Then occurred a great stampede of the seventeen who still had their ears left, but no matter how far they fled, the avenger found them—one at the Stanislaus, one in Vallecito, one in Cucumber Gulch, one in Washoe, Nevada. Thus Joaquín, soon referred to as El Tigre and El Rey de los Pistoleros, left a bloody trail of earless corpses. Sometimes, at night, out of the howling winds of the Sierras, came a song, “El Corrido de Joaquín Murieta,” which froze the blood in the veins of the forty-niners:
Me he paseado en California
Por el año cincuenta;
Con mi pistola rajada,
Y mi canaña repleta.
Yo soy aquel mexicano,
De nombre Joaquín Murieta.
I was riding through California,
In the year of eighteen fifty,
With my pistol in my belt,
My cartridge belt full of bullets.
I am that Mexican
They call Joaquín Murieta.
As a poor little boy,
I was left an orphan,
My innocent brother they hanged,
And I was cruelly whipped.
My Rosita they ravished and killed.
The poor I protect with my weapons,
Put bread and meat on their tables.
Gringos I kill without mercy,
They tremble, hearing my name.
I am Joaquín Murieta.
On a cloudy night a gambler was riding along a mountain road when suddenly the clouds parted and the moonlight revealed the figure of a man, bent over a corpse, slicing off its ears. In the murderer the gambler recognized the black-bearded owner of Hangtown’s gambling hall. In a flash Murieta was upon him, knife glinting in the pale light, cursing: “Gringo, you die!”
“Mercy,” cried the gambler. “Spare me!”
“I spare no one,” said Murieta. “Why should I spare you?”
“After they whipped you,” said the gambler, “there was one who bathed your wounds, covering them with soothing balm. I am that man.”
“For ten centavos worth of unguento, here is a bag of gold worth a thousand pesos. Va Con Dios.”
Murieta left Hangtown before the gambler could expose him. He now appeared openly at the head of three hundred horsemen, raising havoc among the camps and towns of the Americanos. Astride his blooded black stallion, he rode splendidly attired in a black charro costume embroidered with silver and calzones lined with rows of silver buttons, and on his head was a black sombrero with a broad golden hatband. His heavy stirrups were of pure silver, with huge rowels. Stuck in his belt were two large horse pistols and an enormous, gold-handled bowie knife. Dangling from his saddle horn was a string of dried ears. Murieta never smiled. He had forgotten how to laugh. Among his followers were beautiful women, armed and attired like men. He took them to his bed sometimes, and then carelessly discarded them. He had lost the capacity to love. He and his bandidos killed a thousand men. They robbed the miners of a million dollars in gold. They robbed the Wells Fargo wagons carrying the precious yellow metal and killed the drivers. Posters sprouted on walls and fences offering a reward of five thousand dollars for his capture, dead or alive. With a piece of charcoal he scrawled on one of them: “Make it fifty thousand! Joaquín Murieta.”
He had collected thirty pairs of ears from the men who had hanged his brother and whipped him, but not a pair from the thirty-first and last—Bill Lang. He knew that his archenemy was consumed with fear and hardly slept, drowning his terror in whiskey. He savored Lang’s dread and was in no hurry to kill him, grimly enjoying playing cat and mouse with the trembling scoundrel. One night he rapped at Lang’s window, crying: “I am Joaquín Murieta. Pretty soon I’ll be coming for your ears!” Lang’s heart stopped. He had been scared to death.
Joaquín was without pity, but for the sake of Rosita’s memory he harmed no woman. He and his men came across a settler’s wife with a wagon. She was alone. Her wagon’s axle was broken. She had neither food nor money. He told her: “Young woman, you have heard of that Mexican who calls himself Joaquín Murieta. Perhaps you’ll think that I am not all that bad. Once, I was a caring man with love in my heart. It is your people who made me into a wild beast without heart.” He ordered his men to fix the wagon and gave the woman much food and a thousand dollars in gold.
