The Bandit Chief Who Terrorized California And Launched The Legend Of Zorro

In this episode of Writing the West, historian and author John Boessenecker joins the podcast to discuss his latest book, Bring Me the Head of Joaquin Murrieta, a deeply researched examination of the man behind one of the most enduring legends of the American West. Often linked — loosely and inaccurately — to the creation of Zorro, Murrieta has long been portrayed as a folk hero and symbol of resistance. In this wide-ranging interview, Boessenecker draws on 19th-century primary sources to unpack the myths, trace the real history of Murrieta and his gang during the California Gold Rush, and explore how popular culture transformed violence, racism, and outlawry into legend.

Transcript

C&I: So for listeners who don't know or who only know the myth or the Zorro connections, who was Joaquin Murrieta in the most basic historical sense?
Boessenecker: Well, he was the most famous Latino outlaw in American history. And very briefly, he came to California during the Gold Rush from northern Mexico. Like many other immigrants from Latin America, he was run off of his mining claim repeatedly. This was very common then. There was a lot of bitterness by the Anglos against Latinos in the wake of the Mexican War. And so eventually he became a gambler, finally turned to a life of crime, and ended up leading what was the bloodiest outlaw gang in the history of the American West.

C&I: What first drew you to him as a subject and why do you feel like now is the right time to produce this definitive account of his life?
Boessenecker: Well, I got into the Old West when I was a kid. And then when I was 15, in 1968, I just read every book in the local library. I'd load them up on my bike and ride home, and ran out of books to read. And then the next year I got my driver's license. So then I'd go to the library in San Francisco and I'd use my aunt's library card, which is probably not legal today, and read every book they had. And I focused on the Wild West, which is what I always liked. I was never really interested in politics, business, that kind of thing. I just wanted to read about outlaws and lawmen, and that's sort of been my passion ever since. And Joaquin Murrieta — you can't really do much reading about that until you start running across his name constantly. So over the years, I've just gradually collected information on him.

And I put off writing the book for years because probably 90% of everything written about Joaquin is myth and folklore. And I always told people it would take a governmental commission to unravel all the myths about Joaquin Murrieta. And then finally I decided maybe I can put together a short book, and by concentrating solely on primary sources — sources from the 19th century — and not use all the kakameme stuff that's been published after 1900. And the end result is a 500-page book with about 400 endnotes, and hopefully it'll illuminate people as to who the real Joaquin Murrieta was and what life was like back then in the California Gold Rush.

C&I: And when you began digging into this archival material, what surprised you most about the gap between the legends and the real man himself?
Boessenecker: There was probably not that much surprise because I never believed these legends in the first place. And I think maybe when I was a teenager, I probably did, but very soon — within a year or so — I realized a lot of this stuff. For example, the biggest problem with the Joaquin story is that within about eight or nine months of his death, a well-known Cherokee journalist named John Rollin Ridge wrote a book about Joaquin Murrieta that's still in print today. And most people believed that it was a nonfiction book. But when you read it, there's all kinds of conversations between him and members of his gang. Ridge tells you what Joaquin is thinking. And the problem is Joaquin was tracked down and killed, never left any memoirs or anything like that. Nobody knew what he was thinking. There was one interview with him at the end of this series of bandit raids that he committed in 1853.

And in that interview, he says that when he and several of his men stopped to visit a small rancho in the Salinas Valley in California, he basically said what we understand: that he was mistreated, run off his mining claim, that kind of thing. And so, but nothing... The story that Ridge created is that he was run off his mining claim repeatedly, which is true. Then he was flogged, his half-brother was lynched, and his wife was raped. And these things — there's no proof of any of that stuff. And so this is the biggest problem with Joaquin Murrieta because the book came out so soon after his death, most of the recollections by people — you read it and after 30 seconds, you just see this person is repeating stuff they read in the Ridge book, not stuff that they had actually witnessed. And so this book colored the memories of pioneers ever after.

And unraveling that was not easy.

C&I: Right, right. Yeah. And you've produced a couple of works — I think of your work on Frank Hamer, Wyatt Earp — where you're stripping down some of these tall tales to the documented truth. For Murrieta, because he's a little bit... Of course, he factors in largely in tales of the Wild West. He's not as well known in the public consciousness. What was that process like in finding the sources and tracking down research materials?
Boessenecker: Well, one thing is that from the 1960s to the 1990s, several small books came out about Joaquin and each one had some valuable insight. In particular, one came out in the '90s and the author had dug up some really amazing stuff, including a lengthy confession from one of the gang who was Joaquin's brother-in-law. And then this writer, James Varley, in a self-published book that really isn't very well known — it deserves to be better known — came up with all kinds of new stuff. And then that was a basis for me now being spoiled and having access to digital newspapers; many other genealogical records are readily available online now. Well, unfortunately, the ones from Mexico that we really need are pretty sparse. That kind of opened the door to trying to figure out what actually happened, who was in the gang, what did they do, that kind of thing.

