22. Latta, 208, 212, 228, 291–92, 582–85.
23. Ibid., 286–92, 297–99; Perkins, 161–62; Deena J. González, “La Tules of Image and Reality: Euro-American Attitudes and Legend Formation on a Spanish-Mexican Frontier,” in Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies, ed. Adela de la Torre and Beatríz M. Pesquera (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993), 75–90; and Janet Lecompte, “The Independent Women of Hispanic New Mexico, 1821–1846,” Western Historical Quarterly 12, no. 1 (Jan. 1981): 17–35.
24. Latta, passim and esp. 399–467.
25. Hurtado, 32–54.
26. Latta, 85, 208, 212, 228. The first interviewee, Soledad Murrieta de Murrieta, was described to Latta as the family historian. The second, Elías Murrieta, remembered that his grandfather had accompanied Joaquín Murrieta to California and had never returned.
27. The standard reference on these ideas in late colonial New Mexico is Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991). See also his “Honor Ideology, Marriage Negotiation, and Class-Gender Domination in New Mexico, 1690–1846,” Latin American Perspectives 12, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 81–104, and “From Honor to Love: Transformations of the Meaning of Sexuality in Colonial New Mexico,” in Kinship Ideology and Practice in Latin America, ed. Raymond T. Smith (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984), 237–63.
28. Standart, 335; Spicer, 113, 241; Stuart F. Voss, On the Periphery of Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Sonora and Sinaloa, 1810–1877 (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1982), 105–13.
29. A particularly trenchant critique of the cultural concept of honor itself appears in Lila Abu-Lughod, Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993). Abu-Lughod effectively dismantles the “culture of honor” approach advanced in much historical and anthropological literature, by demonstrating the varieties of ways in which contemporary Bedouin women live in critical dialogue with cultural values of “honor” and “shame.”
30. Latta, esp. 13–15, 85–86, 174–76, 208, 279–80, 292, 297–99. (The earlier page references are to interviews with Murrieta descendants and to Latta’s assessment of their stories. The later ones are to an interview with the grandson of the Calaveras County second sheriff Ben Marshall, who echoes some of the contentions of the Murrieta family members.)
31. The inconsistency in the use of diacritical marks that begins here is intentional. A “Joaquin Muliati” appeared in the San Joaquin Republican (Stockton), May 7, 1853. “Joaquin Muriati” appeared in the text of the California state legislature’s “Act to Authorize the Raising of a Company of Rangers,” approved by Governor John Bigler on May 17, 1853, facsimile reproduction in Latta, 328.
32. Based on items published in the San Joaquin Republican, Jan.–May, 1853. Some historians have used San Francisco or other California newspapers to trace essentially the same story. See esp. Pitt’s chapter on banditry entitled “The Head Pickled in Whiskey,” in Decline of the Californios, 69–82. I have chosen the Stockton paper because of Stockton’s unique relationship to the Southern Mines, where most of the events of 1853 took place. In particular, the San Joaquin Republican reprinted much of its material from the Calaveras Chronicle (Mokelumne Hill) and other newspapers in the Southern Mines that are no longer extant. For “the notorious outlaw, Joaquin,” see Feb. 16, 1853; for “Joaquin Carillo,” see, e.g., March 2, 1853.
33. See, e.g., San Joaquin Republican, Feb. 16, 1853.
34. Ibid., March 2, 1853.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., Jan. 26, 29, 1853.
37. Ronald Takaki lays the groundwork for such analysis in Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), though the theme is more implicit than explicit in his argument. See esp. 215–49. The later international implications are suggested in the chapter entitled “The Masculine Thrust toward Asia,” 253–79.
38. San Joaquin Republican, Feb. 23, March 2, 1853.
39. Ibid., Feb. 23, 1853. On midnineteenth-century Anglo American notions of male gender, see, e.g., Charles E. Rosenberg, “Sexuality, Class and Role in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Quarterly 35, no. 2 (May 1973): 131–53; G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976), esp. 175–88; Elizabeth H. Pleck and Joseph H. Pleck, “Introduction,” in The American Man, eds. Pleck and Pleck (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 1–49, esp. 14–20, and essays in the section entitled “The Commercial Age,” 145–215; J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds., Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1987); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993). This story is complicated further by competing ideas about white manhood in the U.S. South, where notions of honor not unlike those described by Gutiérrez for colonial New Mexico were in ascendance. See discussion below.
