American History Hit - The Robin Hood of the Wild West

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

Robbing from the rich to give to the poor and downtrodden - this is the legend of Joaquin Murrieta.But how true was it? Murder rates in 1850s California were 30 times higher than they are today, and Joaquin was part of this violence. Was he a social bandit, or was he fuelled by self-interest?Don is finding out today with historian John Boessenecker, author of ‘Bring Me the Head of Joaquin Murrieta'.Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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To some, he's an Avenger, a man who strikes back at the Anglo-Vigilantes and fortune seekers who stole his home, his livelihood, even his family. He raids settlements and mining camps, who pays out his spoils to less fortunate Mexicans and Native Californians, suffering under a brutal, New Order. So says his legend, spreading across the land. But now he is the hunted one, his band dwindling and a bounty on his head. In the distance comes the faint thunder of hoofbeats. Breathing deep, he checks the grip of his revolver, spurs his horse, and gallops away into the gathering haze. If this is to be his last ride, he will face it knowing he has served justice. But has he?

or just himself. Hello, folks. I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Hit. The archetype of the noble outlaw has captivated human beings for centuries. Still resonates with us today. In a world corrupted by greed, violence, and injustice, especially against the powerless, this lone figure fights back, restoring justice with courage, cunning, and all too often, a revolver. It's the stuff of comic books.

But history complicates our heroes. The real story always does, which brings us to the tale of Joaquin Murietta, the legendary Robin Hood of El Dorado. Murietta was said to have fought for Mexicans, driven from their claims during the California gold rush, striking back against a brutal and deeply racist new order. Yet he and his band also killed dozens of people, including more than 20, in just two months during 1851. So was Joaquin Murietta a champion of the oppressed or a ruthless murderer? It's a fact from fiction conversation with our guest today, John Boznecker, an American historian and author of Bring Me the Head of Joaquin Murietta,

the bandit chief who terrorized California and launched the Legend of Zorro. Hello, John, nice to be with you today. Nice to be with you also. Let's place ourselves in time. This is the California of the Gold Rush era in 1848, famously 1849. At this point, California has been ceded to the U.S. by the Treaty of Hildago, which officially ends the Mexican-American War. And now look out, it's gold. John, is the idea of the rush a real thing?

This was people from all over the world? Absolutely. This was the biggest gold rush in the history of mankind. And gold was discovered almost at the same time the treaty that you mentioned, the Treaty of Guadalupe, Hidalgo, was signed ending the Mexican war and made California a territory of the United States as well as much of the southwest. And so what happened was after gold was discovered, because northern Sonora was closer five or 600 miles away, word arrived there within three, four, five months, whereas word of the gold discovery did not arrive on the east coast of the United States until the fall of that year.

and was largely discredited. Everybody thought it was a hoax until the president of the United States confirmed it in November of 1848, and that set off this massive gold rush. Okay. That's the backdrop for all we're going to talk about today. Our subject, Joaquin Murayeta, would have been one of those Mexicans who lived in California before it becomes the United States in the midst of the gold rush as well. We've already sketched it out, but I want to understand his.

legend. He's basically a Mexican Robin Hood, but how so? Well, Joaquin was actually born in Alamos, which is a mining town in Sonora in northern Mexico. And when Word arrived in the summer of 1848, he and his young wife, Rosa Felice and his three brothers-in-law, who became very prominent in the outlaw gang, all joined the gold rush. And within just a few months, 20,000 Sonoran minors arrived in California from Northern Mexico

and Joaquin and his wife and brothers-in-law were just a handful of the many experienced miners that came from northern Mexico.

Again, we're talking about the legend here, first of all, a bandit for society fighting injustice in the Wild West enters crime for revenge.

