Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  Best evidence indicates that he was born in Sonora, Mexico, around 1830, and so was in his late teens when he followed the reports of gold to California in 1848 or 1849. He found enough gold to stay, even after harassment and violence against fellow Mexicans caused many to leave California and return home. Yet a series of traumatic events involving loved ones set him off on a campaign of revenge. The most common version of the Murrieta legend held that thuggish Americans raped his wife, killed his brother and horsewhipped Murrieta himself. Some of this might have been embellishment, as certainly was the part of the story that said he took his revenge only on those who had injured him, his wife or his brother.

  More generally, Murrieta resented the labeling of Mexicans as “greasers” and “niggers” and their treatment as thieves for merely trying to gather gold. This attitude inspired the California legislature in 1850 to levy a tax on foreign miners. The tax was subsequently repealed, then reimposed, adding confusion to the insult Mexicans like Murrieta felt. They rejected the Americans’ assertion that Mexicans were stealing American gold, rejoining that the Americans had stolen California.

  In any event, Murrieta visited his resentment on the Americans in the gold fields. Violence had been common in the region since the start of the gold rush. Crowded clusters of unattached men who carried substantial wealth on their persons were a recipe for armed robbery and the mayhem that often accompanied it. As in San Francisco, much of the crime went unpunished when those not directly harmed judged they had better uses for their time. When the crime and violence afflicted Mexicans, Chinese or other scorned minorities, the American majority felt even less incentive to intervene.

  But the first months of 1853 brought an escalation of violent crime. Then as later, crime sold newspapers, and the gold-country press recounted the sprees with gusto. “For some time back, a band of robbers have been committing depredations in the southern section of our county,” a Calaveras County paper reported in January. “During the week a party of three Mexicans entered a Chinese tent at Yaqui Camp, near San Andres, and ransacked everything, despite the opposition of the inmates, carrying off two bags of gold dust, one containing $110 and the other $50.” This was just the start. “Three armed Mexicans—supposed to be the same who committed the above outrage—entered another Chinese tent in the same vicinity, assaulted its inhabitants, holding loaded pistols to their heads to keep them quiet, and robbed them of two bags of gold dust, $90 and $60. One of the Chinamen, named Ah Kop, refused to give up his money and attempted to defend himself, when one of the ruffians drew his knife and ran the unfortunate celestial through the body, causing almost instant death.” A second area paper, not to be outdone, recounted “the dreadful murders and outrages committed in the lonely gulches and solitary outposts” of the county, and identified the ringleader: “a robber named Joaquin, a very desperate man, who was concerned in the murder of four Americans some time ago at Turnersville.”

  The violence intensified and the coverage grew more lurid. “We publish today the details of fourteen horrible murders, all committed within seven days, in Calaveras county,” a paper said in mid-February. “A condition of society exists in that important region far worse than that which prevailed in the early days of its settlement. No man dare travel a step unless armed to the teeth, or sleep without having fire-arms already in his grasp; life is not safe for a day and the utmost excitement prevails at every camp.”

  The story reached San Francisco, where it grew the more. “Joaquin was born in the Villa de Catoce, in the department of Jalisco,” asserted The Whig. “He is aged about 35 years, and has ranked among the most crafty and daring guerrillas of Mexico. He is chief of a notorious band of robbers now infesting the vicinity of Mexico, and though living in California, has a regular chain of communication with his associates in his native country. He has been known to enter the capital cities disguised as a friar—has been arrested several times, but through the expertness and influence he wielded among the soldiery, he has been discharged. He is about six feet in height, and of immense muscular strength; is well versed in the use of arms, and in disposition cruel and sanguinary.” Most of this was wrong, but no one except Joaquín could disprove it, and he had no incentive to do so.

