Original subtitles

The West has always been America's fabled Promised Land,

a place where ordinary people dreamed of carving their destiny

on land of their own.

In the first half of the 19th century,

settlers seeking that dream

fuelled a violent clash with Native nations

protecting their way of life.

Then in 1848, California offers up a new kind of dream:

the chance to get rich without land, by finding gold.

New migrants flock west from every corner of the country

and globe, but in this lawless land, for every man making a buck

there are three men bent on stealing it.

That's doubly true for Mexican outlaw

Joaquin Murrieta. He came to California

seeking a fortune, and found his calling

as a common criminal.

His life and death forged a legend

inspiring fictional heroes like Zorro and Django.

His story begins with a fleck of gold.

People live on myths, and the myths that really stick

in American experience are those of the West.

The mountains were taller. The deserts were harsher.

The snows were deeper.

The American West conjures wonder, possibility, opportunity.

The figure of the mountain man.

Notorious outlaws. - The cowboy.

The discovery of gold in California.

This train of wagons trailing across the prairie.

Everybody has a reason for wanting this land.

But most of that land was already occupied.

We have been residents for more than 10,000 years.

This is a clash of two different ways of seeing life itself.

Fighting for the future of your homeland on the one side...

...and fighting for the destiny of the New Republic on the other.

The history of the West is a creation story.

It's the creation of what we think of as modern America.

The West is a place where anything is possible.

It is the essence of the American Dream.

The core of this is, what are we to be as a nation?

The reckoning is coming.

The West is this canvas on which American dreams

become larger than life.

From the earliest days of independence,

the United States has been looking West.

By the mid-1840s, thousands of Americans have crossed the Rockies

and settled in Oregon country,

giving the nation a foothold on the Pacific.

And in 1845, newly elected President James Polk has his sights

set on securing the West Coast.

That same year, the press coins a phrase

that captures the spirit of the age: 'manifest destiny.'

When you take that phrase apart, 'manifest destiny,'

it's saying on the one hand, 'destiny,' this is inevitable,

cos these are a superior people moving into this country,

and 'manifest, that it's just obvious.

Anyone who looks at this will see

the inferiority of those whom they are conquering.

That's the way it was seen.

That's how American expansion was justified.

James K Polk made a pledge, that if he's President

he was going to resolve our border issues both in the Pacific Northwest

and on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Within a year of Polk's election,

the U.S. turns the Republic of Texas into its 28th state.

Mexico is powerless to stop its former province

from joining the Union, and Polk wants more.

The motivation for the U.S. behind the Mexican War

primarily is this desire to fulfil manifest destiny.

They had their eye on this territory for a long time,

and they were intent on taking it by any means necessary.

The Mexican-American War is a naked land grab.

It's caused by the demand for more land.

The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo ends the Mexican-American War,

and formally cedes what is a third or more of Northern Mexico

to the United States. In 1848,

the United States gains an additional 525,000 square miles

of territory, land that will eventually be known

as Utah, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and New Mexico.

But the greatest prize is California.

California has great natural ports in Monterey

and in San Francisco, and near San Diego.

America wants very much to have a trade with Asia,

and so there is a huge desire to have that access to the Pacific.

The people who negotiated and signed the treaty had no idea

that California all of a sudden was worth

a whole lot more than anybody had known.

At the time the treaty was signed, gold had already been discovered

in California, but the news hadn't gone to Mexico City.

The discovery of gold in California

happened within 200 hours of the signing

of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. In other words,

at the very moment that we acquired the far West,

it began to be revealed that this was the richest place on Earth.

Individuals use that as somehow the justification

or the proof that that is exactly what God intended,

that God intended this land for you,

and then God rewards us with gold.

At the time, telegraph lines and railroad tracks

have not even crossed the Mississippi River,

and news of the gold strike spreads by word of mouth,

first to nearby Oregon, then by ships

to ports in Mexico, Peru, Chile,

and China before finally reaching the East Coast.

Gold was discovered in Sacramento in 1848,

but they really didn't get there until 1849.

Why they're called the 49ers instead of the 48ers.

And there were only really two ways you could get to California:

sea passage, if you had money for the sea passage,

the other way, to go overland through the mountain passes,

incredibly arduous journeys either way, but still they came.

That siren call of, "Gold, gold, gold,"

rang through the newspapers, and they came in thousands.

Thousands of Americans

who once longed for their own piece of land to farm

now swap their ploughs for gold pans and blaze a trail to California.

