When I began Fool’s Gold, there was never a question that Joaquin Murrieta would become one of the first topics to be covered. There was no way around him. Even if the enigmatic outlaw hadn’t been the focus of intense obsession of mine for years, it seemed impossible to discuss old west California without discussing Joaquin. For better or worse, the Joaquin Murrieta legend defined the perception of Gold Rush California and he became the archetype of the dashing desperado defending poor Spanish-speaking Californians. To avoid Joaquin Murrieta would be like discussing the history of Las Vegas and avoiding Bugsy Siegel.
So it has been to my continuous surprise over the years to discover that Joaquin’s name and fame hasn’t extended outside of California to the same degree of other old west outlaws like Jesse James or Billy the Kid. Even in California, he has gradually become an obscure figure. He is a “locals only” legend for multi-generational Californians, especially Chicanos, and all but ignored by anyone whose family has been in California less than a half-century, which is most Californians due to the never ending migrations to the state by people seeking their own California Dream. Despite California being the breeding ground for the massive American film industry that spawned countless westerns, Joaquin’s story has rarely been told beyond the cheap B-movie, TV episode, or Zorro remake. Meanwhile, Billy the Kid rivals only Dracula and Sherlock Holmes for the most cinematic appearances of any character ever. There are more bad movies about Billy the Kid than there is a single good movie about Joaquin Murrieta.
The reason for Joaquin’s relative obscurity despite being California’s arguable state bandit is in no small part due to California’s uneasy relationship with its own history. Compared to most other states in the western US, California has actively avoided discussing the more morbid aspects of its frontier history in favor of postcard images of progress and sanitized settler colonialism via Spanish missions, caricatured prospectors, orange groves etc. Tombstone, Arizona thrives on being the “town too tough to die.” Los Angeles, despite remaining very much a “Wild West” town, is squeamish about its origins as a violent cow town. It is in the interest of the state for California to have always been what it purports to be, a paradise to escape to and create a new life in. A bit of blood runs the risk of ruining the postcard image.
Far more frustrating is that the obscurity around Joaquin Murrieta outside local legends and ancient dime novels has, at least compared to his other criminal compadres in old west folklore, extended to contemporary written history as well. In my long history of researching Murrieta, what became increasingly clear was that the bulk of historical works on Joaquin Murrieta were either a.) out of print and b.) written entirely by Californians. Admittedly, Joaquin is not as easy of a subject to tackle as someone like Tiburcio Vasquez or Jesse James or Black Bart. So little verifiable information exists about him as a person that anyone attempting to uncover the story of Joaquin Murrieta finds themselves mostly chasing newspaper clippings and rumors. In theory, this should make him more exciting to the historian hoping for a little detective work. But few thoroughly academic works on Joaquin Murrieta exist that have not been relegated to the shelves of your local library’s local history section to collect dust.
In writing this series, I referenced newspaper accounts, personal memoirs, the occasional historical work, but never did I provide a list of sources cited at the end of each post. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, this is not an academic paper, it’s a substack blog, so get over it. Secondly, and someone less sarcastically, because I didn’t feel like cluttering the end of each page with a mess of citations drawn from every source I could find in painting the history of Joaquin Murrieta, as well as the history of California, Sonora, etc. Nonetheless, I believe I owe it to readers to provide a few important resources that are extremely helpful in gaining a greater understanding of the history of Joaquin Murrieta. Anyone curious to read and learn further can follow each of the sources to their heart’s content, so long as they are capable of finding some of the more rare books listed.
Another fact must be mentioned for transparency’s sake: I am not a professional historian. On the one hand, this is a crutch in that I do not have the time or resources to do what I would have personally liked to do with this series, which is to travel to each of the locales, mine the state archives, dig through oral histories, etc. Lacking access to historical documents beyond publicly available newspaper clippings, the best I can do is build from the work of previous historians and editorialize. On the other hand, years of being both a history nut and an internet research junkie have provided me with a keen nose for sniffing out contradictions in sources and suspect claims. In researching Joaquin Murrieta, one has to wade through so much myth to reach anything resembling the truth, which is itself still filled with the possible lies of men unable to be called out on it. The works I’ve listed are not flawless, and their issues will be noted whenever possible, but that does not make them worthless.
Two older works on Joaquin Murrieta prove valuable for anyone hoping to gain an understanding of the history behind him. Both written by California historians, both disparate in size and in the conclusions reached by the historians themselves. The first, The Real Joaquin Murrieta: Robin Hood Hero or Gold Rush Gangster? was written in the 70s by Remi Nadeau, a fifth-generation Californian. A slim volume at 160 pages (including citations and the index), The Real Joaquin Murrieta picks up largely from Jackson’s writings on Murrieta in Bad Company by following the newspaper accounts and reports of Harry Love for a chronology on Joaquin’s activities. As a historian, Nadeau is ruthless in dispensing with anything mythic around Murrieta and the conclusion he reaches is that “Joaquin Murrieta” was almost certainly multiple men and that the California Rangers had almost no real proof that the man they had caught had been the one responsible for the robbery-homicides in Calaveras County. As an introduction to the unromantic facts around Joaquin Murrieta and to the bloody history of Gold Rush California, it is indispensable. If there is a major flaw behind this work, it’s that at times the focus seems too narrow. Nadeau’s primary objective is to prove what Joaquin Murrieta wasn’t (a Robin Hood, a revolutionary, one man, etc) and anything beyond this basic purview falls to the wayside. He concerns himself primarily with the Joaquin of Calaveras County and touches briefly on Joaquin Murrieta the horse thief in Los Angeles, and seems disinterested in anything involving the Feliz brothers.