C&I: Were there any discoveries in your research that really opened your eyes to Murrieta's motivation or character behind just his actions?
Boessenecker: Most of what I've dug up is information that doesn't come from Murrieta himself. Outlaws — I’ve pointed this out many times — are very difficult to write about because they didn't leave diaries or journals or correspondence. Don't get me started on that. I remember when I had a history professor in college and I'd written an article for one of the Western magazines when I was 18, and my parents were trying to get me into college, which I didn't really deserve because I was such a mess-up and my grades were generally so poor. And so they used this as part of my application and I did get in somehow. And when I asked him what he thought about it, he goes, "Well," and he was an Elizabethan historian, and he said, "Well, it didn't have much depth." And I said, "Well, it was about this gang of Confederate stage robbers who operated in California during the Civil War — Confederate guerrillas." And I tried to point out to him that they didn't leave correspondence or diaries or that kind of thing, that I went as deep as I could into the research, and he didn't know what I was talking about.

So I kind of always remembered that. But with Joaquin, you have to make deductions from his actions, and that's basically what I've done. And the gang just was extraordinarily bold — very little law enforcement in that era. And I counted up the numbers; they’re in my book — but they murdered approximately 45 innocent people, including 20 unarmed Chinese miners. So Joaquin is generally held up today as the Robin Hood of El Dorado, this great liberator and that kind of thing. And definitely Latinos in that era needed — they were mistreated, subject to racial prejudice. They were physically attacked, mentally attacked. And so going through all that stuff, they needed somebody that they could hold up as a kind of a folk hero, heroic character. And in retrospect, Joaquin was the wrong guy to be holding up as a folk hero.

C&I: Right. Well, and like you just mentioned, there were atrocities on both sides. And how did you approach your writing? And there is mentions of extreme violence, obviously, when covering these outlaw gangs. How did you do that without sensationalizing it in the way that maybe those early stories and books might've done?
Boessenecker: Well, what I try to do is just stick with the facts. And the good thing is that by 1853, there were multiple newspapers in the mining country — what we call the Mother Lode — which would be the Sierra Nevada foothills. And there were also newspapers in Sacramento and San Francisco, Stockton, who had correspondents writing regular letters from the mining country because this was the biggest thing going on in that era. Everybody was excited about the Gold Rush. Nobody had ever heard of anything like this before. They wanted to know about the lifestyle, about the violence in particular, which is so off the chart. I mean, I pointed out many times the homicide rates in that era were a hundred times higher than they are today. Just your chances of getting killed in the California Gold Rush, just mining your own business as a gold miner were greater than those of a combat infantryman in Vietnam.

So this is a very dangerous place. And so this stuff was covered extensively in the newspapers. Sometimes we find court records, journals, diaries, that kind of thing. So that's what I tried to rely on in writing the book — not all these kooky yarns that came out about Joaquin many, many years later.

C&I: Right. And how did that chaotic and violent environment of that Gold Rush era really shape Murrieta and his band?
Boessenecker: I think that the problem is we don't know a lot about their backgrounds. A few of them in the gang — at least two were Anglos. Others were primarily from northern Mexico. There were a couple of Californios who were native Californians. And so each of them — we can't say that all of them had bitterness left over from the Mexican War. The Mexican War was the main point of conflict because you had veterans from both sides who suddenly, the erstwhile enemies are working competing mining claims. And this is just a recipe for disaster.

So we don't know a lot about the individual motivations behind Joaquin or his men, but clearly there was an abject hatred of Anglos, at least. But then when they start targeting Chinese, it's obvious that this is a bandit gang motivated by greed and unconcerned. In one case, they robbed a Chinese mining camp while a posse was just a few hundred yards away, approaching, and they continued robbing the Chinese miners in full view of the pursuing posse.

And when the posse got within gunshot range, they jumped on their horses and fled. So this is a very reckless group, and these are very young men. Joaquin was only about 23 or so when he died. He was born in either — I'm sorry — 1829 or 1830. And so these are young, reckless men, and taking advantage of the situation: very little law enforcement and also clearly motivated by hatred toward the Yankees.

