by H. W. Brands
Yet Vallejo saw farther than most of his fellow Californians. Frémont, Vallejo judged, embodied the inevitable, whether Californians wished to admit it or not. At a time when most Californians swore resistance to yanqui expansionism, Vallejo took the astonishing step of advocating attachment to the United States. The United States, he said, represented the future of North America, and America’s institutions represented the best guarantee of the future of California. “When we join our fortunes to hers, we shall not become subjects but fellow citizens, possessing all the rights of the people of the United States,” Vallejo declared. “We shall have a stable government and just laws. California will grow strong and flourish, and her people will be prosperous, happy, and free. Look not, therefore, with jealousy upon the hardy pioneers who scale our mountains and cultivate our unoccupied plains; but rather welcome them as brothers, who come to share with us a common destiny.”
The problem was that the Americans didn’t act like brothers. At the outbreak of the Bear Flag revolt the rebels attacked Sonoma, the seat of Vallejo’s empire. They caught Don Mariano by surprise, rolling him out of bed at gunpoint and taking him prisoner. The flag of Mexico was torn from its staff above Vallejo’s hacienda; the Bear Flag was raised in its place.
The rebels then delivered Vallejo to Frémont, who transported him to Sutter’s Fort, where Frémont ordered Sutter to imprison him. This turn of events didn’t improve Vallejo’s opinion of Sutter, but he placed the primary blame on Frémont. “In spite of the fact that he was wearing the honorable uniform of an officer in the American army,” Vallejo recalled afterward, “he had no compunction about stooping to the extreme of associating himself with those robbers who on June 14th assaulted and robbed the peaceful residents of the Sonoma frontier.”
To the ignominy of arrest was now added the discomfort of detention. Vallejo stifled in the small cell he shared with three others, including his brother Salvador. For six weeks Vallejo sweltered—and alternately shivered, from the malarial fever his imprisonment brought on. Such news as filtered into his cell made him fear the worst regarding the situation at Sonoma, for when rebels ruled, the property of the law-abiding was forfeit. Beyond the fear and the fever was Vallejo’s mortification at having encouraged California’s attachment to the land of these brigands and dishonorable officers.
Eventually Vallejo was released—significantly, on the order of Robert Stockton rather than Frémont, who had departed south in pursuit of glory. Vallejo emerged from his cell, blinking in the light and shaking from disease, to discover that the rebel-robbers had indeed continued their depredations during his imprisonment. “I left Sacramento half dead and arrived here almost without life,” he wrote from Sonoma. “I have lost more than one thousand live horned cattle, six hundred tame horses and many other things of value which were taken from my house here and at Petaluma. My wheat crops are entirely lost.” Tallying up additional damage, and reflecting on how the marauding made his American sympathies seem foolishly naïve, he reiterated, “All is lost.”
In fact, Vallejo had much more to lose. The discovery of gold brought an army of invaders who showed no more respect for Vallejo’s holdings than for Sutter’s. “The good ones were few and the wicked many,” Vallejo remarked. Even so, he might have held on to what was left of his empire, if only because Sonoma was farther from the mines than New Helvetia. But what he couldn’t fend off was “the great crowd of shyster lawyers,” as he put it, who came after the argonauts and immediately “set out to find means of depriving the Californians of their estates and property.” Likening the lawyers to the notorious Sydney Ducks, Vallejo declared, “The bandits from Australia stole our cattle and horses, but these thieves in frock coats, wrapped about with the mantle of the law, took away our lands and buildings and, with no scruple whatsoever, enthroned themselves as powerful monarchs in our houses.”
Vallejo sought, through participation in the new government of California, to limit the damage. As a delegate to the Monterey convention he impressed his fellow delegates with his seriousness and grasp of the issues, and his understanding of those aspects of American history that touched on property rights. “He is better acquainted with our institutions and laws than any other native Californian,” Bayard Taylor reported. (Vallejo also brought to the convention a sly sense of humor. When the delegates considered putting a bear on the state seal, in memory of the Bear Flag revolt, Vallejo, with different memories of that period, offered an amendment proposing that if a bear must grace the seal, “it be represented as made fast by a lazo in the hands of a vaquero.” Vallejo’s amendment got 16 votes— mostly from other Californians—out of 37 cast.)
Vallejo threw himself into the politics of the new state. Elected a state senator, he worked to bring the capital to a site on the Carquinez Straits, a town he wished to call Eureka but which his friends insisted on calling Vallejo. He donated 150 acres and pledged $500,000 toward the construction of public buildings, including a capitol, a governor’s mansion, a university, and an insane asylum. Construction began, and the lawmakers arrived. But they found the virgin town to be insufficiently entertaining, and when the fleshpots of Sacramento beckoned, they moved there, leaving Vallejo the town forlorn and Vallejo the man wiser and $100,000 poorer.
