44 pages • 1-hour read
The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta
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Background
Authorial Context: John Rollin Ridge
John Rollin Ridge (1827-1867) was a member of the Cherokee Nation and published under his Cherokee name of Yellow Bird. He was born in Georgia in 1827 but fled to Arkansas in 1837 after witnessing the murders of his father and grandfather. Both men had been signatories of the Treaty of New Echota, which ceded Cherokee lands to the United States. In Arkansas, Ridge studied law and started his own practice. He married a white woman, Elizabeth Wilson, in 1847; their daughter, Alice, was born the next year. Ridge fled to Missouri in 1849 to avoid prosecution after killing an individual who he believed was involved in his father’s murder. He subsequently moved to California in the hope of gaining wealth in the Gold Rush. As well as The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, Ridge published poems and essays. Although his novel was hugely popular, Ridge himself never saw any of the profits from the publication.
Ridge advocated for the rights of Indigenous Americans and Mexican Americans but did not believe in racial equality. His family were enslavers. During Ridge’s time in Arkansas, he relied on the labor of enslaved people, and he advocated the Confederate cause in the Civil War. Furthermore, while he criticized the racist abuse of Indigenous Americans, he supported the “civilizing” benefits of intermarriage and cultural assimilation. This attitude informs the novel’s critique of racial inequality. Ridge frames the persecution of Joaquín Murieta as unjust in large part because Joaquín wants to assimilate; he believes in American ideals more strongly, the novel suggests, than many white Americans. By and large, this sympathetic treatment does not extend to those who remain culturally “other”—e.g., the various Indigenous Americans whom Joaquín encounters.
Ridge died of a brain fever (Encephalitis lethargica) at the age of 40.
Historical Context: The Mexican War and the California Gold Rush
The events of Ridge’s novel take place in California shortly after the Mexican War and during the Gold Rush. The United States had annexed California, together with Texas, in 1848. Americans, Mexicans, and Indigenous Americans had been living in close proximity in California for many years, but the annexation intensified political turmoil in Mexico and led to a significant loss of civil and political rights for Mexican and Indigenous populations in the new American states. In particular, while the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised US citizenship to all Mexican citizens living in the annexed areas, the California Constitution of 1849 only gave voting rights to white male citizens. This breach of terms is an explicit plot point in the novel, where it develops the theme of American and Californian Identity; Joaquín confronts some of his racist assailants with the terms of Guadelupe Hidalgo, arguing that he has as much right to mine for gold in California as anyone.
Joaquín’s argument is especially potent given the place the California Gold Rush occupies in US mythology as a symbol of the American Dream. The Gold Rush, which began in 1848 when James W. Marshall found gold at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, led to a huge population influx into California—around 300,000 people from America and overseas. The Gold Rush had a disastrous effect on the local Indigenous cultures and intensified prejudice against immigrants and especially against Mexicans. The Foreign Miner’s Tax Kaw of 1850, which primarily targeted Mexican miners, required that foreign miners should pay $20 a month to mine gold in America.
Literary Context: The Dime Novel: Working-Class Literacy and Borderland Adventures
The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta is an early example of a “dime novel.” These were cheap paperbacks containing sensationalist page turners that became increasingly popular in the United States as a consequence of rising levels of literacy after the Civil War. Although their literary quality is debatable, the very existence of dime novels marked an important shift in literary culture, with reading no longer being the exclusive preserve of cultural elites. Like Ridge’s work, many of these novels were set in the American borderlands and dramatized the interactions between the various populations present in the area. Ridge’s novelization of Joaquín’s life inspired a series of spin-offs, the most famous of which was Johnston McCulley’s 1919 The Curse of Capistrano, adapted for cinema as The Mark of Zorro in 1920.
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