His blood-soaked story lives at the murky intersection of history, myth and folklore. But the young Mexican was subject to a litany of racist injustices shortly after entering the country: tied up and whipped, then made to watch his wife gang-raped and his brother hung from a tree after a crowd of white people falsely accused him of stealing a horse.
Vowing revenge, Murrieta turned to a life of banditry, stealing from Anglo Americans until he was tracked down by law enforcement and killed. But debate about the veracity of the Murrieta story persisted from his banditry days until well after the beheading.
It was clear that someone had lost their head. What was far less clear was who it was, and what crimes could be pinned to him. In response, many left the state even as white settlements boomed.
Many so-called Californios—Spanish-speaking people who were in California when it was still part of Mexico—found themselves economically marginalized, and some turned to banditry as a result. Still, dozens of unsolved bandit murders piled up: a general in San Gabriel in November ; six Chinese gold miners near Big Bar in February A team of California rangers, led by Los Angeles Deputy Sheriff Harry Love attacked an outlaw camp in the early morning hours of July 25, , killing eight men—Murrieta allegedly among them.
The amazing true story of Bass Reeves, the formerly enslaved man who protected the Wild West. The entirety of the Murrieta narrative—starting with his vigilante story—would never exist if not for the fictionalized biography by John Rollin Ridge. A Cherokee Indian, Ridge tribal name Yellow Bird is considered the first Native American novelist, but his legacy with indigenous people is complicated.
