Joaquin Murrieta

Right.

In the legend, the meticulously crafted story laid out by Ridge, Joaquin Murrieta is not introduced as a villain or even a hardened man.

He is described as a young man, only 18 years old, hailing from Sonora, Mexico.

Okay.

They are legally mandating your poverty.

Your analogy highlights the exact friction point that ignited the legend.

This historical reality raises an incredibly important question, and it explicitly links the dry legislative history right back to the bloody legend of Joaquin Murrieta.

Which is?

Piedras Vamanos

Working our way back, the Sons of the San Joaquin gave us the Ballad of Joaquin Murrieta, taking us into California's own Western mythology.

Murrieta was a legendary figure during the Gold Rush years, Mexican outlaw to some, avenging folk hero to others.

Somewhere in between, there was the real story.

In the 1850s, they pretty much roamed up and down the state at will, robbing miners in the north and rustling cattle in the south.

The best known of them by far is the Old West's most infamous Latino outlaw, Joaquin Murrieta.

So great were the legends around Murrieta that some have claimed he never really existed, despite the fact that his severed head was displayed as a trophy after he was finally killed.

Believe me, he existed.

There was a price on Murillo's head, and so to claim his reward, Love had his head cut off.

It was jammed into a jar and preserved with spirits and eventually became one of the most famous trophies of the Old West, touring around the mining country before it finally came to rest in a gun shop in San Francisco.

The shop, and presumably the head of Joaquin Murrieta, were destroyed in the earthquake of 1906. we have almost no details about the gunfights Murrieta engaged him.

What we do know suggests he's one of those few early California gunmen who fits the mold of someone like a Wyatt Earp, who engaged in multiple gunfights of note.

Yeah, Marshal, tell the city fathers I'd like to make a deal.

When the corpses are as famous as this one... [laughs] Back in '53 in San Francisco, a fella I knew earned a fortune exhibiting the head of Joaquin Murietta.

Tell them if they'll let me keep the remains, I'll do the autopsies for nothing.

Shut the door, Chester.

That's considered another kind of Old West violence, which still leaves room for many different flavors of gunfighter.

In practice, a gunfighter could work as just about anything: an officer of the law, of course, like Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson, or an outlaw, like Sam Bass or Joaquin Murietta.

Some were gamblers, like Doc Holliday or Ben Thompson, or cattlemen, like New Mexico's infamous Clay Allison, a man you didn't wanna get angry.

When he went to a dentist and the poor guy pulled the wrong tooth, Allison pinned him down on the floor and yanked out one of his teeth without Novocaine.