Roaring Camp

by Susan Lee Johnson

  At long last the campaign bore fruit; on May 17, 1853, Governor Bigler approved “An Act to authorize the Raising of a Company of Rangers,” designating Harry Love as commander.51 Mariposa County petitioners had first suggested Love because of his “experience in border warfare and a long residence on the frontiers of Texas.”52 The legislature must have thought those were good qualifications for chasing Mexicans. In fact, once the troops were mustered in, a Mariposa correspondent assured newspaper readers that all of the men had “smelt powder either in Mexico or Texas.”53 More and more, the rangers seemed soldiers engaged in a rearguard action designed to shore up the gains of the late expansionist war.

  The drive for state intervention had not gone uncontested. Though little publicized at the time, California Assemblyman José María Covarrubias had protested the “violent remedies” debated by the legislature. Covarrubias, a native of France who had become a naturalized citizen of Mexico and married into the prominent Carillo family of Santa Barbara, drafted a minority report on the matter in his capacity as chair of the Committee on Military Affairs.54

  Addressing a proposal for a bounty to be placed on Joaquin, the legislator cited a basic Anglo American legal tenet: “To set a price upon the head of any individual who has not been examined and convicted by due process of law,” he wrote, “is to proceed upon an assumption of guilt.” Neither was Covarrubias impressed by the source of such assumptions: “floating rumor and mere statements of newspapers should not be taken as conclusive evidence.” These accounts, he observed, were “somewhat erroneous.” Then his understatement gave way to incredulity: “Unless the said Joaquin be endowed with supernatural qualities he could not have been seen at the same time in several places widely separated from each other.” Besides, the assemblyman argued, a reward might encourage the acquisitive “to magnify fancied resemblance,” resulting in “dozens of heads” being turned in for identification.

  Finally, Covarrubias took up the matter of the name Joaquin Carillo (at this point Carillo was the only surname accounts had attached to the bandit): “there are citizens of this State, descendants of ancient and honorable families, who bear the name of Joaquin Carillo.”55 One of them happened to be the legislator’s brother-in-law, a district judge in Santa Barbara.56 Covarrubias may have been more concerned about the “ancient and honorable families” of old California than the countless Sonoran pobladores who had answered the call of gold since 1848. Increasingly, though, the fates of affluent Californios were tied to those of poorer Spanish-speaking immigrants. The Anglo pursuit of a vaguely identified Mexican could produce dozens of heads with “black hair” and “black eyes”; the search for a “Joaquin Carillo” could bring dishonor to once preeminent men who were fast losing ground, both literally and figuratively, in their native land.57

  In the end, Covarrubias’s appeal to Anglo American notions of equity and his plea for respect for Californio notions of honor fell on deaf ears. By late May, Harry Love and his rangers were in the field, hot on the trail of men who suddenly had become known as the “five Joaquins”—Joaquin Muriati, Joaquin Ocomorenia, Joaquin Valenzuela, Joaquin Botellier, and Joaquin Carillo.58 It is hard to know whether the proliferation of Joaquins represented Anglo attempts to explain the geographic spread of reported depredations or instead reflected information gathered from months of chasing the supposed perpetrators.59 Most likely, both phenomena were at work and were mutually reinforcing. New intelligence about the bandits, who were reported to number in the hundreds, came in from each self-appointed posse, but somehow only men with the name Joaquin stuck in Anglo memories.60

  And so it was, according to the accounts of Love and his men, that on July 25, when the rangers finally rode into a camp at Arroyo Cantúa near the Diablo Range on the Tulare Plains (south and west across the San Joaquin Valley from the Southern Mines), one of them was able immediately to point out which of the Mexican men gathered there was Joaquin. After all, there were so many from which to choose. When that man tried to escape, first by horse and then on foot, the rangers took aim and shot him. At least two of Love’s men claimed that as he fell the man called out to them to stop shooting, as he had had enough, “ No tere mas, yo soy muerto.”61

