In the telling and retelling of stories like this one and the ones about harassment of the Murrietas in the mines, family members and associates have over the years found ways to get the last word, at least among themselves, in their exchange with Anglos. Faced with a Yankee discourse of manhood and morality that cast their forebear as a godless fiend, they could point to the lust, greed, and cruelty of Anglo men in the diggings and on the horse trails. Faced with a southern discourse of male honor that sought to shame their forebear, they could turn the tables and offer the ultimate insult to honorable men—call them liars. Encountering a drama that ended with a Mexican man deeply dishonored, they could rewrite the final scene by substituting for their kinsman a California Indian—since native peoples, by definition, already were dishonored in Spanish Mexican cultures.82 Encountering yet another story about U.S. victory, they could tell their own tale about Americans hell-bent for glory—grim, grasping, and gullible. None of this could bring back the dead or give the women and men of the Murrieta clan another chance to hunt for their fortune unmolested, but it could preserve a sense of dignity that Anglo Americans had tried to destroy.
In this project, the Sonorans whom Latta interviewed and other champions of Murrieta’s legacy have had some help, because from the start California’s newspapers whispered Anglo culpability. Simply calling Joaquin a bandit invoked a larger narrative about downtrodden men, compelled by repeated injury or injustice to turn to a life of crime. One editor had confronted this problem head-on, and tried valiantly to assure readers that this bandit had no such sad story to explain his malevolence. As long as Joaquin was on the loose, his opponents were able to check this discursive flow. But once the dangers of life in the diggings seemed to wane, and the bandit’s wicked brain appeared to be separated from his murderous and thieving hands, the floodgates opened.
The first freshet came in the form of a small book entitled The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, published in 1854. The author’s name as it appeared on the title page was Yellow Bird; to others he was known as John Rollin Ridge, son of a Connecticut Yankee, Sarah Northrup, and John Ridge, now deceased, but formerly a leader among those Cherokees who urged compliance with the federal policy of removing native peoples from the southeastern states to Indian Territory in the 1830s. The elder Ridge had been killed in 1839 at his new western home by those outraged at his support of the Treaty of New Echota, by which Cherokees ceded their land claims in the East.83 John Rollin Ridge—who witnessed his father’s murder and participated in the deadly feuds that marked the redefinition of the Cherokee Nation in the midnineteenth century—emigrated, like many Cherokees, to California at the time of the Gold Rush.84 Ridge failed there at both mining and trading; indeed, recalling his background among Cherokee planters, he complained in a letter, “I have worked harder than any slave I ever owned or my father either. All to no purpose.”85 The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta was his first literary venture.
Starting where Anglo newspapers left off in 1853, Ridge took up the language of banditry with a vengeance. For Ridge, Murrieta was “a man as remarkable . . . as any of the renowned robbers of the Old and New World”; he was the veritable “Rinaldo Rinaldini of California” (Rinaldo Rinaldini was the hero in a late eighteenth-century German novel of brigandage). In endearing Murrieta to readers, Ridge pulled no punches. Murrieta as a boy had been “mild and peaceable.” As a young man he was devastatingly handsome. What is more, by the end of the U.S.-Mexican War, he had become “disgusted with the conduct of his own degenerate countrymen and fired with enthusiastic admiration of the American character.” All to no purpose. In California, men who “bore the name of Americans but failed to support the honor and dignity of that title” ran Murrieta off mining claims, whipped him, raped his “mistress” Rosita, and hanged his half brother.86 The rest, so to speak, was history.