C&I: Can you give us a sense of the timeline for Murrieta and his outlaw gang? Was it a flash in the pan? Was this an extended period?
Boessenecker: It went on for a number of years, and very gradually. Joaquin — his first known crime didn't involve taking vengeance against the Anglos. It involved shoplifting a pair of boots from a general store in Stockton in 1850. And he was not a criminal then. He claimed that the other guy did it. Whether that's true or not, who knows? The court record — I cite it — his testimony is in the court record. There's only two times he ever made statements that were recorded, and that was one of them.

And basically, from there, at that time he'd been run off his mining claims. He was a professional gambler, and he traveled throughout the mining country, which later became invaluable to him because he got to know the country like the back of his hand. And then by the same year, his brother-in-law, Claudio Felice — Joaquin had married either a formal marriage in Mexico or a common-law marriage. We're not sure. Nobody's ever found the marriage record. He married a young woman named Rosa Felice, and her three brothers all were part of the gang.

And the first leader of the gang was Claudio Felice. And Claudio also started out doing minor crimes like stealing gold from mining claims, then eventually joined a large bandit gang. And then by 1852, Joaquin was an active bandit. So the gang operated for about three years. Joaquin's leadership was basically the last six months or so. Wow.

C&I: And based on the records that you were able to uncover, what can we say with confidence about that gang in terms of its size, its structure? Was that something that constantly evolved or did it stay pretty similar throughout its time?
Boessenecker: The members of the gang did drift in and out. So the members of the gang in 1851 were not the same — other than the Felice brothers — they were not the same in 1853. And the gang never numbered more than about a dozen. I name all the known gang members. One of the most notorious is Three-Fingered Jack Garcia. And like everything else in Joaquin's story, everybody gets his name wrong. They don't know who he is. And he actually started out as kind of a reputable guy who married a fairly prominent woman — a widow — in what's called Marin County today, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. And their marriage didn't work out. He ended up leaving and joining Murrieta's gang and died with him in the big final gunfight.

C&I: Wow. And speaking of law enforcement and that final gunfight, you mentioned that especially in the heyday of the Gold Rush, law enforcement was few and far between, but Captain Harry Love plays a major role in the pursuit of the gang and Murrieta. Can you talk for a second about him and about law enforcement in regard to Murrieta and his gang?
Boessenecker: What happened was this bandit rage just terrorized the mining country in California, just created an uproar and was published in newspapers throughout the country. And so petitions were sent to the state legislature and to the governor of California demanding something be done. And so eventually the short version is a reward was placed on the head of the five Joaquins, which is another myth. The five Joaquins were two men: Joaquin Murrieta with several aliases and Joaquin Valenzuela with several aliases. And Valenzuela was a member of the Murrieta gang. And so the state government then formed the California Rangers, modeled after the Texas Rangers, and Harry Love was a former Mexican War veteran, a former Texas Ranger, and they organized into a company of men and began a long manhunt for Joaquin and his gang.

C&I: And of course, that final gunfight and Murrieta's supposed death and trophy head remain quite controversial. After the research, how authentic is that final day and what can we say for certain about the end of Murrieta?
Boessenecker: Yeah. And I have a whole chapter about this in the book. The short version is there's absolutely no doubt what happened at Cantua Creek. And this place Murrieta was killed — it was right off Interstate 5. Tens of thousands of motorists drive by the spot every day. They have no clue. Nobody knows what happened there. They think the gunfight happened way up in the Coast Range of mountains. It didn't. It happened about a quarter mile off the freeway, maybe a third of a mile at the most.

And there's this final showdown where the Rangers caught up with the gang. There's a huge gun battle. Joaquin and Three-Fingered Jack are killed. There's not a daguerreotype — daguerreotypes, the only type of photography in 1853. Cameras weren't lugged around. A daguerreotype camera had to be carried, if at all, in a wagon.

So by the time they would get the head there, it would've decayed beyond recognition. So no photography. They wanted to collect the reward. The myth is they were savages — savage Rangers — who cut off his head to belittle him. No, they just wanted the money. And so they cut the head off, preserved it in alcohol with Three-Fingered Jack's hand. His head was too shot up to preserve it.

And then many of the stories came right after the death where the opposition newspapers — Governor Bigler, John Bigler was the governor of California. We think politics today are bitter — people don't know what they're talking about. Political violence was very common in the United States in the 19th century, especially in this era. And without getting into too many details, the opposition newspapers immediately poo-pooed the whole thing. They did anything they could to give false information about Governor Bigler.

