The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta

By John Rollin Ridge

First published in 1854, “The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta” is the thrilling Gold Rush tale of a wild outlaw by Cherokee author John Rollin Ridge. Originally written under his Cherokee name Yellow Bird, Ridge’s embellished story of real-life Mexican bandit Joaquín Murieta was instantly popular and soon translated into several languages. Ridge tells the story of Joaquín as a young and idealistic man who moves to California from Mexico with his family in search of gold and is quickly shown the cruel and violently racist side of American culture. With his wife attacked, his farm stolen, and his brother murdered, Joaquín vows revenge on the racist mob and becomes a violent outlaw with a large following of loyal bandits. Joaquín and his gang reach a near mythic status until the community and Legislature organized to create the California Rangers bring the outlaws to justice. Eloquent, brutal, and engrossing, Ridge’s novel is notable for being the first by a Native American as well as one of the first novels set in California. It also inspired countless imitations and legends and endures as a great American story of injustice and revenge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Sep 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781420970579

John Rollin Ridge

John Rollin Ridge (1827-1867) was a novelist, poet, and member of the Cherokee Nation. Born in New Echota Georgia, Ridge was the son of John Ridge, a prominent Cherokee leader and signatory of the 1836 Treaty of New Echota, which allowed the cession of Cherokee lands and led to the devastation of the Trail of Tears. Following his father’s murder by supporters of Cherokee leader John Ross, Ridge was taken to Arkansas by his mother. In 1843, he was sent to study at the Great Barrington School in Massachusetts before returning to Fayetteville to pursue a law degree. He married Elizabeth Wilson in 1847 after publishing his first known poem, “To a Thunder Cloud,” in the Arkansas State Gazette. Two years later, Ridge was forced to flee to California with his wife and daughter after murdering a man named David Kell, whom he believed to be involved in his father’s assassination. Out West, he published The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta to popular acclaim, making him the first known Native American novelist. Ridge was a prominent figure in California’s fledgling literary scene, serving as the first editor of the Sacramento Bee and writing for the San Francisco Herald. Controversial for his assimilationist politics, slave ownership, and support of the Copperheads during the American Civil War, Ridge is nevertheless a pioneering figure in Native American literary history.

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THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF JOAQUÍN MURIETA

By JOHN ROLLIN RIDGE

The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta

By John Rollin Ridge

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7056-2

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7057-9

This edition copyright © 2020. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: a detail of A Mexican Vaquero, by Frederic Remington, (1861-1909), c. 1890 (oil on canvas) / George F. Harding Collection / Bridgeman Images.

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CONTENTS

Publishers’ Preface

Editor’s Preface

Life of Joaquín Murieta

Publishers’ Preface

The following production, aside from its intrinsic merit, will, no doubt, be read with increased interest when it is known that the author is a Cherokee Indian, born in the woods—reared in the midst of the wildest scenery—and familiar with all that is thrilling, fearful, and tragical in a forest-life. His own experiences would seem to have well fitted him to portray in living colors the fearful scenes which are described in this book, connected as he was, from the age of seventeen up to twenty-three, with the tragical events which occurred so frequently in his own country, the rising of factions, the stormy controversies with the whites, the fall of distinguished chiefs, family feuds, individual retaliation and revenge, and all the consequences of that terrible civil commotion which followed the removal of the Cherokee Nation from the east to the west of the Mississippi, under the administration of Gen. Jackson. When a small boy, he saw his father (the celebrated chief and orator, known among the Indians by the name of Sca-lee-los-kee) stabbed to death by a band of assassins employed by a political faction, in the presence of his wife and children at his own home. While the bleeding corpse of his father was yet lying in the house, surrounded by his weeping family, the news came that his grand-father, a distinguished old war-chief, was also killed; and, fast upon this report, that others of his near relatives were slain. His mother, a white woman and a native of Connecticut, fled from the bloody precincts of the nation, with her children, and sought refuge in the United States. Her oldest son, Yellow Bird, after remaining several years among the whites, returned to his own country and asserted the rights of his family, which had been prostrated since the death of his father. He was intimately concerned for several years in the dangerous contentions which made the Cherokee Nation a place of blood; and, finally, not succeeding in overthrowing the murderers of his father and the oppressors of his country, who were then in power, and, having furnished them with a pretext for putting him out of the way by killing a prominent member of their party, he left his country once more and, in 1850, came to the State of California. So far, we know his history. Whether he will ever meet with success in his purposes with regard to his own people, we cannot say, but we hope that he will.