He faced racism under what was called the Foreign Miners Act, correct? His wife had been assaulted, his brother killed. There's extraordinary violence which we're going to get into in more detail, but I'm just trying to get the story behind how he becomes such a legend right

away. Well, the legend of Joaquin began to develop just about the time he was killed. It's sort of a common human inclination from the days of Robin Hood to take a common criminal and adorn them with certain mythical character traits, robbing from the red, and giving to the poor is one of those traits. In Joaquin's case, he died in 1853, and of course we'll get into that as we go forward, but within a year of his death, a novel was written about his life by a Cherokee author named John Rowland Ridge, and Ridge in his novel created most of the myths about Joaquin, including the one that Anglo miners stole his claim, they raped his wife, Rosa, they lynched his half-brother, and flogged him mercilessly, and he was so outraged by disgraceful

treatment that he then turned to a life of banditry. Okay. I mean, he heavily inspired the fictional Zorro, right? I mean, it was a book that then, of course, becomes the big TV series. The author of Zorro, which is originally released as a magazine sequel in 1919, never did say that he based Joaquin on Zorro. However, during the 1920s, a fellow, he was a reporter, the author of Zorro was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. and one of his fellow L.A. Times reporters said as early as the 1920s that Zorro was based on Joaquin Marietta. So we don't have it from the horse's mouth, but the myth goes back very soon after the release of the book Zora, which, as you mentioned, became a very popular TV series, multiple movies, and is very much a legendary character today.

Yeah. So we have what is a sort of archetypal figure, a Robin Hood figure, who has been made into a legend for media purposes for the most part. But there's a whole story and a factual account of this, which your book goes into. And we're going to cover that as we come back after this break. We're back with author John Bowsnecker discussing the fact and fiction of the Mexican Robin Hood, Joaquin Murietta. John, I was one of those 60s kids obsessed with Zorro. I watched the famous. Disney series in reruns. I used to run around the house with, you know, a towel for a cape, drawing Z's on everything, the furniture, the rug, the fridge. I drove my mother crazy, but I was on a mission for revenge. That's what Zorro had taught me. That was an inspiration, right? That was a fictional, of course, count, which was inspired by Murietta's legend. But let's talk about the truth of this guy. No mask, no cape. Who was he in reality? Well, Joaquin was a young miner from Alamos in northern Mexico in the state of Sonora,

and he married quite young. He was born about 1829 or 1830, and by the time word of the California Gold Rush arrived in Sonora in the summer of 1848, he was married to a young woman named Rosa Felice, and many of the miners in the summer of 1848, he was married to a young woman named Rosa Felice. and many of the miners in northern Mexico or experienced silver miners, but to transition into gold miners wasn't a big deal. And so when the word came of the discovery of gold, they just got on their horses and mules and wagons and headed north. So many people from northern Mexico emigrated to California so quickly that Mexican officials thought that their northern frontier was going to be depopulated. Hmm, interesting. A crime is committed against his family. What are the details of that? Well, the story, as I mentioned, about his wife being raped by a group of Anglo miners who then drove him off his claim, flogged him, and lynched his half-brother.

That's a myth created by John Rollin Ridge in his novel about Joaquin Murrietta. What actually happened was Joaquin settled in and around the mining town of Sonora. At that time, the most prominent mining camp in the southern Sierra Nevada, named after the miners from the state of Sonora, Mexico. And there were more than 10,000 in that area. And they mined in places like Campo Seco in Sawmill Flat and in the town of Columbia, which is today a very popular state park. You can't drive a car on the streets of Columbia in the old town because it's the best preserved gold camp of California. And what happened was Joaquin was driven off his mining claim. The Anglo miners showed up later by the time they got there in the spring,

summer, and fall of 1849, the Mexican miners had already been there for almost a year. They'd already claimed all the best gold claims, and they were really despised by the Anglo miners because they had been their erstwhile enemies in the Mexican War, and now they've got all the best mining claims. So Anglo-Ruffians began running the Mexican miners, and not just the Mexicans, the Chileos, the Peruvians, other miners from Latin America, and began running them off their claims. and this happened to Joaquin three different times, but not just him, hundreds of other miners were driven off with him, and only a tiny handful of them have returned to banditry. Most of the miners simply waited until the excitement died over, came back, worked their claims,

and persisted. The accusation is that his wife was raped, assaulted, but there was no evidence from court records or even newspaper clippings of that or the whipping against his wife. Tim, right? And raping was a pretty rare thing out there in those days. Yes, because California at that time was 98% male. And as I point out in my book, even the lowest prostitute was treated like royalty. There are many stories of a woman would walk down the street of either San Francisco or a small gold town. And the miners, Latino and Anglo, would just pour out of the saloons in gambling halls with their hats in hand bowing just to get a look at a woman. Right. So recorded instances of rape in that era