The gold rush fundamentally alters the American Dream. There are

sudden stories about people striking it rich,

and in a day's work gaining a fortune

that would've been, in other cases, years of labour.

And then that just causes an explosion of immigration.

So in 1848, you have about 1,000 white people

living in what is the state of California.

Within two years, you have 100,000.

Within another year, you have over 200,000.

California was once home to around 300,000 Indigenous people.

Then in the 1540s,

the Spanish came looking for the legendary City of Gold,

known as El Dorado.

They did not find it, but in the late 1700s

they built a string of religious missions,

enslaved the local Indians, and forced them

to convert to Catholicism.

Disease wiped out thousands of Natives.

By the time Mexico gains its independence in 1821,

California has lost almost half of its indigenous population,

and now even Mexicans are rapidly being outnumbered

by the 49ers, white Americans from the East

ready to take the land.

The irony for the Mexicans who are there,

for the people who occupy those lands,

is that they're now deemed foreigners. White Americans believed

tha as they won the war,

they're entitled to this gold. - A habit of the American frontier

is that people arrive before the law gets there.

So there are disputes about land.

And there are no rules. People stake claims,

but that's just them saying, "This is my spot."

If you think there's a miner that's doing better than you,

and if that happens to be a Chinese, Mexican, or other,

there's no-one stopping you,

if you have more might, if you have more firepower,

you have more men, to take that claim.

And if there's resistance, there's violence.

Under Mexican rule,

California was a distant northern province

beyond government control. Even in U.S. hands,

it's still not a state. There's no Constitution, no courts,

and no police.

Gangs run rampant in this lawless land.

Newspapers inflame readers with tales of bandits and murderers:

the most famous of all,

a Mexican gang leader who goes by the name of Joaquin.

There's this murky region in between,

where fact, historical documentation,

meets the legend. There was a person named Joaquin Murrieta

that people have identified. We do know he's born around 1830

in a small town in Sonora, Mexico.

Joaquin Murrieta is one of many thousands of Mexican miners

in Northern California trying to make a go of it

like everybody else, panning for gold, digging for gold,

and he enjoys some success.

Some accounts suggest Joaquin was pushed off his land

by American settlers.

Forced to give up mining gold, Murrieta turns to stealing it.

In the state of California at this time in 1852,

there are reports that there's a bandit named Joaquin

on a murderous path, robbing people, stealing horses,

killing people in the gold fields.

You begin to see all these stories circulating

in the newspapers about various bandits,

which they begin to attach the name Joaquin to.

One event in late 1852 cements his reputation

as the most feared outlaw in gold rush California.

Joshua Bean is a military veteran and eventually becomes

the mayor of San Diego. And when he retires from that,

he opens a saloon in a small town in Southern California.

One evening there's a brawl over a girl.

In the aftermath of that, Bean is walking home...

...when he's attacked by persons unknown...

... and killed.

The person behind these murders is a ghost,

a phantom who strikes in the night, and then someone offers testimony

that gives up the name Joaquin Murrieta.

"Joaquin Murrieta did it." Finally, the Phantom has a name.

In the late 1840s,

dreams of gold bring thousands to California.

Some come out to make money off this influx of miners,

others come to rob them outright.

As violent crimes run rampant,

the name Joaquin echoes through the gold fields.

When gold was discovered in California, it hadn't been

formally made into a territory. There was no government there

at that time. California applies

for statehood in 1849, but with the nation divided

over the future of slavery, a crisis ensues.

After the war with Mexico, there is new territory out West

that will have to be admitted to the Union eventually

as slave state or free.

The admission of California to the Union

would mean a free state. tipping the balance in Congress,

which Southern states could not accept.

Eventually, a deal is reached.

The Compromise of 1850 aimed to appease both North and South.

One of the key components of the Compromise of 1850 is,

let the territories decide as they apply to statehood

whether or not they're gonna be a free or enslaved state.

In exchange, the South gets a harsher Fugitive Slave Act.

The newly established territories of Utah and New Mexico

will decide on the issue of slavery themselves.

And California joins the Union as a free state.

But the new government can barely make an impact

on the widespread banditry.

California's a vast territory, so it's gonna take years

before California actually is able to unfold basic state government.

Trying to impose law and order,

like-minded settlers form armed posses

and call themselves Vigilance Committees.

In 1852, a vigilante group in Los Angeles

investigates the murder of Joshua Bean.

Taking the word of a former gang member,

they pin the crime on Mexican bandit Joaquin Murrieta.