The perusal of this work will give those who are disposed to be curious an opportunity to estimate the character of Indian talent. The aboriginal race has produced great warriors, and powerful orators, but literary men—only a few.

Editor’s Preface

The author, in presenting this book to the public, is aware that its chief merit consists in the reliability of the ground-work upon which it stands and not in the beauty of its composition. He has aimed to do a service—in his humble way—to those who shall hereafter inquire into the early history of California, by preserving, in however rude a shape, a record of at least a portion of those events which have made the early settlement of this State a living romance through all time.

Besides, it is but doing justice to a people who have so far degenerated as to have been called by many, A Nation of Cowards, to hold up a manifest contradiction, or at least an exception to so sweeping an opinion, in the character of a man who, bad though he was, possessed a soul as full of unconquerable courage as ever belonged to a human being. Although the Mexicans may be whipped by every other nation, in a battle of two or five to one, yet no man who speaks the truth can ever deny that there lived one Mexican whose nerves were as iron in the face of danger and death.

The author has not thrown this work out into the world recklessly, or without authority for his assertions. In the main, it will be found to be strictly true. Where he has mentioned localities as being the harboring-places of Joaquín, he has meant invariably to say that persons then connected (at the date of the events narrated) with those localities stood in the doubtful position in which he has placed them.

Life of Joaquín Murieta

I sit down to write somewhat concerning the life and character of Joaquín Murieta, a man as remarkable in the annals of crime as any of the renowned robbers of the Old or New World, who have preceded him; and I do this, not for the purpose of ministering to any depraved taste for the dark and horrible in human action, but rather to contribute my mite to those materials out of which the early history of California shall one day be composed. The character of this truly wonderful man was nothing more than a natural production of the social and moral condition of the country in which he lived, acting upon certain peculiar circumstances favorable to such a result, and, consequently, his individual history is a part of the most valuable history of the State.

There were two Joaquíns, bearing the various surnames of Murieta, O’Comorenia, Valenzuela, Botellier, and Carillo—so that it was supposed there were no less than five sanguinary devils ranging the country at one and the same time. It is now fully ascertained that there were only two, whose proper names were Joaquín Murieta and Joaquín Valenzuela, the latter being nothing more than a distinguished subordinate to the first, who is the Rinaldo Rinaldini of California.