Murieta and his band made travel in the goldfields impossible. All traffic stopped. The citizens were in an uproar. California’s governor recruited a company of rangers, commanded by a captain named Love, to put an end to the depredations. On July 25, 1853, near Tulare Lake, the rangers ambushed Murieta and a handful of his followers. They riddled the King of the Pistoleros with bullets. Dying, he looked Captain Love in the eyes, saying; “It is enough. The work is done.” Joaquín was twenty-three years old at the time of his death. It was said that with his own hands he had killed ten men for every year of his life. The rangers cut off his head and the hand of Three-Fingered Jack, and put their trophies into two glass jars filled with alcohol. Captain Love paraded the jars through the streets of San Francisco. They were sent on a tour of the state. It cost a quarter to stare at the head of the man some had called the “Terror of the Mother Lode.” Eventually, the jar with Murieta’s head wound up behind the bar of a San Francisco saloon from where it leered at the aficionados bending their elbows at the bar, until it was finally destroyed in the great earthquake of 1906.
But this was not the end of the legend. There were many, including most of the Spanish-speaking folks of California, who said that the head in the jar did not belong to Murieta but to one of the lesser Joaquíns, and that the mutilated hand did not belong to Three-Fingered Jack but to some poor, no-account peon whose fingers Love had cut off to have proof of having killed the two famous bandits. Five thousand dollars was a lot of money—mucho dinero—and the rangers wanted the reward. For their purpose anybody’s head and hand would do. The head was Murieta’s and the hand Jack’s because Love said so, and no ifs or buts about it.
The humble folk knew better. Had they not proof? Did hundreds of people not hear a black-caped rider sing:
Yo soy aquel mexicano
De nombre Joaquín Murieta …
I am that Mexican
They call Joaquín Murieta.
I am not dead, but live,
To defend my people,
To avenge their sorrows,
To care for the grave of my love.
And did not a black-caped horseman, every Sunday, place fresh flowers on Rosita’s grave?
The Headless Horseman of the Mother Lode
Murieta was dead, but his ghost rode on. Many were the lonely travelers who on moonlit nights found themselves confronted by the headless specter of the great bandido astride a huge coal black stallion, draped in a black capote, his legs encased in black charro pantaloons edged with silver. And out of its headless trunk, like a deep rumble out of a bottomless well, rose an unearthly cry: “Give me back my head!”
One traveler, a fine gentleman, lately arrived from Boston, finding himself face-to-face with the headless phantom, died instantly of fright.
A California judge, dispensing justice at his court, saw the terrible specter walking toward him in broad daylight. It hovered before the trembling magistrate while out of its horrible pulsating neck hole gurgled the heartrending cry: “Give me back my head!”
Then the ghost vanished into thin air, leaving the judge, who had fainted, senseless on his seat. When the poor man came to, his mind was gone. He lived on for many years, his eyes unseeing, his ear unhearing, his lips drooling as, with a sickly grin, he repeated over and over again, a thousand times a day: “I don’t have it! I don’t have it!”
A young lady of good family and gentle upbringing, being then big with child, heard a hollow croaking before her window that froze the blood in her veins: “Give me back my head!”
Then and there, the poor lady had a miscarriage, giving birth to a stillborn son. Her husband, coming upon the scene, took a pistol and blew his brains out. The deranged
woman spent the rest of her days in the madhouse, singing in an eerie voice: “Do I have it? Do you have it? Does he have it? Do we have it? No! No! No!”
When the poor lost soul died, the pallbearers, to their horror, heard her corpse singing in the coffin: “I really don’t have it! Hee! Hee! Hee!”
A man who owned a cabinet of wax figures within a gallery of freak shows saw the headless demon flying in through his window, his serape fluttering like giant bat wings, his skeleton hands grasping a waxen head resembling Murieta’s, screeching, “Give me back my head!”
Unfortunately, the ghost soon discovered that what he had seized was not his head, but a waxen replica. Furious, the phantom hurled the head into the owner’s face with such tremendous force that it cracked the poor fellow’s skull, so that he expired on the spot. The black-shrouded apparition then flew away with a piercing, inhuman laugh that shattered every window within a mile.
A group of jolly Irish immigrants encountered the demon amid thunder and lightning.