As a patrón of the old regime, Vallejo had been accustomed to lavishing generosity on family, friends, and protégés. He continued to do so even after the Gold Rush drove prices to ten times what they had been before. He spoiled his children, of whom he had a large but indeterminate number (counting, or rather estimating, his illegitimate offspring). When he bought a silver-studded saddle for himself, for $2,000, he bought a similar, smaller version for his son Napoleon, for $1,500. He loaned money on the unsecured promises of borrowers, considering collateral beneath him. When his own cash grew short, he borrowed against his land.
As long as the prices he received for his cattle and crops stayed high, he continued to prosper. But when prices subsequently fell—when the supply of food and other provisions started to catch up with the gold- driven demand—Vallejo found himself short. His mortgages came due, and the property behind them had to be sold. Piece by piece his empire was dismantled.
The greater disaster, however, occurred in the courts. Congress and the American legal system, acting at the behest of those “shyster lawyers,” redefined the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to place the burden of proving land ownership on the Californians. Vallejo spent tens of thousands of dollars defending his titles in various lower courts, with diminishing success. The coup de grâce came in 1862 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him regarding the most important of his remaining properties, leaving him with large debts and a small fraction of his former assets.
Vallejo had braced himself for this outcome. “I think I will know how to be decently poor when the time comes,” he said, “just as I have known how to be rich.”
VALLEJO’S SAD EXPERIENCE was peculiar among the native Californians in the size of the fortune he had to lose, but it was not unique in kind. Within a decade of the gold discovery, the Californians were pushed to the margins of society in the land of their birth. The ten or twelve thousand Californians suffered no important decline in absolute numbers—certainly nothing like the destruction of the Indians—but, overwhelmed as they were by the influx of Americans, they lost political power, and with it, in many cases, property.
Explaining why the Californians became marginalized is more difficult than merely observing that they did. As Vallejo’s experience demonstrated, their inability to assimilate wasn’t due to a lack of trying—if anything, he was more American than many of the Americans. In Vallejo’s case, as doubtless in others, some of the inability owed to a failure to master the commodification of life the Gold Rush wrought. In this regard, Vallejo was the same sort of casualty as John Sutter.
But the Californians labored under an additional difficulty: racism on the part of the American newcomers. This surprised some of the Californians, who considered themsel
ves as European as Jean-Nicolas Perlot. Salvador Vallejo, who shared his brother Mariano’s cell at Sutter’s Fort, grew livid every day when the American who had custody of them came around and said, “Let me see if my greasers are safe.” Salvador cursed the man— whom he called a “mulatto” and a “Pike county blackguard”—for defaming two gentlemen of the “purest blood of Europe.” But surprising or not, discrimination on grounds of perceived racial difference was a fact of life in California, as it was in most of America at this time. California Anglos generally considered men and women of Hispanic background to be more or less inferior, and they made few distinctions among those they called “greasers” or—as Vicente Pérez Rosales’s friend álvarez discovered— “niggers.”
Most of the victims of Anglo racism—including Pérez Rosales—responded the way victims of bigotry generally do: by trying to ignore it and getting on with their lives. A much smaller number adopted a violent recourse, taking up arms in their own defense. One responded so violently as to become a legend in the goldfields and a myth in much of the Spanish- American world.
Separating myth and legend from fact in history is never easy; in the case of Joaquín Murrieta it is complicated by the conflicting hearsay and other secondhand testimony that constitutes almost the entire record of his brief and violent life. Some historians have thrown up their hands and suggested he never existed at all; others contend that he was a pastiche of several individuals, a composite created by Anglos to bear the sins of Mexicans generally.
Yet the best evidence indicates that there really was a Joaquín Murrieta, and that he was born in Sonora around 1830. He came to California in 1848 or 1849, in the same migration of Sonorans that brought the first miners to Frémont’s Mariposa estate. Whether he actually worked on Frémont’s property is unclear, but unlike those Sonorans who headed back south in 1849, Joaquín stayed.
Why he turned to crime is equally unclear. A popular version of the Murrieta legend holds that Anglos raped his wife, murdered his brother, and horsewhipped Joaquín himself, thereby driving this heretofore peaceable soul to seek vengeance. (In the extreme version of the legend, Joaquín took pains to avenge himself only on those persons responsible for the assault on his wife and the murder of his brother.) How much of this is true is impossible to tell; but whatever personal insults he suffered, Murrieta doubtless felt the same sense of injury many of his countrymen did. Most Mexicans believed—as did some of those Americans not beguiled by the mystique of Manifest Destiny—that California had been stolen from Mexico, and therefore that Mexican miners had every right to the gold they discovered in California. When American miners treated the Mexicans as interlopers, and when the California legislature in 1850 passed a foreign- miners’ tax, many of the Mexicans understandably felt aggrieved.