40. San Joaquin Republican, March 2, 1853.
41. Along with the literature on Anglo manhood already cited, Takaki has influenced my argument here. It is perhaps telling that while Anglo accounts tend to describe Joaquín as dark-skinned, Murrieta family members insist that their forebear, like a good many of his kin, was huero—he had light skin and eyes and brown hair. Cf., e.g., San Joaquin Republican, Feb. 16, 1853; and Latta, 179, 183. Anglo men did indeed think about their “darker” selves during the Gold Rush. Describing one mining camp, e.g., the future Wisconsin governor Lucius Fairchild wrote in a letter home, “You never dreamed of such a rowdy hole as this is, all summer there was not an hour but what some one was drunk in the street & fights have become so common as not to excite any curiosity even to run & see them. . . . This is a true picture, Every body drinks freely, even myself have swallowed enough cocktails to float a skiff. . . . Gamblers, loafers, loose women, and all the scum of society are here. . . . This is the dark side of us.” Lucius Fairchild, California Letters of Lucius Fairchild, ed. Joseph Schafer (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1931), 182.
42. San Joaquin Republican, Feb. 2, 1853.
43. Ibid., Jan. 29, 1853.
44. Ibid., March 2, 1853.
45. John Doble, farther north in Calaveras County at Volcano (Volcano is now in Amador County), noted on March 14, 1853, that (Miwok) Indians along Dry, Sutter, Amador, and Rancherie creeks—“an area in which there are no Mines & consequently no whites”—were harassing travelers. “They are supposed to be incited to rob and steal by the band of outlawed Mexicans & Chileans [!] known as Joaquins band.” Reflecting a Feb. newspaper story, Doble wrote of Joaquín, “he is said to wear a shirt of mail so that all who have yet shot at him have not affected him.” (The “shirt of mail” is a “coat of armor” in San Joaquin Republican, Feb. 16, 1853.) This is Doble’s only mention of Joaquín or of Mexican banditry. See John Doble’s Journal and Letters from the Mines: Mokelumne Hill, Jackson, Volcano and San Francisco, 1851–1865, ed. Charles L. Camp (Denver: Old West Publishing, 1962), 148. Likewise, P. V. Fox, who was situated much farther south in Mariposa County—another supposed hotbed of banditry—noted mule thefts and murders just once in his diary. Reflecting popular sentiment, Fox wrote that the attacks “were supposed to be the work of Joaquin or his band who has created great excitement by his daring and unprovoked murders and robberies.” See Journal entry, March 13, 1853, P. V. Fox Journals, Beinecke Library, Yale Univ., New Haven.
46. The Journals of Alfred Doten, 1849–1903, 3 vols., ed. Walter Van Tilburg Clark (Reno: Univ. of Nevada Press, 1973), 1:123–24. I have not seen the name Cladne used elsewhere in Anglo or Mexican accounts. Murrieta descendants recall an associate of Joaquín, El Famoso, named Claudio (Acevedo), who they claim helped Joaquín get revenge on the Anglo miners. See Latta, 95, 173. The San Joaquin Republican, Aug
. 11, 1853, mentions a brother of Joaquín’s named Claudio. Likewise, the first “historical” account of Murrieta, to be discussed at length below, identifies a “Claudio” as an important band member. See John Rollin Ridge [Yellow Bird], The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854; reprint, Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1955), esp. 17–18. All of which is to say Doten’s “Cladne” might have been a Murrieta associate or relative named Claudio. Or maybe not.
47. Doten, 1:140. Doten added that despite the “great excitement,” he “could not learn the particulars very definitely.”
48. Ibid., 1:141.
49. On this point, see chap. 4, “Mining Gold and Making War.”
50. San Joaquin Republican, Feb. 23, March 30, May 4, 1853. And see the facsimile reproductions of Governor Bigler’s Feb. 21 proclamation offering a $1,000 reward “for the apprehension and safe delivery of the said Joaquin Carillo into the custody of the sheriff of Calaveras county,” and the Mariposa County petition to the governor to “call out a company of Rangers,” dated April 20, both in Latta, 321, 324–26.