They claimed that it wasn't Joaquin. The head wasn't his. A lot of these stories were dreamed up by the early newspapers. But what my research showed is that other writers have totally missed this.

The other writers — numerous writers — claimed that Love deliberately took the head to Stockton and San Francisco and showed it to people who didn't know who Joaquin Murrieta was, despite the fact that there are 18 affidavits from people who knew Joaquin in the California State Archives today. However, that wasn't the end of it. Again, this is why you have to do research. And this is what drives me crazy about people that are long on opinions and short on facts.

Love and his men took the head up to Marysville and the northern mines and they displayed it for several months in every major mining town from Marysville south to Mariposa near Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park. They collected scores of affidavits from people who all identified the head, including more than 20 affidavits from Chinese miners who said, "That's the guy that was robbing and killing in our mining camps." So I don't know how much evidence you need.

And this is just stuff that people have missed because they want to come up with their opinions. They end up writing a book with a preconceived notion, which is a huge mistake for history. You need to keep an open mind, follow the facts, and see where they lead you.

C&I: Right. And how did Murrieta evolve into this later pop culture icon and inspiration for the legend of Zorro?
Boessenecker: Yeah. And that's kind of a difficult one to answer. The short version about Zorro is that the initial novel came out in 1919, and it was called The Curse of Capistrano. And the author never said, "I based this on Zorro" — I'm sorry — never based Zorro on Joaquin Murrieta. However, he was a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, and about nine years later, in the late 1920s, one of his fellow reporters said that the book — the character Zorro — was based on Joaquin Murrieta. So that's about the closest we can come.

It really reached a pinnacle of myth when the very popular movie came out — I think ’98, ’99 — The Mask of Zorro. And the advertising people for the film then made it very popular. They claimed that Zorro was based on Joaquin Murrieta. They even sponsored a graphic, well-illustrated book about the film and made the claim in the book as well. But the best we can do is say that the story came about eight or nine years after the book The Curse of Capistrano was published, and then it became a silent film and then more sound films. And now we've got, I don't know how many — six or seven Zorro films — all based on the original novel.

C&I: Well, and one question, because you're out there in that area of the world, at least in Murrieta's area, does he remain a cultural icon out there? And how much of that has been mostly the myths and legends that came after his death?
Boessenecker: He's remained an icon, very well known. Most Western buffs know who Joaquin Murrieta is. People in California tend to... A lot of people... Excuse me. People who grew up in California and went to school here generally know who Murrieta is, but many people believe that he's a folk hero. And already I'm getting quite a bit of blowback online from people who are very unhappy that my book is not a hagiographic biography holding him up as the Robin Hood of El Dorado.

Walter Noble Burns, who did the book about Wyatt Earp, Tombstone, had a number of bestsellers. His book The Robin Hood of El Dorado was very, very popular in the 1930s and made into a popular film. And so a lot of people get their history from watching movies. And when you come out with a book of fact, some people tend not to like that, but that's what historians do.

Obviously, we love the truth and try to be as truthful and accurate as we can.

C&I: Well, and you've written, I think, almost a dozen books, if not more, and some of them on outlaws like Joaquin Murrieta and some on lawmen. How do you approach those biographies differently?
Boessenecker: To me, it's exactly the same. You just do the primary-source research. You try to find later interviews from people that were actually there. And the problem with recalled interviews is that at my age, I can't remember what I did last week, let alone specifics. I'll tell you — I used to be a police officer in my 20s, and I'll get together with my old cop buddies and we all will talk about some really dangerous thing we were involved in back then. And each one of us remembers stuff that the others don't remember. And it just gives you the indication of these old-timers relying on their memories. So you have to take some of the details from their recollections and then compare that to the primary accounts and try to come up with the closest reconstruction of what happened as you can.

C&I: Well, and an interesting point you made was that for most of, if not all of these outlaws, they didn't really leave memoirs or diaries or anything like that. And we have only a few court statements. And then on the other hand, with the lawmen — like a Wyatt Earp or a Frank Hamer, or in this case, Harry Love — they're around a lot longer. They're able to tell the story in a sense, I guess you could say, from their official position. And how do you balance that out between trying to take into account the official records, but also the men like Harry Love who had their own story to tell as well? How do you parse through that for the truth?
Boessenecker: Just kind of the same approach. With Harry Love, you have — and his main lieutenant was Patrick Edward Connor — and their actions during the Murrieta manhunt were totally honorable. They carried out their duties. They got into a gunfight. They killed the bad guys while they were resisting arrest. But then Love goes on to have a checkered career. He finally gets killed in a personal quarrel.

