Background
Joaquin Murrieta was born about 1832, in Sonora, Mexico, the son of Joaquin Murrieta and Rosalia Carillo.
Joaquin Murrieta was born about 1832, in Sonora, Mexico, the son of Joaquin Murrieta and Rosalia Carillo.
Murrieta arrived in California probably in 1849, when prejudice against Latin Americans in the mines was beginning to express itself in numerous outrages. He is said to have been driven from a claim on Stanislaus River, in the early spring of 1850, by men who abused his wife or mistress, and later to have been driven from the placers on Calaveras River.
At Murphy's Diggings, Calaveras County, where he worked for a time as a monte dealer, he is said to have been flogged and his half-brother hanged for the alleged theft of a horse. Accounts of his life are contradictory, and few of the details given can be fully authenticated. By Latin American writers and by Bancroft he has been invested with a considerable degree of romantic glamor, but the probability is that he was a ruffian, brutal, avaricious, and lawless.
The account by Hittell (post), drawn largely from a rare book by F. L. Ridge, is perhaps the safest guide to his character and career. Because of some grievance, real or imagined, Murrieta vowed vengeance against the Americans, and for more than two years, at the head of a band of desperadoes, he ranged over a large part of the state and committed an appalling number of robberies and murders.
In 1852, in Mariposa County, he narrowly escaped capture at the hands of Captain Harry S. Love, deputy sheriff of Los Angeles County, who on his own initiative had tracked the bandit to one of his hiding places. A fresh series of robberies and murders in the spring of 1853 caused the legislature to pass an act authorizing Love to organize a company of mounted rangers to pursue him. Love, with his company, soon took the field, and on a morning in July surprised a part of Murrieta's band at a point west of Tulare Lake.
On July 25, 1853, in a running fight the bandit chief and three others were killed and two captured, while two or three escaped. For purposes of identification Murrieta's head was cut off and preserved in alcohol, and was later exhibited in various parts of the state.
Joaquin Murrieta was married to Rosita Carmel Feliz.