Joaquín Murieta was a Mexican, born in the province of Sonora of respectable parents and educated in the schools of Mexico. While growing up, he was remarkable for a very mild and peaceable disposition, and gave no sign of that indomitable and daring spirit which afterwards characterized him. Those who knew him in his school-boy days speak affectionately of his generous and noble nature at that period of his life and can scarcely credit the fact that the renowned and bloody bandit of California was one and the same being. At an early age of his manhood—indeed, while he was yet scarcely more than a boy—he became tired of the uncertain state of affairs in his own country, the usurpations and revolutions which were of such common occurrence, and resolved to try his fortunes among the American people, of whom he had formed the most favorable opinion from an acquaintance with the few whom he had met in his own native land. The war with Mexico had been fought, and California belonged to the United States. Disgusted with the conduct of his degenerate countrymen and fired with enthusiastic admiration of the American character, the youthful Joaquín left his home with a buoyant heart and full of the exhilarating spirit of adventure. The first that we hear of him in the Golden State is that, in the spring of 1850, he is engaged in the honest occupation of a miner in the Stanislaus placers, then reckoned among the richest portions of the mines. He was then eighteen years of age, a little over the medium height, slenderly but gracefully built, and active as a young tiger. His complexion was neither very dark or very light, but clear and brilliant, and his countenance is pronounced to have been, at that time, exceedingly handsome and attractive. His large black eyes, kindling with the enthusiasm of his earnest nature, his firm and well-formed mouth, his well-shaped head from which the long, glossy, black hair hung down over his shoulders, his silvery voice full of generous utterance, and the frank and cordial bearing which distinguished him made him beloved by all with whom he came in contact. He had the confidence and respect of the whole community around him, and was fast amassing a fortune from his rich mining claim. He had built him a comfortable mining residence in which he had domiciled his heart’s treasure—a beautiful Sonorian girl, who had followed the young adventurer in all his wanderings with that devotedness of passion which belongs to the dark-eyed damsels of Mexico. It was at this moment of peace and felicity that a blight came over the young man’s prospects. The country was then full of lawless and desperate men, who bore the name of Americans but failed to support the honor and dignity of that title. A feeling was prevalent among this class of contempt for any and all Mexicans, whom they looked upon as no better than conquered subjects of the United States, having no rights which could stand before a haughtier and superior race. They made no exceptions. If the proud blood of the Castilians mounted to the cheek of a partial descendant of the Mexiques, showing that he had inherited the old chivalrous spirit of his Spanish ancestry, they looked upon it as a saucy presumption in one so inferior to them. The prejudice of color, the antipathy of races, which are always stronger and bitterer with the ignorant and unlettered, they could not overcome, or if they could, would not, because it afforded them a convenient excuse for their unmanly cruelty and oppression. A band of these lawless men, having the brute power to do as they pleased, visited Joaquín’s house and peremptorily bade him leave his claim, as they would allow no Mexicans to work in that region. Upon his remonstrating against such outrageous conduct, they struck him violently over the face, and, being physically superior, compelled him to swallow his wrath. Not content with this, they tied him hand and foot and ravished his mistress before his eyes. They left him, but the soul of the young man was from that moment darkened. It was the first injury he had ever received at the hands of the Americans, whom he had always hitherto respected, and it wrung him to the soul as a deeper and deadlier wrong from that very circumstance. He departed with his weeping and almost heart-broken mistress for a more northern portion of the mines; and the next we hear of him, he is cultivating a little farm on the banks of a beautiful stream that watered a fertile valley, far out in the seclusion of the mountains. Here he might hope for peace—here he might forget the past, and again be happy. But his dream was not destined to last. A company of unprincipled Americans—shame that there should be such bearing the name!—saw his retreat, coveted his little home surrounded by its fertile tract of land, and drove him from it, with no other excuse than that he was an infernal Mexican intruder! Joaquín’s blood boiled in his veins, but his spirit was still unbroken, nor had the iron so far entered his soul as to sear up the innate sensitiveness to honor and right which reigned in his bosom. Twice broken up in his honest pursuit of fortune, he resolved still to labor on with unflinching brow and with that true moral bravery, which throws its redeeming light forward upon his subsequently dark and criminal career. How deep must have been the anguish of that young heart and how strongly rooted the native honesty of his soul, none can know or imagine but they who have been tried in a like manner. He bundled up his little movable property, still accompanied by his faithful bosom-friend, and again started forth to strike once more, like a brave and honest man, for fortune and for happiness. He arrived at Murphy’s Diggings in Calaveras County, in the month of April, and went again to mining, but, meeting with nothing like his former success, he soon abandoned that business and devoted his time to dealing monte, a game which is common in Mexico, and has been almost universally adopted by gamblers in California. It is considered by the Mexican in no manner a disreputable employment, and many well-raised young men from the Atlantic States have resorted to it as a profession in this land of luck and chances. It was