Patrick Edward Connor becomes a military leader and was responsible for a massacre — the Bear River Massacre of Shoshone Indians in southern Idaho during the Civil War. And so he goes from — and I point this out in the book — honorable duty as a California Ranger to extraordinarily dishonorable actions as a military leader. His men slaughtered Shoshone Indians, raped women, killed children. And this is one of the worst — a very not-well-known Indian massacre, but very well documented and deserves to be better known.

And so you have to judge them by these different acts that they take. In the case of Joaquin, many of the Rangers were very reputable; quite a few were very disreputable. So I tell their stories and the reader can make up their own mind about that.

C&I: Well, and we've had Peter Cummings and Brian Burrough and a number of historians on the podcast already. And one thing that always strikes me is this balance between being a strict historian, but also storytelling. And from page one of this book, the storytelling's front and center — you put us in the mind of John Rollin Ridge, who was the early proponent of Murrieta's story. And how do you balance that, and what's your goal in trying to write a book that makes people want to keep reading?
Boessenecker: Well, my thing is I grew up reading books that were supposedly history. One example would be the books that I mentioned: Tombstone, The Robin Hood of El Dorado by Walter Noble Burns, Stewart Lake's biography of Wyatt Earp. And then later, as I got older, I learned that those books had many fictional elements. They had fictional dialogue. The authors made up stuff or took various stories and changed them around to fit their narrative. And I was so mad — I felt like I had been cheated and lied to.

And so then my earliest books were just overwhelmed with minutiae and facts because I was trying to do the opposite. And then as I've become more experienced as a writer, now I try to write for the general reader and I try to draw a balance between telling the actual, specific facts and not overloading the reader with too much minutiae, too much information.

And so it's a balance of those things, but also you want to tell the story in a way that you try to recreate the circumstances. So one way you do it is you go to the places where these things happen and you kind of describe what they look like. And then I've been doing this since I was a kid, so I know where the sources are about how people thought, how they talked, what kind of gambling games they played, what kind of scenes happened in brothels, what kind of scenes happened in dance halls and fandango houses, and that kind of thing.

And then you use all that stuff to try to recreate the situations that you're writing about without fictionalizing it. So what I do in the Murrieta book — I found these extraordinary examples of a gambling hall. So when I have Joaquin going into a gambling hall with all these beautiful Latina women that the Anglo miners are all getting dizzy looking at — the Anglo miners would write this up. “Look at these gorgeous women.” One guy writes, “Mexican women don't walk. They float across the ground,” such is their natural grace. And people today might say that's racist, but these men — women were a very small minority in the California Gold Rush, and men would write about women. Some men would walk 15 miles just to have a look at a woman because they hadn't seen a woman in a year. And so this is — I try to bring that color into the book.

C&I: And we've seen — whether you take Zorro as history, as maybe some people do, or people might've read the earlier Joaquin Murrieta biographies, which as you point out were full of inaccuracies — now that you've done so much research and put the book together, what is that final view of who he was and what should readers take away from his story?
Boessenecker: Well, I think the main thing that you want to take away is that racism is going to affect people and it's going to affect their actions. It's going to change their character. And so when you have something like Joaquin Murrieta, you have a story that's sort of bilateral in some sense. I point out in the book that the vast majority of Latinos that immigrated to California during the Gold Rush were honest vaqueros, miners, farmers, who never robbed anybody. Joaquin and his men struck back. And so not everybody is going to suffer in silence.

And so it's a valuable lesson about the dangers of racism, the dangers of prejudice. These things were actually codified into California law initially in the Foreign Miners' License Act, which supposed foreign miners — who had every right to be here as Anglo or European miners — were forced to pay taxes to mine. And so that was just the beginning of all kinds of racism: some of it from the government, some of it from vigilance committees, some of it just personal. And so I think that's the main story and the main lesson that comes out of the book. The racism was so bad that many Latinos held up Joaquin as a

C&I: Robin Hood. And was Joaquin's death kind of the final nail in that coffin or did we see this continue after his death?
Boessenecker: No. Members of the gang go on. I describe the activities of the various gang members. One of the last that died committed a bunch of murders. His name was Pancho Daniel. He and his brother Bernardo were primary members of the gang when Claudio Felice led the gang, and Daniel ended up ambushing the sheriff of Los Angeles County and three of his deputies in 1857. And eventually he was tracked down, captured, and a mob broke into the jail in Los Angeles two years later and lynched him.