are highly unusual. If it did happen, the person who did it would be in danger of getting lynched. Right. And it would have been in the papers. It would have been highly reported what papers they had. How about his brother? Was his brother killed? His half-brother was lynched, but not then. His half-brother was lynch later during this deadly bandit spree that we'll be talking about. So John Rollin Ridge took these various incidents and compiled them into a very appealing myth. I see. So the organization we're going to talk about is called the Muriata Felice gang or Feliz, I guess. How does this form and why if there was no crime committed against him in the first place? Well, he definitely was abused. Joaquin was run off his mining claim three different times in the mining camps around Sonora.

He developed an unabiding hatred of Anglos, no doubt about that. But the stories told by Ridge have no basis in fact. What actually happened was it was his brother-in-law, Claudio Felice, the oldest brother of his wife, Rosa Feliz, who became the first member of the family to engage in banditry. Claudio was mining with a group of Anglo miners near Sonora and he stole a pouch of gold. There was a trial over this and eventually suspicion rested on Claudio instead of the Anglo sailor who was accused of stealing the gold. And Claudio just fled Sonora and that was the beginning of his bandit career. Joaquin instead turned to gambling. When he failed as a miner, he gambled in the mining region from Mariposa in the south to Marysville in the north.

And in doing so, he learned all the trails and wagon roads and the geography that would be very important to him in his later career as a bandit. I see. So Claudia is really the ringleader in this situation. And he escapes from the Stockton jail that he's put in for that banditry. He becomes the outlaw. December 5th, 1850, there's an attack. on the John Marsh Rancho, killing one and robbing the ranch. This is the gang in action, right, for the first time? This is one of the first attacks that we know of. One of the affiliates

of the gang, who was later hanged in San Jose, gave a very detailed confession about all the crimes that the gang had done. And the rancho owned by John Marsh can still be visited today in eastern Contra Costa County in the East Bay in California. And what they did was they rode up, pretended to be a bunch of innocent passers-by. They cased John Marsh's ranch. He was a very prominent rancher and doctor. And then they looted the ranch. They stole about 40-odd horses and murdered two Anglos who were camped in a tent on the property.

And this was a very typical bandit raid, kind of like the beginning. of the raids by the gang that would eventually be led by Joaquin Murietta. Just a few weeks later, December 15th, 1850, there's an attack on the Digby Smith Ranch, in which Smith's skull is crushed, another head split with an axe. I mean, it's seriously violent acts of banditry to call it that. But I mean, it sounds psychopathic to me. And this was the method of operation of the gang. Basically, the belief, I think, was, dead men tell no tales. And so this was really one of the most violent and certainly the most murderous bandit gang of the Old West. I point out occasionally that even the cowboys who fought

against the Earp brothers in Tombstone, they were the West's largest bandit gang, and they committed 35 murders more or less. Wachin and his much smaller gang of about 10 men committed far more murders than that. Wow. The Cook's head was severed in that crime. And all this, I suppose, was reported in the papers, right, at the time? Yes, this was a very detailed account given in the papers where the bandits raided the Digby farm. They butchered Digby and his partner. Then they set the place on fire, not aware that a keg of gunpowder was inside the cabin and it blew the cabin the smithereens and attracted the neighbors and a big investigation. And the culprits were never identified until the confession that I mentioned came out

more than a year later. Yeah. By February of 1851, so we're talking about a number of months here from December until February, 1851, the gang moves to the Sierra foothills after people start defending themselves against this, right? At this point, the gang was still not that active. They do a bandit raid, whether it be in San Jose or up in Marysville, then they disappear for a while. But the bandit raids in the mountains north of Marysville were the first really determined group of bandit raids by the gang in which they did one robbery and murder after another. And what were they robbing? What were they stealing? Gold? What they did was, and this was the ammo that Joaquin would use, in this series of bandit raids,

Joaquin appeared for the first time with Claudio's gang, and Claudio had been operating as a bandit at this time for more than a year. They would simply ride down a road in the mining region. They'd see a miner approaching on horseback. They'd lassoom off the saddle, stab him to death, and steal whatever gold he had on his person. and they did this. They murdered six people, six gold miners in the space of about a week in the mountains north of Marysville. Each method of operation was identical. Right. Tell me how Joaquin moves into a leadership position in this gang. In the fall of 1851, Joaquin parted from Claudio.