But for most Californians,

he will continue to be known simply as Joaquin.

The Stockton newspaper, the Sacramento newspaper,

the Los Angeles newspaper are reporting stories of Joaquin.

It was sensationalised in the press at the time,

and because newspapers have to sell copies,

more lurid stories would come out. - Newspapers are reporting

all sorts of things attributed to Joaquin,

that he dresses in black, that he seems to be immune to gunfire.

And this leads to speculation that maybe

he's wearing a sort of chain mail. - "He's an outstanding horseman."

"He's a sharp shooter." "He'll knock you off a horse

at 50 paces."

Right as the California gold rush is happening,

what is really striking in American culture

is the rise of mass literacy.

We're beginning to get public schools. Many more people

can read than before. - This is also coinciding

with a newspaper boom in the United States

from just 200, 50 years before, to more than 2,000 by 1850.

This would not be possible

without the cheapening of the printing process. Suddenly

presses mass-produce material.

By early 1853, the press has tied the name Joaquin

to at least 20 murders.

Joaquin is striking out against the Yankee,

but he's also reportedly robbing the Chinese

and killing Chinese miners.

And in one case, Joaquin sets upon a Chinese camp.

Joaquin kills many of the Chinese miners...

... and takes $6,000-worth of gold dust from them.

Newspapers continue to add to the growing list of crimes

committed by Joaquin.

Some even speculate there may be more than one bandit by that name.

The coverage creates a climate of fear.

So the Anglo fear is of the Mexican bandit,

and the Mexican bandit is actually this image

that comes out of the war with Mexico.

There's a lot of guerilla resistance. And so

for a lot of anxious Anglos, any Mexican male could be Joaquin.

Every Mexican becomes a potential bandit.

California is a new state, and this reputation

for being a region rife with banditry, with murder,

is a big problem. They want thousands,

eventually millions of settlers, to come to build the economy,

and so there's a tremendous pressure on the California government

to solve this Joaquin problem. As panic grows,

California Governor John Bigler offers a quick solution:

a $1,000 reward. But for some, it's a call to arms,

and chaos follows.

All sorts of people are interested in acquiring this bounty,

but there's no real way to know who Joaquin is.

So Joaquin became somebody who served as a pretext

to arm vigilantes to roam the countryside and kill,

potentially threatening Spanish-speaking people.

For three months, vigilante squads

openly target Mexicans,

who, in their eyes, look suspicious, but the bounty goes unclaimed.

Anxious Californians demand further action.

When California is trying to figure out

how to deal with Joaquin, they look to Texas,

as Texas has recently created the Texas Rangers.

Originally formed to defend Americans in Texas

from the Comanche, the Rangers have expanded their responsibilities

and their range, venturing south of the border

during the Mexican-American War.

The Texas Rangers acquire a lot of fame

during the war with Mexico as this sort of anti-guerilla,

anti-bandit force. In May 1853,

Governor Bigler signs a bill creating the California Rangers.

Their goal: to find Joaquin.

But it's still unclear if Joaquin is a single bandit or many.

So the bill names five potential Joaquins

for the Rangers to apprehend.

So California copies this idea that we need a heavily armed

paramilitary organisation that is gonna impose order

where there is banditry, lawlessness. But their main tools

are violence, intimidation, and murder.

The Governor of California

sanctions the California Rangers to go after Joaquin

without due process.

He's basically empowered a death squad.

Throughout the spring of 1853,

Mexican outlaw Joaquin evades vigilantes,

even with a bounty on his head.

California Governor John Bigler

hopes that by establishing the state's first police force,

he can end the chase.

Our Republic is based on due process and the rule of law,

and yet on every frontier, extra-legal activity occurs.

And so the Governor of California creates the Rangers,

who are really just a group of people

willing to do the wet work for California

under a very slight patina of legality.

One man is chosen by popular demand

to lead the Rangers in their hunt:

an army veteran turned bounty hunter

with a reputation for killing fugitives

he's already captured. A man named Harry Love.

There is as much lore about Captain Harry Love

as there is Joaquin Murrieta in lots of ways.

In one description, he's half-man and half-alligator.

Harry Love had come to California looking for gold,

and ended up finding something else. What he found is that his ability

to kill other people was more lucrative

than his ability to find gold.

Harry Love had military background from the Mexican War.

He had been a Texas Ranger.

He's someone who could be trusted to hunt people down.

You don't mess with Harry. He'll kill you.