And memory. Once Ridge published his tale of atrocity and its retribution in 1854, Anglo recollections of unprovoked Mexican attacks on mining camps would never again seem so credible. The Ridge version of Murrieta’s life, which teased out the narrative of banditry embedded in even the most rabidly anti-Mexican newspaper accounts of 1853, became the basis for countless plays, operas, poems, crime stories, dime novels, and histories about Murrieta in a number of languages. The Spanish-language versions, popular in Mexico, Chile, and Spain, featured either Mexican or Chilean bandidos, reflecting the origins of most Spanish-speaking Gold Rush immigrants. In English, the story probably reached its widest audience with the Depression-era biography by Walter Noble Burns, The Robin Hood of El Dorado, and the Hollywood film version with the same title, released in 1936 and starring Warner Baxter.87
Ordinary people who had lived in Anglo communities in the Southern Mines told similar stories as they grew older. Mrs. Lee Whipple-Haslam’s reminiscences, for example, echoed aspects of Ridge’s version. Even though Whipple-Haslam insisted that “mob violence” was justified during the Gold Rush “to put the fear of the Lord . . . into the hearts of Mexicans,” she claimed that Murrieta “was painted blacker than he deserved.” Three white “brutes of the lowest order” had robbed Murrieta, “heaped every indignity on his wife,” and burned down his cabin. While other accounts attributed Murrieta’s subsequent vendetta to his sense of honor, Whipple-Haslam traced the violence to his “untutored, savage heart.” Still, she could not really blame him. At least, she reasoned, he was “never known to molest women and children.”88
A representation of Joaquín Murrieta from The Life of Joaquin Murieta the Brigand Chief of California; Being a Complete History of His Life, from the Age of Sixteen to the Time of His Capture and Death at the Hands of Capt. Harry Love, in the Year 1853 (San Francisco: Office of the “California Police Gazette,” 1859).
Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.
Both English- and Spanish-language accounts of Joaquín Murrieta, then, have depended on bandit narratives to make intelligible the events of 1853. Indeed, the Sonorans who raided Anglo gold and horses in the diggings may have seen themselves as bandits, thereby helping to create a historical hall of mirrors in which substance and reflection have been indistinguishable. Nevertheless, the stories of banditry inscribed in conversations, newspaper articles, plays, and the like over the past century and a half have had different narrative purposes. Consider, for example, the varied strategies of Ridge, of Anglo chroniclers, of Murrieta family members, and of recent Chicano writers.
For Ridge, the moral of Murrieta’s story rang clear as a bell: “there is nothing so dangerous in its consequences as injustice to individuals—whether it arise from prejudice of color or from any other source; that a wrong done to one man is a wrong to society and to the world.”89 Cherokee accommodationist, southern slaveholder, northern academy-educated forty-niner, Ridge drew from an unusual repertoire of experiences to write a story that he hoped would bring in “a great deal of money,” with which he planned to start up a newspaper that would give voice to the “leading minds in the different Indian nations.”90 But his pamphlet novel owed a debt to the genre of cheap fiction that has been analyzed as a site of cultural conflict in which “signs with wide appeal and resonance”—the bandit hero, for example—take on different masks, in which “conflicting groups of people become giant characters.”91
For Anglo chroniclers, Murrieta’s banditry had another significance. First and foremost, it established Murrieta’s band—and by extension other Mexican adversaries—as worthy opponents for Anglo American men. (That Anglo men themselves were the root cause of Murrieta’s marauding was a problem for which Ridge had already provided a neat solution; the Sonorans’ Anglo tormentors were Americans in name only, men from whom real Americans could readily dissociate themselves.) Ridge’s editor had made this aim more explicit when he described Murrieta in the book’s preface as “a manifest contradiction” to the belief that Mexicans were “‘A Nation of Cowards.’”92
The history of U.S. westward expansion
is replete with examples of male antagonists who, in the heat of combat, seem spineless knaves; later, in the soft light of victory, they become noble foes. The foremost instance of this gendered process, of course, is the construction of the American Indian “brave”—a construction close at hand when Whipple-Haslam indulgently attributed Murrieta’s vengeance to his “untutored, savage heart.” Implicit in this reinvention of adversaries is a variant of what has been called “imperialist nostalgia,” by which agents of colonialism yearn for “what they themselves have transformed.”93 Romantic memories of a dashing, but defeated, Mexican bandit, then, reflected back upon his presumably equally dashing, and victorious, Anglo opponents. At the same time, such memories mourned the passing of a stalwart enemy whom Anglos had left headless on the battlefield.