  Soon Joaquín Murrieta began popping up everywhere. He was sighted on the Salinas River, and then suddenly as far away as San Diego. Reasonable persons concluded that he couldn’t have committed all the crimes laid to his account; unreasonable persons said he had almost superhuman powers, to travel that far that fast. He was impervious to gunfire. “When shot at, he receives the balls in the breast with a complacent smile,” a gold-country paper reported. “It has been a matter of surprise to his pursuers that the balls fired at him have no effect.” This writer was too practical to give Murrieta special powers. The bandit simply cheated. “We learn from a gentleman who shot from a short distance that he wears a coat of mail beneath his clothes. To what base use has the armor of the days of chivalry come!”

  The news coverage forced local officials to order a manhunt, which made the story even better. “I have been engaged a week in hunting Mr. Joaquin and his party,” the posse leader reported. “And we had a right lively time of it after the greasers. We followed them all over the country, and, while we were on their trail, they killed and wounded 15 Chinamen and stole seven or eight thousand dollars. We got one or two chances at them, but they were so well mounted that they beat us running all to hell.”

  The state legislature stepped in. The assembly appropriated funds to create a ranger squadron modeled on the Texas Rangers and headed by Harry Love, a former Ranger captain. Love mustered a company of frontier lawmen, guns-for-hire and Indian fighters. The governor of California placed a bounty of one thousand dollars on Murrieta’s head.

  Love and the California Rangers chased Murrieta across gold country. They captured one of his brothers-in-law. “He says he will take and show us to Joaquin if we will release him,” Love reported. “I will try him a while to see what it will end in.”

  Love’s Rangers, with the help of the prisoner—who likely inferred, not improbably, that he would meet a bad end if he did not betray his kinsman—tracked Murrieta’s gang to a wooded camp. The Rangers charged, and one of the officers spied the leader. “This is Joaquin, boys,” he shouted. “We have got him at last.”

  Not quite, as a correspondent who got the story from the Rangers recounted. “At the mention of the word Joaquín, seeing that he was recognized, the Mexicans threw off their cloaks and serapes and commenced firing and retreating. Joaquín, himself, was unarmed, having evidently just been awakened from a sound sleep, and in his hurry to get his horse forgot his weapons. However, he made a bold dash for the animal, jumped upon him unsaddled, hastily threw his lariat over the animal’s nose and leaped down off the bluff, 14 or 15 feet in height, into the dry bed of the creek. One of the rangers followed him immediately down the bank and another down the side of the creek to cut him off. They had fired at him several times but without effect, and seeing that there was a danger of his escaping, they aimed at the animal and succeeded in bringing him down. Joaquin then commenced running, and had gone some thirty yards when he received two shots, and as he was falling cried No tire mas, yo soy muerte—Don’t shoot any more, for I’m dead. He immediately expired.”

  Harry Love was a professional man-hunter. To reassure the citizens of California that he had got Murrieta, and to make certain he and his men received the bounty, he cut off Murrieta’s head. Lacking a better preservative, he soaked it in a jar of whiskey.

  The head persuaded the governor to pay up. And it convinced the papers that Joaquín Murrieta had met his end. Crime in the gold country didn’t cease, but it was ascribed to lesser mortals. Murrieta began to appear in dime novels that cast him as the Robin Hood of El Dorado.

  His pickled head became a curio in itself. To the soberly law-abiding, it was a symbol of justice vindicated. To Mexicans it represented a martyred hero. The last of Joaquín Murrieta
finally rested in a San Francisco museum, where it gathered dust until the 1906 earthquake and fire, after which it was never seen again.

  31

  WHERE CAN WE GO?

  OF THOSE THRUST TO THE MARGINS BY THE FLOOD OF Americans to California, none lost more than the Indians. The indigenous population of California had fallen by half during some eighty years of Spanish and Mexican rule, chiefly as a result of infectious disease. But the population appears to have stabilized, with the remaining 150,000 or so Indians finding an equilibrium with the much smaller number of European-descended friars, soldiers, civilian officials and settlers. Some of the Indian tribes lived in close proximity and contact with the Europeans; others remained aloof and largely untouched by white ways. Some tribes were comparatively peaceful; others more aggressive.