“Give me back my head!” howled the disembodied spirit, seizing the head of one among the group, an unfortunate fellow named O’Malley, and twisted it right off in front of his horror-stricken friends. The ghost kicked the head around for a while as if it were a soccer ball but, after a short while, lost interest in his gruesome plaything, hurling it high into the clouds. O’Malley’s head never came down, but stayed up there, in outer space, orbiting the earth. The evil apparition, on its phantom steed, galloped after O’Malley’s head in the sky and could for some time after be observed dashing wildly back and forth over the firmament. The dead Irishman’s friends were never the same again, condemned for the rest of their lives to reexperience the horrible scene again and again in an endless circle of nightmares.
Murieta’s real head, preserved in alcohol, was kept in a pickle jar behind the bar of San Francisco’s Golden Nugget Saloon. For the price of two bits the barkeep could be induced to remove the green-velvet covering to expose Murieta’s ghastly countenance. The pickled head was a great conversation piece and attracted crowds of paying customers. But once each year, every August 12, the saloon was empty, because on that day, the anniversary of Murieta’s death, the ghost was apt to come riding through the swinging door into the barroom, get down from his snorting steed, and try feverishly to pry open the jar’s lid in order to reclaim the missing part of his anatomy. Frantically, the skeleton fingers would clutch the lid—always in vain. It was said that whoever had watched this unnerving scene would die within a year.
There was one who defied this dire prediction, an ancient befuddled drunkard and former prospector who had made the saloon his permanent abode. Always inebriated, wandering about in an alcoholic haze, suffering from delirium tremens, he cheerfully explained that he preferred the headless ghost to visions of pink elephants.
So on one August 12, punctually at the stroke of midnight, the ghost rode into the Golden Nugget. Despite having no head, and therefore no eyes, he got down from his horse and walked straight up to the grizzled tosspot, grasping him by the collar, screeching, “Give me back my head!”
“Sorry, old chap,” said the undismayed lush, “I can’t. But I’ll give you a drink,” and with that poured the contents of a whole bottle of whiskey down the phantom’s gullet.
“Gracias, señor,” gurgled the ghost, who then hiccuped and trotted off together with his horse.
On April 18, 1906, a monstrous earthquake shook the city of San Francisco. Thousands of buildings collapsed or went up in flames. The Golden Nugget’s roof fell in, its walls crumbled. The jar containing Murieta’s famous head tumbled to the floor amid a shower of broken glass, the preserving fluid forming a big puddle. The head was rolling about on the polished boards when suddenly the phantom, on its ebony stallion, swooped down upon it, placing it upon its shoulders. At once, the head opened its mouth wide, exposing two rows of brilliantly white teeth, and shouted over and over again: “Mi cabeza! Mi cabeza! My head! I got it back! I got it back! I got it back at last!”
With its head once more in its proper place, Murieta’s ghost galloped off, through burning streets, smoke, and ashes, plunging finally into a huge crack made by the earthquake, never to be seen again.
El Keed
Henry McCarty, alias William H. Bonney, was a buck-toothed runt and juvenile delinquent best known by his nickname “Billy the Kid.” Born on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he ultimately wound up in New Mexico. His first try at being a baddie was inauspicious—stealing dirty shirts and underwear from a Chinese laundryman—but he advanced his career by becoming a horse thief and cattle rustler. He was befriended by a tweedy English gentleman rancher named Tunstall, who was involved in the notorious Lincoln County War, a power struggle between various commercial and cattle interests in the region that led to some of the most spectacular shootouts in western history. Tunstall was dry-gulched, becoming the “war’s” first victim. The Kid promptly went on a killing rampage, not only to avenge his late patron, but also for the fun and the money. The Kid’s greatest claim to fame is that he killed a man for every year of his life—twenty-one. (Mercifully, he died young.) Arrested for murder, the Kid escaped and could have high-tailed it over the border into Mexico, but “nubile hips and pneumatic breasts” made him loath to leave. Eventually, the law caught up with him. His silhouette outlined against a moonlit window, he made a good target for Sheriff Pat Garrett, who sneaked up on him and blasted Billy into the misty beyond. The best that can be said about young Billy is that he was right handy with a gun.
Americans have the unique propensity, astonishing to foreigners, to make heroes out of brutal, unwashed killers, and Billy was no exception, as a veritable avalanche of legends extolled the callow youth, creating an idol—the handsome, bold, and death-defying, but pure and tenderhearted, “Keed.”