  Meanwhile, Anglo reports say, Love killed three more suspects and detained two others, as the rest of the Mexicans encamped at Arroyo Cantúa fled into the hills. The rangers then cut the heads off of two of the four slain men, and Love sent two of his charges to the U.S. outpost at Fort Miller to have the heads preserved in alcohol there. One of the beheaded men, all agreed, was the man identified as Joaquin when rangers first rode into the arroyo.62 But when Love wrote to the governor announcing news of the battle a week later, he insisted, “There is not the least doubt that the head now in my possession is that of the noted Joaquin Muriatta the Chief and leader of the murderers and Robbers of the Calaveras and Mariposa.”63

  The “noted Joaquin Muriatta,” of course, had only recently been named in Anglo newspapers as one of the “five Joaquins,” and he had never been identified as the ringleader. And so perhaps it is not surprising that some Anglos wondered just whose head Love’s men had taken to Fort Miller. The Los Angeles Star and San Francisco’s Alta California poked fun at the whole business, and the Alta editor went so far as to suggest, “Although I will not say that interested parties have gotten up this Joaquin expedition, yet such expeditions can generally be traced to have an origin with a few speculators.”64 Writers for Stockton’s San Joaquin Republican, the newspaper that had pushed so hard for state intervention, continued to champion their man Love and his detachment, and chastised the skeptics: “Why do they . . . cast a slur on the reputation of as brave a body of young men as ever entered the field?” But even such staunch advocates could only add to the confusion; the same article that took rival papers to task went on to declare, “In our mind, there is no doubt that Joaquin Valancuela (not Carillo) has been killed.” To further persuade readers, the editor quoted a Mariposa correspondent on this Joaquin Valancuela: “‘He is the Simon Pure Joaquin, and you will see his head in the course of a week in Stockton.’”65

  And the other cabeza? Love claimed only that the second head had belonged to one of Joaquin’s “principal men,” or again to Joaquin’s “Lieutenant.”66 But even before Love filed his report the newspapers had a name for the decapitated Mexican man—“Three Fingered Jack.” This “Jack” was also described as “notorious,” though no Anglo accounts before the conflict at Cantúa had ever used that sobriquet or mentioned a bandit whose hand had but three digits.67 Be that as it may, this second head suffered an even more ignominious fate than the one said to belong to one or another of the Joaquins. Love reported to the governor that the head of the “Lieutenant” had been so disfigured by a shot through the skull that the rangers had to bury it at Fort Miller.68 Apparently, though, some prescient, or just bloodthirsty, Anglo soldier had wittingly or unwittingly prepared for this turn of events by slicing off the dead man’s three-fingered hand as well, because ten days or so after the raid at the arroyo, the San Joaquin Republican reported the arrival of one of Love’s men in Stockton with “the head of Joaquin and the hand of ‘Three Fingered Jack.’”69 Six days later, broadsides appeared in the streets of Stockton announcing a one-day exhibition of:

  THE HEAD

  of the renowned Bandit!

  JOAQUIN!

  AND THE

  HAND OF THREE FINGERED JACK!

  THE NOTORIOUS ROBBER AND MURDERER.70

  It all happened so quickly that no one seemed to wonder how it was that rangers commissioned “for the purpose of capturing the party or gang of robbers commanded by the five Joaquins” returned from the field not with prisoners to be turned over to county authorities (only one arrested man survived and landed in the Mariposa county jail), but with a head and a hand to be preserved in glass jars.71 José María Covarrubias probably was not surprised; although there was no official order to murder men and mutilate corpses, Covarrubias assumed that the
bandits’ pursuers would return with heads for identification.72 Why? Surely live prisoners—or even full corpses—although more difficult to transport, could have been identified more easily than the distended visages on heads soaked in alcohol, and hence would have guaranteed a quick reward. Perhaps Covarrubias understood that the Mexican men and their Anglo enemies were caught up in a pernicious affair of honor that would likely end in dishonorable death. The legislator took as a matter of course that decapitation of someone named Joaquin Carillo could shame not just that man and his family but other, more affluent Joaquin Carillos as well. Besmirching the family name, beheading—these were dishonoring acts, and Covarrubias both anticipated and sought to prevent them.73

  What the legislator probably did not know was that some of the Anglo Americans were operating under not entirely dissimilar assumptions about male honor. All sorts of U.S. men—northern men, southern men, urban clerks and farmhands, African American slaves, free blacks, and displaced American Indians—had gone to California in search of gold, and most likely many sorts of American men joined the war on Joaquin. The particular discourse of manliness that pervaded newspaper accounts of 1853 indicates that northern, white, aspiring middle-class men were prominent actors in the struggle not only to catch the bandits but to mold perceptions of the problem of banditry as well.