With Joaquin making national headlines,

Love sees a chance to get famous too, by killing him.

So he handpicks a posse of gunmen who are also ready to do

whatever it takes.

So Captain Harry Love assembles a group of about 20 Rangers.

These are young men, probably 20s and 30s.

We don't know a whole lot about them.

They were probably several of them, if not most of them, miners,

who didn't strike it rich as they had hoped,

and are looking for other things to make some money.

As hopeful immigrants

pour into the furthest edge of the nation,

gold is on the decline. For most Californians,

the rush is over.

By '52,

those early pickings of gold are gone, or depleted.

And every time the gold becomes harder to find,

it becomes more expensive to find. And then you have to develop

new technology for panning. And then eventually

there is what's called hydraulic mining:

they change the course of rivers, and erode cliff sides,

and then you mine that. And eventually they chase the gold

to the underground seams where it originates.

People who go out to California to mine gold

discover that they're just like coal miners in Pennsylvania,

and they're working for somebody else.

And in some ways, it's a microcosm of the Industrial Revolution

in America at about this time and a bit later.

What we see is this transition

from a situation of individual opportunity, you know,

that fellow down there with the pan, to one of big business,

of corporate power. It's the story, of course,

that we see, especially in the far West, unfolding

over and over again.

As gold becomes harder to find,

miners seek their fortunes elsewhere.

For the California Rangers in 1853,

killing Joaquin offers a much needed paycheque:

$150 a month for the hunt, $1,000 for the kill.

That's the equivalent of $40,000 today.

But Joaquin could be anywhere in the 160,000 square-mile state,

and the Rangers have just three months

to track him down.

So you have an elusive character.

Weeks and weeks and weeks, Love and his California Rangers,

they're asking people here, people there,

"Have there been any sightings of Joaquin?"

There are rumours that Joaquin is moving

between Sonora and California. - He could be hiding

in the mountains and disguising himself

in urban environments. - He appears out of nowhere.

He kills, then disappears as quickly.

It sounds at times as though he's in two places at once.

So there is a robbery and a murder over here,

a vengeance murder over here, but nobody could get

from here to there in that time. By July 1853,

the Rangers have spent two months hunting

without a trace of Joaquin.

Harry Love must have been getting very antsy.

The pressure is building. We have to apprehend

or kill this Joaquin.

Newspapers follow their pursuit,

and their sensational stories paint the Golden State

as a lawless land. But California is changing.

As Americans come with more than just dreams of gold,

they're here to build homes and start families.

Most who went to California went thinking that it was temporary.

They would go, make their fortune, come home.

But they looked around, and they said, "Well,

California's kind of a nice place."

In the 1850s, California is getting populated.

Places like San Francisco and San Diego were becoming cities.

They were destinations.

Letters and stories spread the allure of California

to cities back East, and a newly popularised technology

plays a vital role. Migrants are now sending back photographs

as proof of their prosperity.

Most of these people couldn't really even afford the suit

they wore when they had these photos taken,

but by sending a success photograph, kind of a selfie

back to Boston or to North Carolina, and your kin see that,

and they say, "See, he was right. We should follow him."

But for Native Americans across California,

the flood of settlers unleashes a nightmare.

The people most endangered by American rule

in California in the 1850s are Native peoples.

At the time of European arrival,

California was the most diverse and densely settled portion

of Native North America. It had over 100 different languages

and a diversity of indigenous peoples

that is hard to summarise.

In the two decades after this acquisition

by the United States, the Native population

reduced from about 150,000 to 20 or 30,000.

Their population plummeted due in part

to factors we could consider unintentional,

like the spread of diseases, to a terrible extent,

intentional practices of the U.S. state,

arming or at least enabling vigilantes

to kill Indigenous peoples.

For California gold rushers,

a plot of land is a potential jackpot.

For settlers, it's an opportunity, and both want the Native population

out of the way.

Migrants from nearby Oregon are among the first

to attack Native Californians, sometimes claiming revenge

for the killings of Christian missionaries

Marcus and Narcissa Whitman. But the new state government

soon takes the lead. Governor John Bigler even raises funds

to exterminate Native people.

The state is paying bounties, both sponsoring militias

and paying irregulars to kill Indians.

As violence becomes routine practice,

local militia and vigilante groups

are responsible for killing as many as 16,000 California Indians,

with the state spending around $80 million in today's money.

In hunting down Mexican outlaw Joaquin Murrieta,

Harry Love follows a well-trodden path

of state-sanctioned violence against non-Americans.