Or so it was among some of those who had lived through the Gold Rush. In the case of Joaquín Murrieta, it took only a generation or two for some Anglos to abandon nostalgic constructions. Thus, in the same month that The Robin Hood of El Dorado appeared in movie theaters across the United States, an Anglo humorist who wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle took aim at the Gold Rush bandit in a story provocatively titled “My Grandfather Debunks Murietta, Who Was a Sissy.” The writer Earle Ennis reported that Murrieta’s mother “liked the Lord Fauntleroy style of dress and made [Joaquín] retain his curls into manhood.” Thus coiffured, Murrieta would “flip his long, raven locks out of his eyes when he was angry.” Furthermore, the bandit “walked like Clark Gable”—not the walk of a (white) man’s man. As for Murrieta’s exploits, the humorist dismissed them as the overreactions of a hysteric: “Once he shot a whole company of infantry because they marched through an old lady’s cornfield. On another occasion he chased a general in full uniform from Tuolumne Meadows to Oregon because the general was mean to his horse.” Indeed, while successive generations of white people indulged ever more freely in imperialist nostalgia with regard to the Native American “brave,” the legacy of the Mexican American “bandit” has been more erratic and ambiguous. But questions of gender, as well as race, have remained at the center of changing Anglo constructions.94
Murrieta family members and contemporary Chicano writers have used the language of banditry differently than have Ridge or Anglo chroniclers, though family and ethnic strategies owe a debt to Ridge’s storytelling, which contributed to a cross-national ennobling of Murrieta’s memory. Murrieta descendants and associates recall a forebear who did all within his power to defend, not degrade, the family name. Most likely, oral “tradition” about Murrieta has undergone considerable reinvention over the years, as tale tellers have reconciled conflicting reminiscences and tailored a narrative of the California years consistent with present family circumstances.95 But over the many years that Frank Latta spoke with women and men named Murrieta, Valenzuela, and Felíz in Sonora and California, certain memories held relatively constant: the journey north; the harassment in the mines, including rape, whipping, and lynching; the turn to mustang running; the rift between Murrieta and Tres Dedos; and the fight at Arroyo Cantúa—which Murrieta was said to have survived. As significant as these details is the consistent pride family members voiced as they talked to Latta about a man who, far from dying a dishonorable death, disappeared after the final battle, so to live on in memory.
Chicano writers, activist and academic alike, similarly have made use of the bandit narrative, but for larger purposes. Identifying Murrieta as a social bandit—a man engaged in individual insurrection who is heralded among the oppressed as a hero—Chicano historians have given him an important place in an ethnic past plagued by domination that can serve as a source of remembered power in creating a more just and equitable ethnic future.96 This hopeful creation of ethnicity through the arts of memory occurs as well in the epic poem by the Chicano activist Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, I Am Joaquín—Yo soy Joaquín, first published in 1967.97 A searching study of the ambiguities of Chicano history—a past both Indian and Spanish, Mexican and American, a past of both “tyrant and slave”—the poem begins with uncertainty, “I am Joaquín / lost in a world of confusion,” and ends in anticipated triumph, “I am Joaquín / . . . I WILL ENDURE!” Between uncertainty and triumph, the reader meets the presumed Joaquín of the poem’s title:
all men feared the guns of
Joaquín Murrieta.
