Novel
The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit
John Rollin Ridge · 1854
Opening lines
Sitting down, as I now do, to give to the public such events of the life of Joaquin Murieta as have come into my possession, I am moved by no desire to administer to any depraved taste for the dark and horrible inhuman action, but rather by a wish to contribute my mite to those materials out of which the early history of California shall be composed.
Text quoted from purl.dlib.indiana.edu
Synopsis
In California, in the spring of 1850, a young miner from Sonora is driven off his claim by Americans who do not want Mexicans there and who assault his companion before his eyes. He is then driven off his farm. Riding a stolen horse lent to him by his half-brother, he is whipped in public, and the crowd hangs the half-brother without trial. He swears to live for vengeance, and those who whipped him fall one after another. At the head of a band, he steals horses and robs travellers and camps from one end of the State to the other.
Context
The work appears in San Francisco in 1854, from W. B. Cooke, signed Yellow Bird, the English translation of the Cherokee name of its author, who will earn almost nothing from it. The text is at once plundered: in 1859, the California Police Gazette publishes without an author's name a reworked version that spreads the legend; adapted in Paris in 1862, then passed into Spanish, it makes Murieta a Chilean. Historians of California have taken up its episodes as facts. Only two copies of the 1854 edition are known to survive, and the text was not given back to the public until 1955.
Who it is for
A short novel in prose that presents itself as a biography and is not one. It was not translated into French until 2017.
Prizes and reception
Often regarded as the first novel published by a Native American author, it is also said to be a distant source of Zorro.
Sources for this page 8
The pages consulted to check this page.