaquin and this gang that the state legislature then formed the California Rangers, which were only in effect for three months.~ Joaquin's other brother-in-law, the last surviving brother-in-law, Jesus Feliz, is captured in Calaveras County for horse theft.~ He's turned over to Harry Love. And this appears in the contemporary accounts, but you know, have missed it. I've dug this stuff up out of various records and whatnot. And so love makes a deal with them. Take me to Joaquin and we'll let you go. And so a long manhunt begins. end up over in San Juan Bautista, which is ~ northeast of Monterey. And from there they head up into the coast range and they're up there for quite a few weeks hunting the gang. Finally, they encounter them on Cantua Creek, which is just the place Joaquin ~ meets the rangers is on a flat above Cantua Creek, ~ maybe a third of a mile off of interstate. Tens of thousands of people drive by the spot every day. And this is one of the most significant gun battles of the old west. Everybody knows where the OK Corral is in Tombstone, but nobody knows. All you gotta do is look to the right and you can see the hills that overlook the spot where this gun battle took place. So the Rangers have a huge gun battle with Joaquin and his gang. They kill Joaquin Marietta, his lieutenant, three-finger Jack.~ who was, that's another story, Three Finger Jack. And then.~ several other of the gang, the rest of the band manages to escape.~ Excuse me. The Rangers then, not ~ many people have said that they did this ~ to ~ cause indignity or to terrorize people, ~ but they didn't.~ There were no photographer within a two-day ride. The temperature is 112 on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley that particular day. So they cut off his head. and they want to collect the reward. So they put it in a jar of alcohol and eventually it's displayed throughout the mining region from Mariposa to Marysville. Scores of people identify the head as Joaquin, the leader of the bandit gang. Many of the Chinese victims identify Joaquin and the head is then ends up on display in a freak museum in San Francisco and is destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, which is sort like a gruesome end to a gruesome story. So yeah, that's very interesting because the title of your book is Bring Me the Head of Joaquin Murrieta. I know that there's a lot of, we'll get back to a couple of things that you mentioned before, but I know there's a lot of lore around whether that artifact, whether his head survived and whether it was on display at other places later on. remember you mentioned in the book, and I remember when I was younger, at one point there was somebody in Sonoma claiming to have the head of Joaquin Murrieta, but you're pretty convinced that ~ all that was destroyed in the earthquake of 1906. Yeah, absolutely no question about that. The guy is a gun collector up in Sonoma. And what happened was that was a wax head done as a conversation piece for the old Almaden Museum in San Jose. And then I've got the accounts, even in the newspapers back then when he acquired it, he did a trade, he thought it was real. But anybody, there's photographs of it, you can see it on Google. online all you got to do is take one look at it you could tell that ain't a ~ human head from 1853. It's a wax fake. But he was convinced it was. And even there was this Jesuit priest at University of San Francisco. I think this was in the 80s, mid 80s I think. He was convinced it was the head and lobbied and lobbied to have it buried and given a proper funeral and everything. And of course this guy paid a bunch of money for it back then. I think he paid like $3,000 in the 1980s, which was multiplied by three or four or five for today's money. He wasn't gonna let them bury this thing he paid thousands of dollars for. But he was convinced it was real, but it certainly wasn't. The whole history of the head is detailed in my book. then let's circle back to this character, Harry Love. You spend a lot of time talking about Harry Love in the book and the California Rangers. Could you talk a little bit about him and the fact of what the Rangers were and that they were controversial in their time? The Rangers were a fairly typical group of frontiersmen. In order to be recruited, you had to be a good horseman, a good shot, a tracker, a trailer, basically a frontiersman. Harry Love had acquired a notable reputation. He served as a volunteer ~ from ~ Alabama in the Mexican War along the Rio Grande in South Texas.~ He then, after the war, ~ became a noted express rider for the U.S. Army. He'd carry ~ letters and newspapers and correspondence from northern Mexico hundreds of miles to San Antonio for the U.S. Army. And he was very colorful character with long flowing hair typically carried in his belt a bowie knife and a Colt Dragoon a large Colt Dragoon revolver. And when he came, by the time he came to California, he fairly noted. He'd also was the first to ~ navigate and map the Rio Grande.~ And so ~ he was a natural choice to lead the California Rangers. The other most notable Ranger was Patrick Edward Connor, who was a local militia leader in Stockton.