And with Claudio's younger brother, Reyes Feliz, they rode down to Los Angeles. And there they met up with a woman named Mariana Andrada, later known as Mariana LaLocca, Crazy Mariana. And she would become widely known as the wife of Joaquin Murrietta. And the short version is, in Los Angeles, Joaquin murdered General Joshua Bean, the reputable older brother of Judge Roy Bean, who's famous from the Paul Newman movie. the judge Roy Bean. Right. And several of the gang were captured and lynched by the Los Angeles vigilantes, including Joaquin's brother-in-law, Reyes Felice.

Joaquin flees Los Angeles, heads back north, and he finds out that just a month or two earlier, his other brother-in-law, Claudio Felice, had been killed by a posse on the Salinas River. And by this time, Rosa Felice, their brother and his wife, according to family history, had left him and gone back to her family in Mexico. So it seems like these things, the loss of his wife, the deaths of his two brothers-in-law put him over the edge. Because immediately after that, he begins organizing this very dangerous bandit gang that he became the leader of. Yeah. Everything we've talked about so far is mere preamble.

to this much bigger spree that's about to come. And this is led by Joaquin, obviously, because Claudio was out of the picture. The legend has it that Joaquin and his band sort of reverse the social injustices of the Anglo people. That's kind of the reputation of this story, that they robbed all these people of Anglo origin and then gave that money to these poor people who were of Mexican descent, I suppose. Is this true? No, again, that's a fiction created by John Rollin Ridge. and other writers in later years. There are numerous novels written about Joaquin in the 1920s and 30s. You know, so this is something that's totally unsupported. The fact is that in the winter of 1852, 53,

Joaquin is in Calaveras County. He makes his headquarters at a place called Joaquin Peak, which is just south of San Andreas, still called that to this day. They gathers. at the top of this mountain, and he collects a gang of 10 men, nine Latino, one Anglo, and among his gang are a notorious character who became notorious in the Mexican War in California. His name was Bernardino Garcia, also known as Three-Fingered Jack, and another outlaw named Joaquin Valenzuela. And the other gang members, most of their names are known and identified in my book. They first ride out and steal dozens of horses that they're going to use in their bandit raids.

And then in January of 1853, they begin the bloodiest bandits spree in the history of the American West. Before we get into the details of this crime spree, which is rather famous, I want to know how common this was. Were there a lot of gangs running around, where was banditry a big part of daily life for these miners out there? There were bandits in California. One was Solomon Pico, who was associated off and on with Joaquin Marietta. Pico was primarily on the coastal region between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles. There were also Anglo robbers. California was a very, very dangerous place in the 1850s. The homicide rates there were 30 times higher than they are today. And so there were a lot of, outlaws, a lot of ruffians, a lot of the people that came to California were very rough and tumble frontiersmen, and many were highly disreputable. Even some of the wealthier people that came to California turned out to be escaping charges back in the eastern states. Well, I guess where there's smoke, there's fire, and where there's gold, there's going to be

crime. Let's talk about this famous crime spree that Joaquin Muretta commits. along with his gang, something like 22 men were killed in two months. Who are they targeting and why so? The gang pretty much was opportunistic. Their principal target during this period, and this is one of the real puzzlements for those who believe that Joaquin was a Robin Hood or what revisionist historians have called a social bandit, meaning a primitive rebel, somebody who's striking back against the upper class against the capitalists. But their principal target was Chinese miners. What had happened

was this was a worldwide gold rush. People came from Europe, from Asia, from South America, and developed this incredibly diverse society in California. And among the earliest miners were those in Guangdong or what we call Canton province in southern China. And and 20,000 Chinese joined the gold rush just in the first year or so. They just boarded ships, came to San Francisco, went up to the mining country. And in the culture of the Chinese, these were generally working class men. Very few women came at that period from China. And they call California Gold Mountain.