  Things changed with the discovery of gold. The changes weren’t all for the worse, at least not immediately. As elsewhere, native peoples adopted some elements of the new regime even as they resisted others. Gold wasn’t unknown to the Indians of California, but they had never much valued it. Once they learned that white people did value it, and would trade useful items like guns, knives, steel pots and blankets for it, some of them joined the ranks of the miners. The first placer miners encountered by Vicente Pérez Rosales, the Chilean argonaut, were Indians, who often worked as families. “The system they employed for washing the earth was the same as that still used by our panners of gold, but more methodical,” Pérez Rosales recalled. “With sticks hardened in the fire, or an occasional worn-out tool of civilization, the men dug until they came to the circa, one of the strata most largely composed of sand and of the heavy bodies deposited in the valleys by the water that drains into them. This sand the children loaded into tightly woven grass baskets and carried to the banks of the stream where a row of women with fine trays of the same material washed it, wrapping the gold in small packages to the value of about two Spanish gold pieces, for use in trading.”

  Indian participation in the mining process didn’t last. Most of the immigrants had traveled thousands of miles to lay hands on California’s gold, and many hardly thought twice about pushing the indigenous peoples aside. News of the gold discovery reached Oregon not long after the Whitman massacre; Oregon’s males weighed their options: to stay in Oregon and avenge the killings, or go to California and claim their share of the nation’s sudden fortune. Some decided to do both, traveling to California and then taking out their anger on the Indians they encountered there. The Oregonians acquired a reputation as Indian killers. A San Francisco newspaper, the Daily Alta California, explained how their “insatiated search for revenge” for the Whitmans had been visited upon even the most friendly tribes. “Their trail was marked with Indian blood,” the paper said. It went on to assert that the Oregonians’ attacks had started a cycle of violence. “The ire of the savages was stirred, and ‘Indian outrages’ alarmed the quiet diggers on the American River.… Here may be dated the commencement of disturbances between our people in the Placer and the Indian tribes of the North.”

  The San Francisco paper was too quick to blame the Oregonians for Indian troubles. The Oregonians simply happened to be the first Americans on the scene. Nearly every group of Americans treated the Indians with violence, which grew worse as the immigrant tide swelled. As with the Oregonians, attack begot reprisal, which triggered renewed attacks and additional reprisals. Before long the immigrants felt themselves as aggrieved as the Indians did.

  In such a context it was no surprise that elected officials became some of the most ardent advocates of harsh Indian policies. Peter Burnett, after arriving in Oregon with the emigrant train of 1843, had ventured into politics and won election to the provisional government. Yet his career didn’t advance swiftly enough to suit him, and on hearing of the gold discovery, he uprooted his family once more and trekked south. He dove into California politics and surfaced, in late 1849, as the first governor elected under the constitution Congress hadn’t yet approved. Burnett kept his ear to the ground and a wetted finger in the air, and he retained his post when the constitution did take effect, in September 1850.

  Burnett pronounced on the Indian question in terms that were chilling but not unlike those long heard on the frontier. He declared that the two races could never coexist; too great a gulf divided them. “The white man, to whom time is money, and who labors hard all day to create the comforts of life, cannot sit up all night to watch his property,” Burnett said. “And after being robbed a few times, he becomes desperate, and resolves upon a war of extermination. That is the common feeling of our people who have lived upon the Indian frontier. The two races are kept asunder by so many causes, and having no ties of marriage or consanguinity to unite them, they must ever remain at enmity.” Burnett thought the question transcended individual decision. “That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races, until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.”