If Nadeau’s work is brief and breezy, then schoolteacher and amateur historian-ethnographer Frank Latta’s 685-page Joaquin Murrieta and his Horse Gangs is an all-encompassing behemoth, the product of sixty years of research (Latta was born in 1892, the book was published in 1980, and he died in 1983) that aspires to be the definitive work on Joaquin Murrieta. Much of this Latta achieves by chasing down every single source possible that he can on Joaquin Murrieta, including oral histories. In some respects, the effort pays off in ways which proved immensely important to uncovering the mystery of Joaquin Murrieta. It was Latta who traveled to Mexico to interview alleged members of the Murrieta family and in doing so, uncovered records that a Joaquin Murrieta had been born in Sonora corresponding to Joaquin Murrieta’s age at his alleged death and married into the Feliz family.
The problem with the “all-encompassing” approach to finding sources is what happens when those sources are unreliable or tainted. Latta chased down oral histories and accounts from those who claimed association with Joaquin Murrieta with no apparent concern for the fact that Joaquin Murrieta had been the subject of countless tall tales. One of his sources was a series of interviews conducted in the 1920s with a man named Avelino Martinez who claimed to have ridden with Murrieta, then later to have met him in 1877, well after Murrieta’s recorded death. Perhaps Murrieta survived the Arroyo Cantua shooting to meet an old friend twenty-four years later? Not according to Latta, who suggested from accounts largely taken from supposed descendants that while Joaquin Murrieta had survived the Arroyo Cantua shooting (apparently a decoy was killed and decapitated instead), he succumbed to his wounds mere days later. In making Joaquin Murrieta a player in the Arroyo Cantua affair and a survivor of it, Latta plays the game of wanting to have his cake and eat it by blending history and myth.
Despite the flaws, both books proved valuable to future Joaquin Murrieta researchers in pointing them to sources to further examine. James F. Varley’s The Legend of Joaquin Murrieta acts as a sort of synthesis between the two works, detailing further the exploits of the Feliz gang and reprinting the confession of Teodoro Vasquez. One of the more recent and interesting works on Murrieta comes from Lori Lee Wilson in The Joaquin Murrieta Band: The History Behind the Legend. What differentiates this book is Wilson’s contextualizing of the Joaquin Murrieta media panic against the fears of an Hispanic uprising by Anglo Californians and her analysis of the Joaquin legend in contemporary Spanish-language sources like El Clamor Publico, as well as the political divide in California between Free Soil vs Chivalry Democrats, filibustering, vigilantism, and later Mexican bandits who inspired similar media panics as Murrieta. As the most recent and readily available historical work devoted to Joaquin Murrieta, The Joaquin Murrieta Band should be the go-to for anyone hoping to read further on the enigmatic bandit.
For biographical information on Harry Love, there was no more obvious work to seek out than his biography The Man From Rio Grande by William B. Secrest. Secrest was no stranger to the history of Joaquin Murrieta. The Fresno native, a schoolteacher by trade and historian of frontier California by avocation, had already covered Joaquin Murrieta in a forty-page article published as Joaquin: Bloody Bandit of the Mother Lode and he often tackled California’s long history of local desperados. But The Man From Rio Grande was his later in life passion project, a biography of a lawman obscured by his descent into infamy and by the hero worship around the man he hunted. Secrest paints a vivid picture of Love’s life based on the sources he could find, and a vivid picture of life in California in the 1850s. But what becomes clear about The Man From Rio Grande is that it is as much hagiography as it is biography. Secrest’s aim is not simply to document Harry Love, but to rehabilitate him. In doing so, he displays about as little skepticism of Love’s account of killing Murrieta as Governor Bigler did. This lack of skepticism and desire to celebrate Love’s life extends to the domestic affairs, where Mary Bennet is singled out as the sole problem in her marriage to Harry Love. The Man From Rio Grande is a valuable resource for the early life of Harry Love, so long as one recognizes the author’s bias.
For information on Los Angeles in the 1850s and the circumstances around the murder of Joshua Bean and the subsequent lynchings, the best contemporary resource is John Mack Faragher’s Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles. Covering everything from high-profile murder cases to lesser known domestic disputes, Eternity Street reads like western noir, and is an entertainingly informative and brutal examination of what was one of the most violent settlements in the United States at the time. Horace Bell’s memoir Reminiscences of a Ranger provides a primary source POV of this Los Angeles and details the creation of the short-lived Los Angeles Rangers that spun off from the vigilance committee that lynched Reyes Feliz. Bell’s narrative is often unreliable and prone to exaggeration and a clear personal bias. Nonetheless, it gives readers a window into the mindset of at least one American who migrated to California during the Gold Rush and witnessed the bloody days of old LA.
As a final note: , I implore any readers fascinated in Joaquin Murrieta and the surrounding histories of Gold Rush California, the Californios and Hispanic history of California, the Mexican-American War, crime, justice, vigilantism etc to seek out information wherever they can find it and wherever reliable. Perhaps you’ll reach a different conclusion to the identity and fate of Joaquin Murrieta. Perhaps you’ll learn something I neglected to cover. Perhaps you’ll just be titillated by the blood and the bullets. Read about the past and see the present and future in action. And whenever you go looking for reliable and accurate information on the history of California in the old west days, be wary of falling for Fool’s Gold.
Thanks for all the research! Great work much appreciated! 🤠 👍