  But a faint trail of evidence suggests that southern frontiersmen were also among Joaquin’s most determined opponents—men whose understandings of personal honor may have resembled Mexican beliefs as much as white northerners’ notions of manhood. Virtually all Anglo accounts agree that among the rangers was a lieutenant, William Byrnes, who had known Joaquin personally in the early years of the Gold Rush; many further agree that Byrnes and Joaquin played monte together. This man Byrnes is variously credited with having identified Joaquin either when the rangers rode into Arroyo Cantúa or after the shooting had stopped, when corpses littered the ground. Many say it was Byrnes who cut the heads off two of the dead men (and perhaps the hand as well?), and all agree that Byrnes was one of the rangers who took the body parts to Fort Miller for preservation.74 Who was this man Byrnes, who seems to have known a Joaquin and who played a key role in seeing to it that the head and the name of a Joaquin would live in infamy?

  Leonard Withington Noyes, a New Englander who wrote his reminiscences in later years, recalled knowing a “Bill Burnes” and his brother Mike at Murphys Camp in Calaveras County, not far from where Joaquin Murrieta was supposed to have dealt monte. Although the spelling differs, it seems likely that “Bill Burnes” and “William Byrnes” were the same person. According to Noyes, Mike Byrnes was one of four men who worked together on the Texas Claim and called themselves the “Texas Rangers.” Noyes claimed that these Texans made “enormous sums of money which was all plaid off at Monte and expended for bad Whiskey.” He added that they “delighted in swagaring around Town with a Big Six Shooter and Boey Knife . . . usually half drunk and acheing for a quarel.” William Byrnes seems not to have mined with his brother’s company, but he lived in the area and Noyes knew him, at least by reputation: “Bill Burnes . . . Gambled was a Shooter from Texas and inclined to quarel.” Noyes recalled that Byrnes “was said to have shot the Notorious Joaquin Muriatta whose Head Harry Love had on exhibition afterwards.” William Byrnes would also have known his brother’s mining partner Sam Green, another of the “Texas Rangers,” whom Noyes depicted as constantly “Making an exhibit of his Revolver & Knife and threatening Vengance to all who happened to disagree with him.”75

  When Noyes described Sam Green and the Byrnes brothers, he was evoking a characteristically Yankee portrait of white southern frontiersmen: it was a portrait that captured all the quick-tempered violence of that male world without comprehending its roots in notions of honor that could turn taunts, insults, and even practical jokes into deadly challenges.76

  Joaquín Murrieta may have set up camp next door to that male world in 1850 or 1851. The relations between Green, the Byrnes brothers, and Murrieta’s family are likely to remain largely lost to historians, but what little evidence there is points to complicated alliances and enmities. William Byrnes may well have known Joaquín Murrieta, or else one of his close male relatives, and the setting for their acquaintance might well have been the monte table. Given Byrnes’s later cut-throat activity at Arroyo Cantúa, one might assume that he and Murrieta were not friends. Sam Green was also apt to have known Murrieta, but chances are Green was on better terms with the Murrieta clan. A Calaveras County sheriff remembered,

  There was bad blood between Sam Green and Bill Lang over the lynching of Jesus Murrieta, Joaquin’s brother, in Murphys New Diggins when Lang accused Jesus Murrieta of stealing a mule that he, Lang, had sold to Jesus. . . . Green sometime after this meets Bill Lang and as Green was in his cups, denounced him. “You cowardly cur you had nothing on them Murrieta boys, Jesus paid you for that mule. You are a born scoundrel. . . . I ought to kill you and I guess I will.”