Yet even if there was a real Joaquín Murrieta, it is by no means certain he was responsible for everything attributed to him. Robberies and other violent crimes were epidemic in the mining districts, where men carried fortunes, very large by the standards of most frontier regions, on their persons; where the multiethnic and multiracial composition of the populace inhibited any general sense of fellow feeling; where a large majority of the populace was young, male, single, and uninterested in settling there permanently; and where those young, single, unsettled males were too busy seeking their own fortunes to have time to create the regular institutions of social order. But a hungry winter in the southern mines (in the same region where Jean-Nicolas Perlot encountered the hundreds of graves of starved miners) helped provoke an outbreak of armed theft and associated violence in January 1853 that was unusual even by the anarchic standards of the gold country. Many Mexicans made a partial living rounding up and selling wild horses; whenever horses went missing it was easy for Anglos to blame the Mexicans. When other items went missing, it was easy to blame the Mexicans as well. Joaquín Murrieta provided a name and an identity on which to hang many crimes that winter.
The crime wave was thoroughly covered by the newspapers of Calaveras and Mariposa Counties and the surrounding region. “For some time back, a band of robbers have been committing depredations in the southern section of our county,” a Calaveras weekly declared in January. The principal victims had been Chinese; the perpetrators appeared to be Mexicans. “During the week a party of three Mexicans entered a Chinese tent at Yackee [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.” The article went on, “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 Akop [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 paper summarized “the dreadful murders and outrages committed in the lonely gulches and solitary outposts” of the county, and put a name on the chief perpetrator. “The band is led by a robber, named Joaquín, a very desperate man, who was concerned in the murder of four Americans, some time ago, at Turnersville.”
The violence continued during the following weeks. “We publish today the details of fourteen horrible murders, all committed within seven days, in Calaveras county,” explained a shocked editor on February 16. “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.” A San Francisco paper, the Whig, supplied a biography of the reported brigand leader.
Joaquín was born in the Villa de Catoce, in the department of Jalisco. 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. He has a dark, sallow complexion, and during the Mexican war was known to wear a coat of armor. He has committed numberless murders, has burned many ranches, and has resided in San Francisco. He has frequently obtained information of Mexicans leaving California with money, who have been dogged and robbed by detached portions of his band. In some instances they have been robbed upon their arrival at Mexico—the news of their departures and the sums of money they had about them, having been forwarded by means of the associates living along the road.
That such details of Joaquín’s background and activities were at this point almost entirely conjectural didn’t diminish the alarm the undeniable violence aroused in the populace of the mining regions. And not only there: Joaquín was said to have been sighted along the Salinas River and as far south as San Diego. Almost needless to say—but only almost, as the opposite enjoyed credence at the time—no one person could have committed all the crimes attributed to Joaquín, or been everywhere he was said to have been. Yet it was human nature (besides making good copy for the papers) to personalize the crime wave, laying responsibility on a single mastermind, the more lurid and bloodthirsty the better. Imaginative drawings of Joaquín—swarthy, armed to the teeth, but handsome in a piratical sort of way—began circulating, along with elaborations of his great strength and his imperviousness to capture. “When shot at,” the Calaveras Chronicle explained, “he receives the balls in the breast with a complacent smile. It has been a matter of surprise to his pursuers that the balls fired at him have no effect. 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!”
Predictably, a hue and cry arose for the capture of the bandit chieftain. A posse was formed at Mokelumne Hill, and set out on the trail. But they had no luck. “I have been engaged a week in hunting Mr. Joaquín and his party,” the posse leader reported on their return, “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.”
By now Joaquín’s reputation had spread across the state, and his capture became a political priority. Legislators from Mariposa County convinced their colleagues in the state assembly that a general manhunt was required. An outfit of rangers, modeled on the Texas Rangers, was commissioned, and Harry Love, a veteran of the Texas border, was appointed first captain. Love hired several assistants—a mix of Indian fighters, frontier lawmen, and gunslingers—at $350 per month, and raised a company of men. To give the Rangers an added incentive, Governor Bigler placed a bounty of $1,000 on Joaquín’s head.
Love and the California Rangers chased Joaquín across the Mother Lode country; when they heard that the bandits had escaped toward the west, Love and the Rangers followed them there. At San Jose they surprised and captured a man thought to be one of Joaquín’s accomplices. As Love explained to Governor Bigler, “I have arrested a Mexican, Jesus, a brother in law of Joaquín’s. He says he will take & show us to Joaquín if we will release him. I will try him a while to see what it will end in.” The kind of encouragement to cooperation the prisoner received is unknown; considering the background of Love and the Rangers, he might reasonably have believed they would kill him.
