The Wild West of Yester-Year
Joaquin Murrieta
By Rachel Kovaciny
Who was Joaquin Murrieta? A “Mexican Robin Hood” who robbed
from rich miners to support poor Mexican workers? A
common bandito who stole whatever he could from whomever he
encountered? Did he even exist or did dime novelists invent
him? According to the legends and folklore surrounding him,
Joaquin Murrieta was born in Sonora, Mexico, in the 1830s.
In his late teens, he married his childhood sweetheart and
moved to California during the Gold Rush of 1849. Thousands
of Mexicans migrated to the gold fields, so many that white
miners urged the California government to pass a Foreign
Miners Act to limit them, just as they later tried to stop
the flow of Chinese immigrants.
Legends say Murrieta’s success at gold mining enraged a
group of miners, so they attacked him, his wife, and his
stepbrother. Some accounts claim the miners falsely accused
Joaquin and his stepbrother of stealing a mule, hanged the
stepbrother, and flogged Joaquin. In others, the miners
attacked Joaquin’s wife, then beat him when he tried to
protect her. Either way, the legends depict Joaquin Murrieta
as a wronged man who took revenge not only on his attackers,
but on all who were like them.
Murrieta supposedly formed a criminal organization composed
of several “gangs” that roamed California, stealing gold and
horses, and punishing the men who originally attacked
Murrieta. They drove herds of stolen horses to Mexico and
sold them there. Some reports state that Murrieta’s
followers killed both white and Chinese miners for their
gold, while some folktales say that they only robbed and
killed white miners, but would help Chinese, American
Indian, and Mexican miners with the money they stole.
Throughout the early 1850s, there were dozens of robberies,
holdups, and burglaries reported in and around the gold
fields, all attributed to Mexican bandits. Newspapers blamed
these on Joaquin Murrieta and his gangs, though it is
difficult to find any evidence to prove who was responsible,
or if they attached Murrieta to the crimes because he had
been accused of similar crimes already. The known facts are
these: in 1853, the California legislature listed a Joaquin
Murrieta among many bandits they wanted hunted down and
captured. On May 11 of that year, the governor of California
created the California State Rangers and appointed Captain
Harry Love to lead them. Love was a former Texas Ranger and
a veteran of the Mexican War.
In July 1853, the California State Rangers confronted a
group of Mexican bandits and killed three of them in a gun
battle. They identified one of the dead bandits as Joaquin
Murrieta and brought back his head, preserved in a jar of
alcohol as proof of his death. If that sounds familiar to
you, yes, the movie The Mask of Zorro (1998)
featured similar details.
In real life, the California State Rangers got paid a reward
of $1,000 for killing Murrieta and two of his associates.
However, there were rumors they had actually killed some
innocent Mexican vaqueros and passed them off as the
bandits. Over the next two decades, although Murrieta’s
preserved head was on display for anyone to see for the
price of a dollar, people claimed they had seen Murrieta
alive and well in the California mountains.
A Cherokee gold miner named John Rollin Ridge wrote a dime
novel in 1854 called The Life and Adventures of Joaquin
Murieta, [sic] the Celebrated California Bandit. That book
perpetuated the Robin Hood-style legends that made Murrieta
a folk hero for the people of Mexico. Ridge’s book is
considered the first novel written by a Native American, and
it is one of the earliest books about the California Gold
Rush actually written in California. But its historical
accuracy is dubious.
Whether Joaquin Murrieta ever existed, and whether he robbed
from the rich to aid the poor, John Rollin Ridge’s book
about him had a lasting impact on American culture. In the
early 1900s, Ridge’s book and The Scarlet Pimpernel by
Baroness Emmuska Orczy inspired novelist Johnston McCulley
to create a new fictional hero: Zorro. And, not only has
Zorro been an enduringly popular fictional character on page
and screen ever since, but he inspired artist Bob Kane and
writer Bill Finger to create a superhero they named Batman.
We know for certain that Joaquin Murrieta had something in
common with Robin Hood: whether he ever existed, his legend
has inspired and entertained people for generations.