  He did. And he was hanged for murder in 1852 at Mokelumne Hill.77

  The point here is not so much to determine who shot whom, who lynched whom, who tangled with whom over a game of cards, but rather to suggest what kind of social world gave rise to a larger conflict that finally ended with state-sponsored Anglo rangers galloping off to a U.S. military base with two Mexican men’s heads and one hand. Sam Green’s doubly fatal fight with a man who was probably among the Murrietas’ harassers indicates that when southern backcountry notions of male honor shared ground with those of Sonoran pobladores, unlikely alliances could develop. They were not long tolerated, though, among Anglos, who quickly put an end to Green’s pugnacious ways. After the hanging of Sam Green, there is scant evidence of any cross-ethnic ties, as Mexican men intensified their resistance to Anglo depredations and Anglo men nervously imagined the worst—every robbery, every murder became the act of an elusive, omnipresent, omnipotent Joaquin.

  William Byrnes, the “shooter from Texas,” may have had his own reasons for chasing down a Mexican man with whom he had once played monte, but Byrnes was content to subsume his individual tale of enmity within a larger Anglo story about amoral Mexican men who preyed on “defenseless” Chinese and imperiled American habits of industry. His personal narrative may have been resolved by the deeply dishonoring act of decapitation; the shared Anglo tale found its denouement in a heroic battle that reenacted, one more time, the American conquest of Mexico’s upper extremities.

  The story was not over, however, as long as people kept on retelling and, indeed, reinventing it, as I have here. I began my retelling with the voices of twentieth-century Sonoran descendants and elderly associates of the Murrieta clan, filtered through the research agenda of the author Frank Latta and my own strategy for introducing the Gold Rush with one of its most intriguing conflicts. Some of those same voices, just as they contest contemporary Anglo accounts of the cause, extent, and meaning of the events of 1853, similarly contest the story’s outcome. In effect, Murrieta descendants and associates contend that Anglo readings of banditry and its suppression in the Southern Mines are lies.

  This is especially true of the account of the Cantúa raid offered by Avelino Martínez, who told Latta that he had been hostler for Joaquín Valenzuela, cousin of Joaquín Murrieta, in California. Martínez—who Latta says was of Spanish Mexican, Indian, and Chinese descent—was convinced throughout his life that Harry Love and his rangers were a detachment of the U.S. Army.78 He claimed they wore soldiers’ uniforms and carried soldiers’ guns, and that Murrieta, Valenzuela, and the others, having left the mines and taken up mustang running, knew that they were being pursued by the military. When Love caught up with the Sonorans at Arroyo Cantúa, Martínez explained, they were rounding up horses for one last drive down into Mexico.

  The night before the raid, Joaquín Murrieta and a few others were encamped on higher ground at Las Tres Piedras, above and to the west of the arroyo, and hence were not at Cantúa when Love arrived the following morning. Vale
nzuela had dispatched Martínez to Murrieta’s camp to pick up some things they needed for the trip south, and so the hostler was not at the arroyo either. Murrieta’s hostler, on the other hand—a California Indian called Chappo, who was raised at Mission San Carlos Borromeo—was at Cantúa (caring for Murrieta’s lame horse), along with Valenzuela and the man known to Martínez as Tres Dedos.79 Martínez recalled that Tres Dedos and Murrieta had argued bitterly over what course of action they should take now that the U.S. Army was after them—Tres Dedos advocated another round of robberies so that all could return to Sonora with plenty of gold, and Murrieta refused. That was the last Martínez knew of those camped at Arroyo Cantúa until late on the morning of July 25, when another of Valenzuela’s men rode up with news of the army attack at the lower camp.80

  Although anxious to see what had happened at the arroyo, the men at Las Tres Piedras did not dare ride down that afternoon, for fear soldiers would discover them. So they spent a sleepless night up in the hills, and then followed circling buzzards into the camp the next day. They found eight corpses there, according to Martínez, two of them mutilated—those of Chappo, the Indian hostler, who had lost his head, and Tres Dedos, who had lost both head and three-fingered hand. Joaquín Valenzuela was also among those killed. All of the dead men had been robbed, their clothes and boots cut open, and the entire camp had been swept clean of horses, saddles, blankets, guns, knives, and gold—save a few ounces someone had hidden in a coffee pot on the morning of the raid. Martínez was emphatic about the identity of the decapitated men—one was Tres Dedos, who became known to Anglos as Three-Fingered Jack, and the other was his fellow hostler Chappo. Murrieta was not among the dead; he helped bury them. The “head of the renowned bandit Joaquin” exhibited first at Stockton in August 1853, then, belonged to a mission Indian named Chappo.81