Murieta, Joaquín

▪ American bandit

baptized 1830, Alamos, Sonora, Mex.?

died 1853, California, U.S.?

      legendary bandit who became a hero of the Mexican-Americans in California. Facts of his life are few and elusive, and some historians consider him a mythic figure.

      A Joaquín Murieta was recorded as baptized in Sonora, Mex., in 1830; while still a teenager, he married and migrated with his wife to California (1848). In the Gold Rush he tried prospecting, as did thousands of other immigrant Sonorans. The Yankee miners pressed the legislature in Sacramento in 1850 to pass the Greaser Act (its official title) and the Foreign Miners Act in an attempt to drive out the Mexicans. According to legend, Murieta—or several “Murietas”—responded by leading bands of outlaws that raided up and down the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys, robbing gold miners and holding up stages. The governor offered rewards for his capture, dead or alive, and in June 1853 a visiting Texas Ranger, Harry Love, brought in the head of a Mexican preserved in a jar, claiming it to be that of Murieta. Although the raids did end, rumours persisted that Murieta lived on—returning, by one account, to Sonora, where in the late 1870s he died and was buried in a Jesuit cemetery in the village of Cucurpe.

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