51. “An Act to Authorize the Raising of a Company of Rangers.”
52. San Joaquin Republican, Feb. 23, 1853, and facsimile reproduction of the petition in Latta, 324–26.
53. San Joaquin Republican, June 8, 1853.
54. On Covarrubias, see Hubert H. Bancroft, “Pioneer Register and Index,” in The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, vol. 19, California (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1885), 2:683–795, esp. 770; Donald E. Hargis, “Native Californians in the Constitutional Convention of 1849,” Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly 36, no. 1 (March 1954): 3–13, esp. 12, n. 7; Pitt, 43.
55. All quotations from “Minority Report of J. M. Covarrubias,” facsimile reproduction in Latta, 330–32.
56. Bancroft, 2:770; Pitt, 136, 143.
57. “Black hair” and “black eyes” were the only physical descriptions offered of the head of Joaquin Carillo in the governor’s proclamation of Feb. 21, 1853. See facsimile reproduction in Latta, 321. On the declining fortunes of Californio men from families like the Carillos and Covarrubiases, see Pitt; and Albert Camarillo, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848–1930 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1979).
58. “Act to Authorize the Raising of a Company of Rangers”; San Joaquin Republican, June 8, 1853 (the newspaper’s spelling of two of the five names varies slightly—“Muliati” for “Muriati,” “Corillo” for “Carillo”).
59. Latta insists that Murrieta family memories can account for each of the five named Joaquins: “Joaquin Muriati” was Joaquín Murrieta, El Famoso; “Joaquin Ocomorenia” was actually Jesús Valenzuela, who adopted the alias Ochomorenio from a childhood incident involving ocho merino (eight sheep); “Joaquin Valenzuela” was Joaquín Valenzuela, brother of Jesús; “Joaquin Botellier” was Joaquín Botellas, an associate of Joaquín Murrieta; and “Joaquin Carillo” was Joaquín Manuel Carillo Murrieta, half brother of Joaquín, El Famoso, and full brother of Jesús Carillo Murrieta, who was hanged by the Anglo mob in the diggings. See 96, 127–28, 133–34. Important as all this may be, it does not explain why Anglos named only “Joaquins” as the objects of their search.
60. This would not be the last time Anglos tried to attenuate diversity through (mis)naming; soon thousands upon thousands of men from South China would all be called John Chinaman.
61. Report of Captain Harry Love to Governor John Bigler, Aug. 4, 1853, facsimile reproduction in Latta, 512–14; San Joaquin Republican, July 30, Aug. 2, 6, 11, 1853. Two of Love’s rangers later offered their reminiscences of the battle at Cantúa to California newspapers. An article based on an interview with William Henderson appeared in the Fresno Expositor, Nov. 12, 1879, which is quoted at length in Latta, 511, 515–20, 584. Similarly, William Howard talked twice to reporters and gave somewhat different renditions of the events in the Merced County Sun, May 3, 1890, and the San Francisco Bulletin, Dec. 3, 1899, both quoted at length in Latta, 540–50, 554–56. Howard’s daughter Jill L. Cossley-Batt pieced together her father’s reminiscences in The Last of the California Rangers (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1928), esp. 157–93, which offers a third version of the story. The “last words” of Joaquin appear in San Joaquin Republican, Aug. 11, 1853; and Fresno Expositor, Nov. 12, 1879, quoted in Latta, 519. William Howard claimed in all three renditions of the battle that Joaquin was first shot and injured, that he then surrendered to one of Love’s men, and that finally he was shot again and killed when other rangers rode up and believed he was resisting arrest. See Howard quoted in Latta, 542 and 559; and Cossley-Batt, 190.
62. Report of Captain Love; San Joaquin Republican, July 30, Aug. 2, 6, 11, 1853.
63. Report of Captain Love.
64. Alta California (San Francisco), Aug. 23, 1853, quoted in Joseph Henry Jackson, Bad Company (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 13. On the Los Angeles Star coverage, see Pitt, 80.