Newspapers and their readers are rooting for him,

but his time is running out.

Harry Love has a three-month deadline

to find this elusive, poorly described person.

As he gets closer and closer to that deadline,

there's tremendous pressure on Love to find Joaquin

and maybe even, in his mind, to get creative.

There were lots of Joaquins in the state of California,

Mexican-origin people.

If you put a bounty on the head of someone named Joaquin,

who is to say that the person you apprehend

is actually the person you say he is?

Just three weeks before his contract expires,

Love gets a lead.

Harry Love and his Rangers apparently find the brother-in-law

of Joaquin, and they make a deal with him.

"We won't arrest you or kill you if you tell us where Joaquin is."

He says they're in what is today Fresno County.

So Harry Love and the Rangers go there.

Love and his men come upon a group of Mexican-looking peoples

in an area called Arroyo de Cantua.

Love and the California Rangers have identified this encampment

where Mexicans have a number of horses,

and determine that some of the horses are stolen.

So in their minds, this is Joaquin and his bandits.

So it doesn't take much in that encounter, in that exchange,

to get heated and the guns drawn.

- Stop! - Hey, whoa!

Drop your weapons!

There's a shootout, and some of the bandits scatter.

And Joaquin almost makes his escape.

He's wounded.

And as they come to him in his dying moments,

he said, "Don't shoot me. I'm already dead."

But killing this Mexican bandit

is no guarantee that Love will get his bounty.

So Harry Love believes he has Joaquin,

but he has a problem, which is, there's no real way to prove this.

That could have been a Mexican that maybe was named Joaquin,

maybe not.

But Harry Love was gonna collect that money.

On July 25, 1853,

Harry Love and the California Rangers

succeed in their mission,

finding and killing the bandit Joaquin Murrieta.

Determined to claim his reward, Love removes the outlaw's head

and preserves it in a barrel of alcohol.

There's a lot of question,

particularly in the Mexican community,

about whether Harry Love ever got Joaquin

or whether this is just some poor hapless Mexican.

There's no way to prove that it's Joaquin,

but fortunately for Love,

state officials are dying to have this problem go away.

So when he presents the severed head, they say,

"Job well done." The banditry is done with.

Harry Love collects the $1,000 bounty

for killing Joaquin Murrieta, and splits it with his Rangers.

The grateful California government later rewards him

an additional 5,000, which he keeps for himself.

And with his newfound fame,

he sees yet another way to profit off the dead Mexican bandit.

Right here!

- Joaquin Murrieta! - Harry Love realises

there's still value in this severed head, and so

he puts it on display and charges admission. This is shocking

and barbaric by our standards, but it's part of a long tradition.

For hundreds of years, people that have run afoul of the state,

of the king, have had their heads severed, put on a pike

as a warning to anybody who would think about

defying the state's power.

To Americans in California, Harry Love is a hero.

By killing a feared Mexican outlaw,

he's made the new state a safer place to live.

But the legend of Joaquin will not die.

So after Harry Love and his men decapitated Joaquin Murrieta,

the newspapers started circulating rumours

that they had gotten the wrong man.

Some newspapers claimed that Joaquin Murrieta had escaped

into Mexico. Other newspapers claimed that he continues to exist

in California.

Because if Joaquin's not dead, or at least we can claim he's not,

we can continue to publish stories of his exploits, of his deeds,

and sell newspapers.

A young Cherokee journalist is paying close attention.

John Rollin Ridge finds his way to California

like so many other people in 1850, to strike it rich.

After failing as a miner, Ridge turns to journalism,

and sees a chance to hit paydirt by spinning the Joaquin story

out of the headlines and into a popular novel.

But he also has an axe to grind.

John Rollin Ridge grew up in Cherokee Nation

and watched as his homeland was stolen by settlers.

Two decades earlier,

President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act,

which forced Native Americans in the East off their homelands

and onto unfamiliar territory in the West.

The Jackson administration is determined

to remove Native Americans from the Southeast,

from Georgia and that wider region, because that's rich, fertile land

that is perfect for growing cotton. Beginning in 1830,

Native nations in the Southeast are expelled from their land.

But the Cherokee resisted removal

under the leadership of Chief John Ross. But for some,

it seemed inevitable. - John Rollin Ridge

was part of a family which became known as the Ridge Party,

believed that their best chance of sustaining Cherokee society

was ceding their lands east of the Mississippi

and taking up lands in the West. Against the tribe's wishes,

Ridge's father, grandfather and uncle

all signed a treaty with the U.S. government,

giving up seven million acres of Cherokee land in the East.