The sun was sinking over the Sierras as the cool breeze of eventide stirred up dust devils among the chaparral. A lone rider could be seen making his way across the malpais on a horse so worn and weary that it seemed on the point of collapse. The rider was a young and handsome lad, lithe and tall in the saddle, his face shaded by a large sombrero. Ever and anon, the youth looked back over his shoulder as if searching the horizon for unseen pursuers. His face was lit up by a broad smile as, in the growing darkness, his eyes discerned a light coming from the window of a low adobe building. Forcing his horse into a faltering trot, he reined in before the humble home, dismounted, tied his animal to the stump of a dead tree, and knocked at the door.
“Bienvenido,” a voice welcomed him in Spanish. The stranger brushed the dust from his rawhide shirt, took off his sombrero, and entered. He was greeted by the comforting sight of a cozy, white-washed room, the friendly glow from an adobe fireplace, the flickering light of a candle on a table beside a jug of water. An elderly couple, simple campesinos, were seated on a bench by the fire. At the table sat a strikingly beautiful girl, about seventeen years old, with glowing amber skin, cherry lips, and dark translucent eyes, combing her raven hair.
“Agua, por favor,” the young stranger implored, his voice hoarse and cracking. The girl got up, poured water into a gourd dipper, and handed it to him. He drank deeply and greedily as one who had ridden far through the waterless desert.
The couple introduced themselves as José and Apolinara Padilla. Their daughter’s name, they told him, was Pablita. After slaking his thirst, the young man answered with many words of politeness, but failed to mention his own name.
“Señor Padilla,” he pleaded, “I and my horse are tired unto death, for we came a long way. I have not eaten since yesterday. Can you give me and my caballo shelter for the night, a little food for me, and the use of your pasture for my animal? I have money to pay for everything.”
At the mention of money Don José stiffened. “Do not insult my hospitality, señor,” he protested, “we do not have much, but whatever we do have is yours. Do not mention money again, por favor.”
They motioned him to the table to eat
as mother and daughter vied with each other to serve him. Pablita could not tear her eyes from the stranger. Flaxen-haired and blue-eyed, he was like no man she had ever seen. She thought him handsome beyond imagination. Fairy tales came to her mind, of saints and angels, knocking at doors, asking for a bed and a tortilla, testing the hosts’ goodwill and open-handedness. Could this fine young stranger be such a saint?
The young man, in turn, feasted his eyes on the girl. He noticed that she was wrapped in a gorgeous flowery shawl with long fringes. He saw that her parents also were dressed as if going to a fiesta.
“Señor,” her father told him, “make yourself at home. You may use my and my wife’s bed to sleep on. I myself, my esposa, and my daughter must go to a baile.”
At the word “baile” the young man’s eyes lit up. “A dance!” he exclaimed. “I love to dance. May I come along?”
Don José frowned: “How can you think of that, tired and worn out as you are?”
“Thanks to your kindness, I have already regained some of my strength, and señor, I am never too tired to dance.”
The host seemed embarrassed: “It would not be wise for you to go to this fiesta. I did not want to tell you this, but I see that I must. The man who is giving this baile is as powerful as he is bad. He thinks he owns this town and all who live in it. He pretends to be a big ranchero, but his riches come from cattle rustling and his power from the pistolas of the gang of bandidos who assist him in his crimes. We would like to drive them out, but he kills all who stand in his way. His name is Policarpo Bonilla—a thief, a murderer, and a violator of women. There is no resisting him. His men will cut your throat at a nod from his head. We live in a no-man’s-land here, without law and justice. This evil hombre is giving this baile, as he says, in honor of our little Pablita. He wants to possess and dishonor her as he has so many others. He says that if we do not come he will send his men to drag us there, by the hair if necessary. He vows that if we resist him, he will kill me and my good wife, and still force Pablita to come to him. It breaks our hearts, señor, but we are like little fledgling birds in the claws of a big cat. If you go there too, it will arouse his jealousy and will do us no good. He is sure to kill you and we do not want to have your death on our conscience.”
Legends and Tales of the American West Page 27