I killed those men who dared
to steal mine,
who raped and killed
my love
my wife.98
The familial drama of female shame and male honor is finally played out on a larger stage, and in that drama Anglo American men, cowering in the hills of California, pay a high price for their unmanly ways. Remembered victory, then, becomes a wellspring of renewed resistance.99
What of my own purposes in retelling—indeed, reinventing—the story of Joaquín Murrieta? I have done so in part because the story illustrates in microcosm some of the tensions between memory and history that characterize knowing the Gold Rush itself, and hence underscores the difficulties inherent in studying something so utterly common. But while the Murrieta tale engages the dialectic of history and memory, it does so from a perilous position. If the Gold Rush benefits from a habit of ritual remembering in mainstream Anglo American culture, Joaquín Murrieta—despite all of the books, poems, paintings, and films—suffers from an Anglo habit of ritual amnesia. I ought to know; I was well into my research on the Southern Mines before I “remembered” that Mexican “banditry” was central—both chronologically and conceptually—to my study of social relations during the California Gold Rush decade, 1848 to 1858.100
And so it is. In telling the tale, I have tried to create a vivid but also mercurial picture of the decade at its midpoint in order to persuade you that the Gold Rush, particularly as it occurred in California’s Southern Mines, marked a time and place of tremendous contest about maleness and femaleness, about color and culture, and about wealth and power. I have hinted that there was something special about the Southern Mines that kept these contests close to the surface of daily life, so that they easily erupted into violence of all sorts—economic, physical, political, sexual. All over the gold regions, the relative absence of women, the overwhelming presence of men of many nations and colors and creeds, and the wild fluctuation of local economies ensured that white, American-born, Protestant men who aspired to middle-class status would be anxious about issues of gender, of race and culture, and of class. After all, many such men assumed that they, collectively, should subdue and rule the newest territorial acquisition of the United States.
But what was true everywhere in the diggings was especially true in the Southern Mines, where the foreign-born predominated in numbers, where Miwok Indians stubbornly persisted, where the small female population included a large proportion of non-Anglo women, and where the capitalist trajectory of gold exploitation and the accompanying elaboration of class hierarchies were thwarted by inadequate underground deposits suitable for industrialized mining. On this meandering, even dead-end, path to industrialization, the dominance of Anglo American men and institutions was often—as we have seen—difficult to enforce, and groups of people united by shared interests could create for themselves spheres of autonomy and strategies for interdependence.
Still, historical study of the Gold Rush has concentrated on the Northern Mines, where the trajectory from surface, individualized (placer) mining to underground, industrialized (quartz or hardrock) mining was most clear.101 Why do we know more about rich diggings, like the Northern Mines, than about relatively poorer diggings, like the Southern Mines? (The same is true for their analogues outside California; consider, for example, Virginia City, Nevada, and Virginia City, Montana.) How is it that poorer diggings came to be populated disproportionately by people born outside the United States? To what extent has the protracted boom economy—searched for but not found in the Southern Mines—become a metaphor for American expansionism, optimism, and “staying power”? To what extent do these constr
ucts in turn reflect dominant nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses of gender, of race and ethnicity, and of class? How did the California Gold Rush become part of an American language of success? In that process, what has been remembered and what forgotten?
These are some of the questions I address in the chapters that follow. Key in my reading of the Gold Rush is a commonplace of women’s and ethnic studies—that, in the United States, women of all races and ethnicities and both women and men of color constitute “marked” and white men “unmarked” categories of human experience, the unmarked category serving as the normative, the more inclusive, the less “interested” and particular.102 It is among my purposes in this study to foreground the lives of women of color, men of color, and white women, and to “mark” the categories of Anglo and male experience—to show them to be as historically and culturally contingent, as deeply linked to understandings of gender and race, and as limited in their ability to “explain” the Gold Rush as that of any other group of participants. Sometimes I will do so by emphasizing the peculiar specificity of the lives of the dominant; at other times I will pointedly “change the subject.”103 I will continue to talk about the ways in which all-male events have been about gender, and about how white women’s and men’s doings have been about race. I will also have occasion to read nondominant peoples into Gold Rush stories that have seemed not to be about them at all.104
This latter strategy I have already employed in my not-too-subtle efforts to read Rosa Felíz de Murrieta back into the tale of Joaquín Murrieta—efforts that faltered once the tempo of the narrative picked up and took a forced march into paramilitary conflict. Her disappearance in my story reflects her virtual absence in all accounts of the events of 1853 after the remembered rape in the mines. Anglo accounts generated prior to the battle at Arroyo Cantúa had always ignored her existence, and Murrieta descendants and associates, when they mention her, place her out of harm’s way at a rancho in Alameda County, in the San Francisco Bay area, during the face-off between the bandits and the rangers.105 Then she—like her husband, for that matter—vanishes altogether.
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