And for them, it was an opportunity to escape poverty. Just the same, the motivations were the same, no matter where you came. from. But the difference was the Chinese, their culture, didn't own horses and didn't know how to use firearms. And so in the mining country, they had no way to flee, no way to fight, and they were sitting ducks. Right. Yeah, they tended to be unarmed. Exactly. They were easy targets, I guess. But was there a racial motivation behind this as well? We don't really know if there's any racial motivation, that would be speculation. What we do know is what I said. They were extremely hardworking. The typical Chinese miners would wait till the Anglos had abandoned a claim.

Then they'd come in a large company of anywhere from 10 to 30 miners, and they'd work the tailings, and they'd find the gold that the Anglos had missed. And in the early years of the gold rush, they were highly praised by the Anglo newspaper writers. These are hardworking people. they're honest, they don't commit crimes. And so when they began to become targeted by the Joaquin gang, it created a lot of horror and uproar. The raids on the Chinese mining camps are all very similar. The gang of anywhere from six to ten outlaws would gallop into the camp. They'd hold everybody up. Anybody who ran would be shot dead or stabbed to death. They'd loot the whole camp, grab whatever gold or other valuables they could get a hold of and just gallop out again.

Each raid only lasted maybe a half hour, 45 minutes. And so what happened was this resulted in the deaths of more than 20 Chinese miners. The total number of murders by the gang was at least 45. All innocent people murdered for their gold. And some of the victims were Latino. So again, this raises this issue. if they were rebelling against Anglo injustice, why are they robbing fellow Latinos?

Why are they robbing and murdering Chinese minors? And so these bandit raids just create a hysteria, and the California state legislature is pressured over and over again to do something about it. And the legislature then enacts a law, which creates the California Rangers. All right. Just like the Texas Rangers.

I guess that was a normal thing in those days, right? The California Rangers were modeled after the Texas Rangers. Their captain chosen was Harry Love, who's a famous former Texas Ranger, a Mexican war veteran. He was the first man to navigate and map the upper Rio Grande River. He was also a very famous express writer for the U.S. Army for several years after the Mexican war ended in 1848, and then he finally joined the gold rush, not to be a lawman, but to make it rich. Interesting.

Wow. The Rangers finally captured the youngest and only remaining Felice brother, Jesus. He ends up informing on Muriade, right? That's correct. He's captured for stealing livestock, turned over to Harry Love, and Love had been hunting Joaquin for weeks with no success and throughout the not just the foothills in the San Joaquin Valley. And so he made a deal with Joaquin's brother-in-law. If you'll lead me to Joaquin, we will let you go and you won't be charged with any of these crimes. And the brother-in-law agreed to do that.

Yep. And they roll up on on Joaquin, July 25th, 1853, Waukeen. is killed in a running gunfight. What is a running gunfight? Well, a running gunfight is when the outlaws are fleeing on horseback and the lawmen are pursuing them. And in this case, the Rangers with Harry Love rode down onto the banks of Cantua Creek, which is located just about a third of a mile east of Interstate 5, which is the main highway that connects northern and southern California. And today, tens of thousands of motorists drive by the spot every day and have no idea that the biggest gun battle of the Wild West, other than the battle at the O.K. Corral, happened almost within eyesight of where they're driving.

How big was the gang at this point? At this point, the gang is maybe half a dozen or eight. They're all camped out on a ledge above the creek bed of Cantua, and love rides up and starts questioning several of these men in the camp, and a young man with shoulder-length hair stands up and approaches him and says, talk to me, I'm the leader of this gang. And that was Joaquin Murietta. And I suppose he tried to arrest him right then and there, but they end up running away, right? Yes, Joaquin, as soon as that happens, one of the Rangers who had known Joaquin had gambled with him in the mining region, yelled out, that's him, boys, that's Joaquin. And this huge gun battle

breaks out. Several of the gang are killed. Wakene, including Bernardino Garcia, or three-finger jack. Then Wachene leaps bareback onto a horse, takes off down the creek bed, he leaps the horse off this 15-foot embankment, races down the middle of the creek bed. Several of the rangers pursue him on horse back. They fire one of the bullets nicks the horse. The horse stumbles. Waukeen is thrown to the ground. He leaps back onto the horse. The terrified animal continues down the creek bed. The rangers fire again. Joaquin is wounded. Finally, one of the rangers fires a final time. The bullet tears through Joaquin's body, rips him off the top of the horse. As the rangers run up, he tells him in Spanish, don't shoot anymore, I'm dead.