And so the gang continued on. I have a chapter about his nephew, Procopio Murrieta, who grew up idolizing his uncle. He later became one of the most notorious bandit chieftains of California in the 1860s and ’70s. And his paramour, Mariana — she's called Mariana la Loca, or Crazy Mariana — later became a very notorious character herself in the 1880s.

And so you have remnants of the gang that continued grabbing headlines for decades after he died.

C&I: Wow. Wow. And having written stories on Earp and Hamer and now Murrieta, are there other figures or eras that feel ripe for reinterpretation on your list?
Boessenecker: Well, I have so many book ideas in my brain. I don't think I'll ever live long enough to write even a fraction of them. But yeah, there are people I'm thinking of writing a book about. I've got to figure it out. Right now, I've got a bunch of ideas. I have to figure out what my publisher wants to do.

C&I: Yeah. And how much of the next decision, for instance, goes into — I'm sure it's a balance between your own interest and a need, obviously, like in Murrieta's case, but also in knowing you're going to have enough primary sources to pull on. How does that balance work out for you in your decision?
Boessenecker: Well, some of the people I want to write about are so obscure. Many publishers don't really want to do that. If you do a book about Wyatt Earp, it's going to sell if it's just got the name Wyatt Earp in the title. If you're doing a book about someone not as well known, then it's going to be something that you're hoping the readers will pick up on, word of mouth, that kind of thing. And so I think that for me, it's sort of a balance between those two things. I want something that I'm really passionate about, but something that the readers are also going to enjoy.

C&I: Well, and I'm sure with these more obscure characters, it's probably even more satisfying to bring that story to light versus a Wyatt Earp who's been told again and again.
Boessenecker: Correct. And the only reason I did my Wyatt Earp book is that my friend Paul Cool was writing a book about the Cowboys, and he and I used to get together in Tombstone — and Tucson especially — and they'd be kicking us out of the library at midnight. We'd burn the midnight oil going through the microfilm newspapers because they weren't digitized back then.

And then Paul passed on of cancer. He was such a great guy. And then I basically inherited his files. And the only reason that I did the book — I had done a lot of research on the Cowboys myself. I did a book about Bob Paul, the lawman who hired the Earp brothers as shotgun messengers for Wells Fargo in Tombstone. And Paul was one of the great lawmen of the Old West and a bitter foe of the Cowboys.

And so what my concern was that there had been so many books about Wyatt Earp, but many writers were trying to judge him on 30 seconds in a vacant lot behind the O.K. Corral. And I wanted to know who the Cowboys were. Where did they come from? And nobody had ever written this before. So I felt this was something — between my research and Paul’s research — that I could tell a story that starts with John Kinney, the founder of the Cowboys in the 1870s, long before they ever came to southern Arizona, and tell a story that hadn't been told before.

And myself and other historians had dug up a lot of negative stuff about the Earps. The fact that they had been pimps in Peoria, Illinois had been dug up by a local historian in the mid-’90s. And then later I found all kinds of stuff about Virgil Earp, his wife, Allie, who has been held up to the stars as this wonderful, petite, fiery Irish woman — and she was — but she was also a prostitute in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

And it doesn't surprise you. The Earps were professional gamblers. The women — Josephine Earp, also a prostitute from San Francisco. My friend Peter Brand wrote a wonderful book about her, so it's not a surprise. And so that's why it's important with the Earps story to tell about their backgrounds. Wyatt Earp was a horse thief, an embezzler, a pimp. And then when he came to Tombstone, he and his brothers recreated themselves, which is what the frontier was about.

It's a place where people could come, leave their past behind, and recreate themselves. Often people came from the East Coast and recreated themselves into something different — something bad, like an outlaw. But for the most part, the West was a place of promise and hope.

C&I: Wow. Well, John, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about your book, Bring Me the Head of Joaquin Murrieta. And I wonder — where can people find you, follow your work, and learn more about any upcoming projects or appearances you might have?
Boessenecker: I have a number of book signings coming up in January and February in the San Francisco Bay Area. You can follow me on Facebook. I'm afraid I'm too tech-ignorant to know anything other than Facebook, but I basically put on there — if I'm giving a book talk or something — then I'll post it on Facebook.

C&I: Well, John, thanks again so much. And for those that haven't checked out your latest book, please go — it's available now — and we hope to talk to you again soon.
Boessenecker: Thanks a million for talking with me.

C&I: All right. Take care.
Boessenecker: You too. Thank you so much.