The Age of Gold (47 page)

But the Californians labored under an additional difficulty: racism on the part of the American newcomers. This surprised some of the Californians, who considered themselves 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.