Joaquin Murrietta
1830 - 1853
Joaquin Murrietta, California bandit, was perhaps our first fast-draw
artist, although he used the old model French cap-and-ball large bore
pistol which he wore for quick use in his sash.
This swarthy Mexican came to California when he was not yet twenty years of
age, and with him he brought along a pretty wife, Antonia Molinera, who
was raped by the miners of the Mother Lode country while Joaquin was
away at work dealing monte in one of the saloons. This criminal act
almost drove Joaquin out of his mind and started him on a career of
gunslinging robbery which has never been equaled. His small '49
gold claim was forgotten in Stanislaus as he took to nursing his
bitterness by small holdups of individual miners and then larger
ones. He became implicated in horse stealing and was beaten with
a thonged bullwhip. The bleeding Joaquin became a gringo-hater
from that moment on.
He
organized a band of desperadoes, and each man had to be fast and deadly
with a gun, and his wife was dressed as a man and also trained to slip
a weapon speedily from its sash and shoot to kill with a single
shot. With some 80 men at his back, the gunfighting Mexican
swooped down upon stage coaches to rob and loot them and called to a
halt lone riders from whom he took all goods nd left them afoot.
He robbed for gold and dust, up and down the mining camps of the High
Sierra, and to add to his already growing fame, he tied China men
together by their queues, made them dance to the tune of a pistol, then
shot their eyes out.
It
is said that Joaquin lured a Sacramento River schooner to the beach to
take his band aboard. In the lonely reaches of the river where
they boarded it, they killed and made off with more than twenty
thousand dollars in gold and dust. On another occasion, Joaquin
offered a thousand dollars for his own capture and arrest and then told
the sheriff who he was and killed him Again, he is said to have
stolen 50 fine-blooded horses from the estate of the old California
governor and run them off into Mexico.
The
end came when Captain Harry Love, a noted Los Angeles gunfighter, with
20 men, rode down upon the bandit, surprising him at a campfire near
Lake Tulare. His head was severed and carried back by Billy
Henderson to the sheriff's office, where it was auctioned off and sold
for thirty-five dollars.
Dr. Allan Thomson, once the doctor of Jack London, saw Murrietta's head in
a large jar of alcohol in the old Gordon Museum on Market Street, in
San Francisco, and the sum of twenty-five cents gained him
admission. Dr Thomson tells us that Joaquin was a swarthy
Mexican, "about like Mr. McCarty has painted him", and that the place
was crowded with visitors. "The earth quake of 1906 rocked the
jar from its foundation and the head of Murrietta was lost forever."
Calamity Jane | Clay Allison | Curly Bill | Dave Mather
Doc Holliday | Jesse James | Jim Courtright | Joaquin Murrietta
John Ringo | John Wesley Hardin | King Fisher | Luke Short
Old Man Clanton | Pat Garrett | Wild Bill Hickok | Wyatt Earp
OK Corral | Artist - Lea Franklin McCarty