And that was the final words of Joaquin Murietta. No wonder this has been romanticized. I mean, this is right out of the movies, isn't it? It's a fascinating story. This is just a tiny, you know, tidbit of the whole story, obviously, and what we can go into today. But what happens is even more remarkable is the Rangers then cut off Joaquin's head. Oh.

And they put it into a barrel of alcohol. they cut off the hand of three-finger jack because his head has been shot up by several pistol bullet wounds and is unrecognizable. And they then display the head throughout the mining region. And so what you're doing here is the nearest photographer was a two-day's ride. The temperature was 112 degrees in the San Joaquin Valley. And the head would have been non-existent really for purposes of taking a photograph. So they wanted the reward. And how do we get the reward? We have to prove we got the right guy. We can't get a photograph taken. There's only a handful of photographers in the entire state of California at this time. And so they cut the head off and they display it throughout the mining region. They collect scores of affidavits, many from the Chinese miners who'd been victimized, other people, some Latino who knew Joaquin in Mexico, many others who identified him as a notorious gambler, that kind of thing, because he had been quite well known in the mining region before he

turned to banditry. And then they used these affidavits to collect the $5,000 reward that the state legislature had placed on the head of Joaquin Murrieta. Wow. What ever happened to that head? The head, bizarrely, was, its ownership was contested at one point in what I call the most bizarre auction in American history. It was auctioned by the sheriff of San Francisco on the courthouse steps because the owner had failed to pay his debts. And in 1866, it ended up in a freak museum in San Francisco and was on display there for 40 years, a very well-known object seen by many, many people and finally was destroyed, along with the entire museum in the fire and earthquake of 1906. Oh, my God. That's right. John, I got to take a breath. This is an amazing story.

When we come back, we're going to nail down the questionable origins of this legend even more and where we stand with it all today. John, the legend of Joaquin Muriata. I don't even understand how it comes to pass because he was so famously violent, as you're describing, and the crimes are abhorrent. Where would this turn into something appealing to children like me? What happened was initially among Latinos, and these would be the Californios, the native Californian residents of California, or the Mexicans, Peruvians, Chileanos, who were the predominant Latinos, in the gold rush. They were all treated with terrible racism. They were not treated with the respect and dignity that Anglos received. And so as I pointed in my book, when people are oppressed,

they will seize it anything that gives them hope. Initially, there were corridos or ballads that were made about Joaquin. Many folk stories, many, many people claim that they were related to him or that they knew him. And most of the people in later years who claimed that they knew Joaquin were actually either not even born yet or were tiny children at the time Joaquin was killed. So these myths began to grow right after the time he was killed. John Rollin Ridge was the first Cherokee novelist, at least in the Western United States. He himself had received similar treatment. He and his family had been run out of the South on the Trail of Tears when the Cherokees were forced to relocate in Indian Territory, now the state of Oklahoma. And his father and

grandfather were both killed in the violence over the Trail of Tears. It created two factions in the Cherokee Nation, one that supported it, one that opposed it. And so his own life experiences, he himself shot and killed one of the leaders of the opposing faction, and he fled Arkansas for California, eventually brought his wife and daughter out to meet him. So he, too, was a fugitive from justice. So he saw this Joaquin's story as something that very much aligned with his own experiences, and that's what led him to take this historical character of Joaquin Muriattie. and turn him into a Robin Hood-like figure.

Wow, in a way to serve his own agenda, right, that you're saying to correct his own perception of history there. The Bandit is really a symbol, kind of social revolution. And Joaquin later gets picked up as late as the 1970s as a symbol of the fight against Anglo-oppression, which, of course, was so much of what was happening in those days with the labor strife that was happening that Chicano's and so forth were part of. There's also what's called the many Joaquin's theory that he was assisted by the fact that he goes by both Moretta and Carrillo, his mother's former husband. So I mean, there's there's sort of a vagueness about who this man really was.