~ And Connor later, though, became a general in the Union Army in the Civil War. But instead of being one of these heroic generals ~ who fought at the Confederacy, was the engineered a notorious massacre of Shoshone Indians during the Civil War. And that's the thing he's most known for. So his career goes from, I point out in the book, it goes from his highlight is his role in breaking up the Joaquin Murrieta gang to the lowest where you could get where witnesses actually testified that these volunteer soldiers at the massacre had massacred women and children and they'd raped women. There are numerous accounts of these soldiers raping Indian women. So you had, that's the whole gamut. You had reputable guys who are California Rangers, one of them to extremely disreputable, ~ including one who later called himself Joaquin and he was a cutthroat in Utah and was eventually murdered in Salt Lake City, probably by the avenging angel, Brigham Young's bodyguard gunfighter who was the main suspect in his death. So you had a whole gamut of personalities in the California Rangers. How long did the Rangers last? When were they disbanded? Only three months.~ Love tried to have them ~ extended for another three months. He wrote letters to the governor saying there's more of the gang out there, which there definitely were. But the you know, back then the taxpayer dollar was the number one consideration. They had extremely tight budgets. And the legislature refused. The governor refused also to reinstate the Rangers, so three months is it. So what do you think the, well, one of the things that you mentioned also is the other members of ~ Joaquin Murrieta's band, some of them survived and ~ went on to other places like Salavon Pico, for example. What can you tell us about some of the others, ~ the other members that survived? The most of them, for example, Solomon Pico, who was the first cousin of Pio Pico, who was the last Mexican governor of California, came from a very prominent family. He had a large land grant in what's now, think, just kind of over in the Sierra foothills, and he lost it. And that kind of turned him to a career of crime also. But he was ~ more educated from an upper class back then than Joaquin Mariette came from the uppermost class of the Californios. And there was a pretty strict caste system in effect back then in early California. And so he ended up ~ committing all kinds of crimes, robberies. He was involved in ~ a number of murders.~ He and his gang were later accused of robbing and killing many travelers along El Camino Real, the King's Highway, which is now roughly Highway 101 between San Jose and Santa Barbara. So finally, he ends up in Mexico as a bodyguard for the governor of Baja, California. And then he's involved in more stuff down there. And finally, the governor's had a belly full and he orders a general roundup of numerous, I can't remember exactly how many, 10, maybe even 20 cutthroats in Baja. And they're all just without any trial or anything, they're all just lined up and executed by firing squad. And one of them is Solomon Pico. And this is about 1860. So he managed to live about seven years after Joaquin. How did you go about collecting all the information for this book? How do you do your research for a book like this, which is massive and has a lot of detail? Well, this is something you know you just have to end up like an old guy because you've had been doing it a long time.~ I've just collected information on Joaquin since I was in high school and it never dawned on me to do a book. I just was fascinated by the story and then I used a lot of that when I have this chapter on my 1999 book Gold Dust and Gunsmoke and then. Over the years, continued to, when I'd be researching something, I'd run across other things. So before the internet, my buddy Bill Seacrest, who passed about five years ago, he was the leading authority on outlaws and law men of Frontier, California. And we would research, but in reading the old newspapers, you'd see all kinds of stuff, and we'd make notes of it. And that's how we figured out who all these outlaws were simply by happenstance. we kept, I had a long, ~ like a three by five index card file where I'd keep track of these people and I'd have handwritten notes. As I mentioned, when I was young, I couldn't afford Xerox copies, which they really didn't, very difficult to get those. And so I'd keep handwritten notes on everything. And then Bill and I would, ~ we were both more conservative in many senses, but when it came to ~ When it came to our research, we were communists because everything I had belonged to him and everything he had belonged to me. And so we just traded and learned. And that's kind of how our books came about, just trading on research and digging stuff up. And the Marietta thing was when I finally, ~ actually a friend of mine who's a professional historian was actually, we were having a couple beers one night about 10 years ago at a Wild West History Association conference in Texas. And he was telling me, ought to write up this Murrieta story.~ It's write up your alley. And I said, you know, the problem is I don't think I could write 40 pages of fact. The rest of it would be all fiction. But it really got me thinking. And ~ then what happened was I decided I'll look into it some more. And the more I dug, the more I dug up. And then eventually the book, I was able to put the book together. The thing that I wish I had more of was more information about Joaquin's personal life, but it's just not available. He didn't out, like I mentioned before, outlaws, don't keep diaries and journals.