Reading Room · the gold years

How California Invented a Bandit

In 1853 the State of California put a price on a name, and a company of Rangers came back with a head in a jar. The story of Joaquín Murrieta is usually told as a legend. It began as a piece of state paperwork — a bounty on five men who shared a first name, and none of whom the warrant could actually describe.

The gold country in the early 1850s was a hard place to be Mexican or Chilean. The Foreign Miners' Tax was written to drive non-Anglo miners off their claims; men were robbed, taxed off ground they had worked first, and lynched with the law watching. Out of that violence rose a string of robberies and killings across the southern mines, and the newspapers gave the whole of it a single author: a Mexican bandit named Joaquín. The trouble was that witnesses kept naming a different Joaquín each time, and no one could say which one was real.

A warrant that fit everyone

In May 1853 the legislature solved that problem by refusing to solve it. It passed an act authorizing a company of California Rangers under Harry Love to hunt down "Joaquín" — and to be safe, it named five of them: Joaquín Murrieta, Joaquín Carrillo, Joaquín Botellier, Joaquín Valenzuela, Joaquín Ocomorenia. A warrant that named five men and described none was, in practice, a license to hunt any Mexican rider in California. The bounty was real money; the target was a category.

That July, at Cantua Creek, Love's Rangers killed a group of Mexican men. They cut off one man's head and the hand of a companion said to be "Three-Fingered Jack," dropped both into jars of brandy, and carried them back as proof. The head went on display for a dollar a look, first in Stockton and then up and down the state, labeled with the celebrated name.

The doubt was there from the first dollar

People did not simply believe it. Plenty who paid their dollar to see the jar said out loud that the head had never belonged to anyone named Murrieta. The San Francisco Herald and the Alta California carried reports that the Rangers had, among others, killed an innocent mustang catcher. To shore up the claim, seventeen affidavits of identification were eventually gathered — and the number itself is a kind of confession. A body that is really who you say it is does not need seventeen men to swear to it.

This is the ground the novel walks onto. In The Renegade Enos, the man who pays his dollar in the Stockton tent knows the head. It belongs to his oldest friend — a vaquero named Jacinto, a hunter of wild horses, a man who had five fingers when they last shook hands, identifiable by a notched ear that no affidavit bothered to mention. Enos says nothing. He cannot. The only name that would let him testify is already on the legislature's list of the wanted. That is the whole engine of the chapter: the one witness who could correct the record is the one the record has made unspeakable.

The writer who gave the ghost a life

A year later, in 1854, a Cherokee writer took the confusion and gave it a shape it has never lost. Writing under his Cherokee name, Yellow Bird, John Rollin Ridge published The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murrieta, the Celebrated California Bandit — by most accounts the first novel written by a Native American, and the first published in California. His Joaquín is a wronged man driven to vengeance by Anglo miners who seized his claim, beat him, and hanged his brother. It was, in its way, a confession in disguise: a dispossessed man writing a dispossessed man, pouring his own family's grief into an outlaw the law could safely hate.

After that the legend belonged to no one and everyone. Ridge's book was pirated, translated, rewritten for a century; Murrieta became a folk hero from California to Chile, and the masked-avenger mold fed straight into Zorro and everything after. Ridge made almost nothing from it. The name had gotten away from him exactly as it had gotten away from the state that manufactured it.

Two books, one legend, from opposite sides

That is why these two novels are companions. Yellow Bird tells the story of the man who made the legend. The Renegade Enos stands in the tent with the man who saw the real bodies the legend was built to bury. Between them is the same lesson the whole conquest keeps teaching: California named a bandit so that it would not have to name what it was doing to the people who shared his first name. The head in the jar was never evidence. It was a period at the end of a sentence the state needed finished.

The Renegade Enos: Witness to the American West is a novel by H.L. Delaney, forthcoming from Basalt Sea Press — the conquest of the West at the eye level of the man it used and discarded. Get launch news →