That's correct. If you go on Wikipedia, they have a whole page based on the five Joaquins gang. And I've been pointing out now for more than 30 years, probably preaching to a dead horse, but in any event trying to point out that the five Joaquins were too many. men, Joaquin Murietta and Joaquin Valenzuela, the other three names were their aliases. And Joaquin, yeah, Joaquin's birth name was Joaquin Carillo. His father died. His mother then married Murieta. He used the Murrieta name. The most famous other name is Joaquin Oko Morania, which is just an Anglo mispronunciation of his real nickname, which was provided by the Spanish-speaking journalist in Los Angeles County, the L.A. Star newspaper, who pointed out that Joaquin Valenzuela's nickname was not Oco Morania. It was Naco Moraineo, meaning the dark Indian. So the five Joaquins represent two men. When the legislature offered the $5,000

reward, at this point, Joaquin obviously was a fugitive, and they didn't have a lot of personal information about him, but they knew he went by several names, and they knew there were at least two Joaquins. So the reward was issued for the five Joaquins and named each of them with their surname. But as I said, these names represent only two men. I see. Interesting. But in the end, it's as much a media story as it is a crime story, and the facts just blur from then on, as you've described many times. The title of this book that we referred to is called The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murrietta, The Celebrated California Bandit. And right there in the title, you can get the tone of the thing. John Rollin Ridge, 1854, that is published. It's one year after the outlaw's

death. This is a 90-page long book, so he's gone to some length to literally and figuratively describe this thing. It's basically a romantic story, right? Yes, it's very romantic, and it makes three-finger jack very notorious and basically blames all the butchery on three-finger jack, which of course is not true because three-finger jack was not part of the gang when Claudio led Joaquin and the other men on their raids above in the mountains above marysville where they butchered six miners. So this kind of murderous activity was done more than a year before three-finger jack even joined the gang. Not to mention he only had three fingers.

How could he do this? Well, this was a great. Yeah, well, and three fingers was actually a common injury for a vicaro. They'd lassoo cattle, whip the end of the lariat around the saddle horn. Yeah. And if you didn't do it correctly, it'd take off your thumb or finger. So he was variously called three-finger jack or four-finger jack, depending upon whether you count. you counted his thumb as a finger or not.

Interesting. The book is republished as the life of Joaquin Muretta in the California Police Gazette five years later, more popular than the last time. It starts to build up things. They change the wife's name to Carmela. Now she was ravished and killed. The story is then republished in Spain, then France, then Chile, and he becomes El Bandito Chileino.

I mean, this is a very flexible story that is used by many people. And I think that's an interesting commentary on how the world was really looking at the American West at that time. And what a what a canvas it already was decades before the Westerns were made. That's very true. And people saw the American West, no matter where you lived. We've talked about people from all over the world, saw the American frontier as a place of new beginnings, a place of hope, a place where you could become independent and financially responsible. and reinvent yourselves in many cases. And so it was sort of like a dream for people from all over the world to come to the American West.

And this story of banditry was something that became even more and more common with stories about Jesse James, Billy the Kid, the Dalton gang, and many, many more. Many of them were subjects of dime novels long before the introduction of motion pictures. There's a stage drama written. There's poetry written about this. And now there's a book that you've written. Why did you want to write this? What did you feel needed to be corrected?

Well, really, even in more recent years, a number of books have come out, especially since the 1950s, about Joaquin Murietta. One in particular claimed that he wasn't even a real person, that he was a fabrication. and then other books came out that relied on John Rollin Ridge, even books written by academics, that relied on the Ridge book as a source when, you know, just any kind of perfunctory research would tell you that, hey, we need to look into some of this stuff. This may be fiction. And so a detailed, researched, and resourced book about Joaquin had never been written. And so the result is my book, which is perhaps overly long. It's almost 500 pages, several hundred end notes, which document every statement in the book.

Because I wanted to, as a historian who loves the Wild West, I wanted to tell the true story, bring in all the characters, tell you who they were, where they came from, what happened to them, and tell the real story of Joaquin Murietta, which really had never been done before. Interesting. John Bosnaker is an American historian in all. author, also a lawyer representing trust in estate litigation. The title of this book that we've been discussing is, Bring Me the Head of Joaquin Murietta, the bandit chief who terrorized California and launched The Legend of Zorro. Thank you so much, John. I so appreciate

your time, and I, for one, am completely enlightened by this story. I had no idea. Really appreciate it. You're more than welcome, and thank you for having me. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, Two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.