The federal government organises deportation campaigns

that bring the Cherokee and other Southern Indians

to what we now call Oklahoma, which was at the time

known as Indian territory.

The Trail of Tears saw an estimated

100,000 Native Americans removed from their homelands.

Along their journey west, 15,000 would die from disease,

hunger, heat and cold, including 4,000 Cherokee.

As a 12-year-old, Ridge witnessed his father stabbed to death

for his role in the removal.

For Ridge, a Cherokee rider still seething at his enemies,

Joaquin Murrieta represents the underdog who fights back.

What Ridge does, he takes all these stories about Joaquin

and he formulates them into a really compelling narrative,

as he wants to create a sympathetic character.

Ridge's character is still a young Mexican

who goes to California in search of gold,

but then he adds a twist, with a dramatic new backstory.

Joaquin meets the face of American racism,

and as the story goes,

these American miners come to his claim...

...there's violence that ensues. They rape his wife in front of him.

He's beat to a pulp and left to die...

...and that sets him off in this path of banditry.

Seeking revenge... against the gringo.

In Ridge's novel, there are also moments where we see

Joaquin Murrieta protecting the people

who he sees as suffering in an unjust society.

So on the one hand he could be

a valiant protector of his people...

...and on the other hand, the bandit,

the murderer, the cutthroat.

So the story told by John Rollin Ridge,

those 12 miners, he finds them and kills them all.

It's the first novel

ever published by a Native American, and he hopes

people will see in its pages the true history of California.

But it's a flop.

Ridge never met the financial success

he felt was his due, and ended up dying in his 40s of a brain disease.

But tall tales of the Wild West

are now getting popular across America.

In 1859, portions of Ridge's novel are plagiarised

by the California Police Gazette.

But this version of the story makes several changes:

Joaquin is portrayed as a villain, a robber who killed for money,

and the posse that hunts him down are the heroes.

The story gets retold and retold, dime novels of the 19th century,

and then into the early 20th century.

It's translated into French, into Spanish, into other languages.

It's republished in Chile and Argentina.

Over time, the story of Joaquin the outlaw

is overtaken by the narrative of an avenging hero.

A popular Spanish folk ballad depicts him defending his people

in an unjust society.

And Joaquin becomes known as the 'Robin Hood of El Dorado.'

Ridge's narrative of Joaquin as this sympathetic vigilante,

the underdog seeking righteous justice,

creates this wider web of stories and legends

about this Joaquin character. - He was fighting

against the invading American, the Yankee, the gringo,

so he's elevated to a folkloric hero in lots of ways.

In the decades after Joaquin's death,

California will transform from a lawless mining hub

into a booming and diverse economy.

People realise there's money to be made,

not simply from gathering the gold, but from attracting people

to California. - Once people got there,

they realised there was gold in every direction.

There were fertile valleys

like the Central Valley, which now produces

one-fifth of all the food in America.

Families start to come,

and instead of living in shanty towns,

they built communities. Vigilantism is replaced

by actual police forces, and courts, and judicial systems.

And so California ceases to be a frontier place,

and becomes a place of permanent American settlement.

Even as California changes,

the legend of Joaquin lives on.

As a kid growing up in Los Angeles in the 1950s,

you couldn't help but know about Joaquin Murrieta.

I heard it from my father, and then saw it on television.

Joaquin Murrieta has come to embody the sense of possibility

that one could reinvent oneself, whether as a miner or as a bandit,

and seek something different.

So the story of Joaquin is really of a piece

with other stories about larger than life figures

in the American West. Great outlaws of the West,

Jesse James, and the kind of people

who emerge in Western literature. - Myth and reality often,

as in so much about the West, get conflated with one another,

get entangled with one another, gets hard to distinguish

one from the other, and ultimately sometimes what matters most

is what people believe to be true. If people believe in Murrieta,

then maybe that's ultimately what matters most.

The severed head displayed by Captain Harry Love

is eventually destroyed in a San Francisco earthquake

in 1906. Nobody will ever know

if it truly belonged to Joaquin Murrieta.

But the Murrieta legend reveals the turmoil

of the California gold rush, transforming a Mexican outlaw

into a folk hero fighting for the oppressed.

Over the following years, as settlers continue to flock West,

another legendary figure will emerge,

this time in the Kansas Plains:

John Brown will leave violence in his way

and his actions will help push the nation towards civil war.