65. San Joaquin Republican, Aug. 2, 1853.
66. Report of Captain Love.
67. San Joaquin Republican, July 30 and Aug. 6, 1853.
68. Report of Captain Love.
69. San Joaquin Republican, Aug. 6, 1853.
70. Facsimile reproductions of the broadside appear in Latta, 601; and Ridge, xxxiv.
71. “Act to Authorize the Raising of a Company of Rangers”; Report of Captain Love.
72. “Minority Report of J. M. Covarrubias.”
73. This analysis relies on a chastened reading of historical and anthropological scholarship on how ideas about honor have operated in various cultural contexts. For the most relevant analysis, see Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, esp. 176–226. Background on “cultures of honor” can be found in Julian Pitt-Rivers, “Honor,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 18 vols., ed. David L. Sills (New York: Macmillan, 1968); and J. G. Peristiany, ed., Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966). My reading of such works (as well as those cited on the U.S. South below) has been tempered primarily by Abu-Lughod.
74. For the various versions of when and why Byrnes recognized Joaquín, and what part he played in relation to the heads and hand, see San Joaquin Republican, July 30, Aug. 6 and 11, 1853; Report of Captain Love; William Henderson’s account from Fresno Expositor; William Howard’s three accounts from Merced County Sun, San Francisco Bulletin, and Cossley-Batt, 188–90; and Ridge, 155. Two Anglo old-timers told Latta in 1930 that Byrnes later admitted the rangers had not killed Murrieta at all, but some other man. Byrnes never came forward with this information, the men said, because the rangers’ larger purpose had been accomplished: they got the heads and hand and broke up the gang. Latta, 585–86. Whatever one makes of these old-timers’ tales, the stories are not inconsistent with the analysis developed below; the appearance of victory was all-important.
75. Leonard Withington Noyes Reminiscences, Essex Institute, Salem, Mass., transcription at Calaveras County Museum and Archives, San Andreas, Calif., 48. I am grateful to Willard Fuller of the Calaveras County Historical Society for calling my attention to this source.
76. See Elliot Gorn, “‘Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch’: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry,” American Historical Review 90, no. 1 (Feb. 1985): 18–43. Gorn locates this rough-and-tumble male world as far west as Mississippi and Arkansas, but it seems likely that southerners who moved on to Texas partook of a similar cultural milieux. The origins of Texas as part of Mexico also must have had an impact on the discourse of honor as it developed there. See also Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982); and Kenneth S. Greenberg, “The Nose, the Lie, and the Duel in the Antebellum South,” American Historical Review 95, no. 1 (Feb. 1990): 57–74, and Honor and Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Masks, Dressing as a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Reb
ellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1996).
77. The Calaveras County second sheriff Ben Marshall kept a journal in the early 1850s that has since been lost, but transcriptions of portions of that journal made by his son Frank Marshall, Sr., apparently survived. Frank Marshall, Jr., allowed Latta to use the transcribed (and in part rewritten) journal, and pieces of it are reproduced in Latta; see esp. 287–88. Leonard Noyes (who despised Ben Marshall) confirms the hanging of Sam Green, though he recalls that Green shot Alexander Long, not Bill Lang. See Noyes, 48.
78. If Latta is right that Martínez was of Chinese descent, then Martínez’s father was probably a Chinese sailor aboard a European or American vessel that stopped at the Sonoran port city of Guaymas sometime around 1840. His mother would have been mestiza. See Latta, 120.
79. Ibid., 100.
80. Ibid., 560–68.
81. Ibid., 569–74.
82. See esp. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, esp. 176–206.
83. See Thurman Wilkins, Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People, 2d ed. (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1981); Gary E. Moulton, John Ross: Cherokee Chief (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1978); and James W. Parins, John Rollin Ridge: His Life and Works (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1991). I began to develop these ideas in a talk entitled “Moral Stories: Telling Tales of the California Gold Rush,” American Religious History Luncheon Series, Yale Univ., Jan. 29, 1990, and am grateful to participants in that colloquium for their comments. I particularly benefited from Philip J. Deloria’s suggestions.
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