~ Various people have looked for his baptismal record. I know several people that claim they found it at which it was it turned out to be a rank fabrication. These people that ~ have claimed both ~ American citizens and Mexican citizens, a number of each have claimed they found it all turned out to be total hogwash. So we don't even have his baptismal record. And there is a Joaquin Murrieta that ~ later ~ appears in a baptismal record in later years. I point out in my book, Murrieta was a very common name in Northern Mexico. And I found multiple people with various Anglo misspellings of Murrieta in the early 1850s between Calaveras County and Stockton. There's four five or six of them, including a prominent merchant. Hmm. Stockton with the same last name. So simply because you have the last name Murrieta doesn't mean that you're related to Joaquin Murrieta. So there's just again so much myth about that, but it's just a matter of trying to dig and be patient and analyze and very important to be analytical and look at the when the ~ documents came out. And the best example on that is there's a guy named Frank F. Latta yeah. who was a, many people today get mad at me when I say he's not a historian, he's a folklorist, because what he did was he started interviewing people in the 1920s and 30s. And I go into some detail on this in my book, because Lada came out with a book published in 1980 called Joaquin Murrieta and his Horse Gangs. And he has basically Joaquin Murrieta is a merchant or a businessman running a band of mesterners. or Mustang hunters. And ~ most of the book comes from three people. If you do a modicum of research, you'll find out that they were small children when Joaquin was killed and couldn't possibly have had anything to do with Joaquin's gang. And so that just kind of blows a hole in Latta's book. And a lot of people get upset when I say that, but my job is to recount history, not folklore. Sure, sure. I know his book on the Tejon Ranch has a lot of interesting information. Yes, the Tahoe Ranch book. It has a lot of stuff from this Jesus Jose de Jesus Lopez, who they've even put a monument to him up there on the Tahoe Ranch. But he's one of the fabricators ~ who he was just a little boy when walk. He claimed he rode with the gang. helped. He was at the gun battle. He helped bury the dead gang members at Cantua Creek in 1853. Kind of hard to do when you're like four years old or whatever. And he told Lata and Lata himself admitted in the 1930s that he was ~ telling these ~ stories that shouldn't be believed. And then in the 1970s, he's writing his book and he ~ places biblical value on the things the guy told him when he'd actually questioned it in a published newspaper story back in the 1930s. I think Lata meant well, I tell everybody this. He also did a book called Dalton Gang Days about the Dalton Gang who were like the most famous bank robbers after Jesse James and the younger gang. but what he did there, well, he did the same thing. He used the same historiography, if you can call it that. But the Daltons were 40 years later. They were in the 1890s. And so Lata interviewed Eugene Kay, who had been the sheriff of to Larry County who personally. and was involved in everything to do with the Daltons when they were in California. And then he interviewed Littleton Dalton, the honest Dalton brother. There was a bunch of Dalton brothers. They were all criminals except for Littleton, who then gave the entire inside story of the family. So I tell everybody, The Dalton Gang Days is one of the finest books ever written about a Western outlaw gang because of the research he did. The problem is he's getting it firsthand for The Dalton Gang book and he's getting it forth hand from on his Joaquin Marietta book. That makes sense. I see. Well, you know, I've kept you a long time, but I just want to finish up by asking one question. What do you think this book does in terms of dispelling any sort of misconceptions about California history, particularly this bandido legend of Joaquin Murrieta? For those who are true believers, it's not going to have any effect at all. When I post things online about it, there's a lot of blowback because people are married to their beliefs. Joaquin, the other story is that Joaquin was the basis for Zorro. And that's a story that goes back to the 1920s. That's nothing new. But the author of Zorro never admitted that or never detailed that. Maybe something will come out in the future. So I'm hoping the book, at least for younger readers, will give them an idea of the racial~ issues, ~ conflict, prejudice that existed back in that era. When we see people complaining that there's racism today, ~ There clearly is, but nothing compared to what we saw in that era. You saw people deny due process of law and lynched by vigilantes because of the color of their skin. People would assume, ~ all Mexican immigrants are bandits. Therefore, we're going to hang these guys. But you also see people fighting against vigilantism in that era and even up through the 1930s. So it's definitely a very, ~ it's a very two-sided story.~ The one side of story is the level of racism there makes what we see today just pale in comparison. So I'm hoping that the book illustrates that. illustrates how these legends ~ come about and ~ also for people who want an exciting read can read the actual true story of Joaquin Murrieta and his gang. Well, it's definitely an exciting read, ~ full of detail, full of very evocative descriptions of the time period that for me was also very interesting. And I really enjoyed it as I also enjoyed your book on Tiburcio Vazquez. so ~ John Boessenecker I really hope everyone will go out and get a copy of Bring Me the Head of Joaquin Murrieta. and I appreciate your taking the time to talk to me about this. Well, thanks for having me. enjoyed and hopefully I didn't put anybody to sleep.