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| Joaquin Murrieta |
Joaquin Murrieta Carrillo (1829-July 25, 1853), also called the Mexican Robin Hood or the Robin Hood of El Dorado, was a famous figure in California during the California Gold Rush of the 1850s. Depending on the point of view, he was considered as either an infamous bandit or a Mexican patriot.
In 1919 Johnston McCulley supposedly received his inspiration for his fictional character Don Diego de la Vega better known as Zorro from the 1854 book entitled The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murrieta, The Celebrated California Bandit by John Rollin Ridge.
John heard about a Mexican miner who had turned to banditry and was intrigued by the story.
More information: Ancient Origins
John Rollin Ridge, grandson of the Cherokee leader Major Ridge, wrote a dime novel about Murrieta; the fictional biography contributed to his legend, especially as it was translated into various European languages. A portion of Ridge's novel was reprinted in 1858 in the California Police Gazette. This story was picked up and subsequently translated into French. The French version was translated into Spanish by Roberto Hyenne, who took Ridge's original story and changed every Mexican reference to Chilean for either nationalistic reasons or to better fit the Chilean market.
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| A banner about J. Murrieta |
The historian Frank Latta, in his twentieth-century book, Joaquín Murrieta and His Horse Gangs (1980), wrote that Murrieta was from Hermosillo in the northern Mexican state of Sonora and that he had a paramilitary band made up of relatives and friends. Latta documented that they regularly engaged in illegal horse trade with Mexico, and had helped Murrieta kill at least six of the Americans who had attacked him and his wife.
He and his band attacked settlers and wagon trains in California. They also stole horses, driving them from Contra Costa County to the Central Valley via the remote La Vareda del Monte trail through the Diablo Range. The gang is believed to have killed up to 28 Chinese and 13 Anglo-Americans.
By 1853, the California state legislature considered Murrieta enough of a criminal to list him as one of the so-called Five Joaquins on a bill passed in May 1853. The legislature authorized hiring for three months a company of 20 California Rangers, veterans of the Mexican-American War, to hunt down Joaquin Botellier, Joaquin Carrillo, Joaquin Muriata, Joaquin Ocomorenia, and Joaquin Valenzuela, and their banded associates.
More information: Federico de California
On May 11, 1853, the governor John Bigler signed an act to create the California State Rangers, to be led by Captain Harry Love, a former Texas Ranger and Mexican War veteran.
The state paid the California Rangers $150 a month, and promised them a $1,000 governor's reward if they captured the wanted men. On July 25, 1853, a group of Rangers encountered a band of armed Mexican men near Arroyo de Cantua on the edge of the Diablo Range near Coalinga, California. In the confrontation, three of the Mexicans were killed. They claimed one was Murrieta, and another Manuel Garcia, also known as Three-Fingered Jack, one of his most notorious associates. Two others were captured. A plaque, California Historical Landmark #344, near Coalinga at the intersection of State Routes 33 and 198 now marks the approximate site of the incident.
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| Joaquín Murrieta |
As proof of the outlaws' deaths, the Rangers cut off Three-Fingered Jack's hand and the alleged Murrieta's head and preserved them in a jar of alcohol to bring to the authorities for their reward. Officials displayed the jar in Mariposa County, Stockton, and San Francisco. The Rangers took the display throughout California; spectators could pay $1 to see the relics. Seventeen people, including a Catholic priest, signed affidavits identifying the head as Murrieta's, alias Carrillo.
But, 25 years later, the myths began to form. In 1879, O. P. Stidger was reported to have heard Murrieta's sister say that the displayed head was not her brother's. At around the same time, numerous sightings were reported of Murrieta as an old man. These were never confirmed. His preserved head was destroyed during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fire. His head is displayed prominently in the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Old Town San Diego, so there are doubts to whether his preserved head, in fact, still exists.
Murrieta's nephew, known as Procopio, became one of California's most notorious bandits of the 1860s and 1870s; he purportedly wanted to exceed the reputation of his uncle. Murrieta was possibly partly the inspiration for the fictional character of Zorro, the lead character in the five-part serial story, The Curse of Capistrano, written by Johnston McCulley and published in 1919 in a pulp fiction magazine.
More information: Hollywood Jesus
For some activists, Murrieta had come to symbolize the resistance against Anglo-American economic and cultural domination in California. The Association of Descendants of Joaquin Murrieta says that Murrieta was not a gringo eater, but He wanted to retrieve the part of Mexico that was lost at that time in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Last studies talks about another theory about the real Zorro, another person with an Irish origin. The mystery continues...
Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
H. L. Mencken