  Burnett’s war of extermination took guerrilla form, primarily. In hundreds of incidents, thousands of Indians were killed, on the slightest provocation or no provocation at all. Hubert Howe Bancroft, an Ohio native who arrived in California the year after Burnett’s declaration of war, and who would become California’s leading historian, caustically summarized what followed the declaration and why: “The savages were in the way; the miners and settlers were arrogant and impatient; there were no missionaries or others present with even the poor pretense of soul-saving or civilizing. It was one of the last human hunts of civilization, and the basest and most brutal of them all.”

  YET NOT ALL THE WHITES WERE KILLERS, AND NOT ALL THE Indians merely victims. James Savage was a trader with the Indians of the central Sierra Nevada. “He is a man of about 28 years of age, rather small but very muscular and extremely active,” wrote Robert Eccleston, who had taken up a claim on the Mariposa near the Frémonts’ place. “His features are regular, and his hair light brown, which hangs in a negligé manner over his shoulders. He, however, generally wears it tied up. His skin is dark tanned by the exposure to the sun. He has, I believe, 33 wives among the mountain females of California, five or six only, however, of which are now living with him. They are from the ages of 10 to 22 and are generally sprightly young squaws. They are dressed neatly, their white chemise with low neck and short sleeves, to which is appended either a red or blue skirt. They are mostly low in stature and not unhandsome.”

  Savage’s wives were evidence of more than his charm. As the gold rush commenced, he enlisted Indians to pan for gold, and he established a series of trading posts in the Mariposa region. He treated the Indians fairly, by the evidence of their willingness to work for him and the business they brought to his posts—business that was sometimes secured by wives, as deal-closers or guarantors of fulfillment.

  His wives also served as early warners of dissatisfaction among the tribes. The Yosemite Indians—the name translated as “grizzly bear” and signaled their fierceness—were planning a war against the whites, one of his wives told him. Savage sought out the leaders of the nearby tribes and urged them not to join any war. The whites were too many, and they were vindictive; they would respond to any attack with overwhelming force and would crush the Indians.

  One of the chiefs present at this parley scoffed. José Juarez, as he was called, declared that the whites wouldn’t fight. They were too busy grubbing for gold. Yes, there were many whites at San Francisco. He had seen them there. And they had big ships with guns. But the ships couldn’t come into the mountains.

  José Juarez called for war at once. The numbers of whites were growing; they must be defeated and driven from the mountains now, before it was too late. All the tribes must band together.

  José Rey, another chief, said his people would join. Not only would they save their country, they would seize the trade goods, gold and other property of
the whites. The first to fight would win the most.

  James Savage was dismayed, and he left the meeting fearing the worst. The next thing he heard was that the Indians of the region, conspicuously including the women and children, had disappeared into the mountains. This was ominous: the battlefield was being cleared of noncombatants.

  Still Savage hoped to prevent the war. He gathered a small group of men and rode into the mountains to find the Indians. Their approach alerted the Indians, who warned him not to come close. He halted and shouted across a ravine that separated his men from the Indian camp. Adam Johnston, one of the men with Savage, later recounted the exchange. “Savage said to them it would be better for them to return to their village—that with very little labor daily, they could procure sufficient gold to purchase them clothing and food,” Johnston said. “To this the chief replied it was a hard way to get a living, that they could more easily supply their wants by stealing from the whites. He also said to Savage he must not deceive the whites by telling them lies, he must not tell them that the Indians were friendly; they were not, but on the contrary were their deadly enemies, and that they intended killing and plundering them so long as a white face was seen in the country.”

  More discouraged than ever, Savage retreated from the mountains, and discovered that the war had begun, with an Indian attack on a mining camp on the Fresno River. “We reached the camp on the Fresno a short time after daylight,” Adam Johnston recalled. “It presented a horrid scene of savage cruelty. The Indians had destroyed everything they could not use or carry with them. The store was stripped of blankets, clothing, flour, and everything of value; the safe was broken open and rifled of its contents; the cattle, horses, and mules had been run into the mountains; the murdered men had been stripped of their clothing, and lay before us filled with arrows; one of them had yet twenty perfect arrows sticking in him.”