Kevin Costner's the West (2025) s01e05 Episode Script

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
fueled 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 the American experience
are the myths 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.
But 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 side.
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,
because these are a superior people
moving into this country.
And "manifest," that is 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 the way American
expansion was justified.
James k. Polk made a pledge,
that if he's president
of the United States,
that 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 fulfill manifest destiny.
It 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,
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,
they 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
from California 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 far west 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.
That's 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 plows for gold pans
and Blaze a trail to California.
The gold rush fundamentally
alters the American dream.
Suddenly, there are these stories
about people striking it rich,
and in a day's work gaining a fortune
that would've been, in
other cases, years of labor.
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 hav 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
that because they won the war,
they're entitled to this gold.
It's a habit of the American frontier
that people arrive
before the law gets there.
When that happens, there
will be disputes about land.
And there are no rules.
People are staking 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 son or a, 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 apparently enjoys
a fair amount of 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 too.
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 profession,
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,
so there was no government
in California 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 all this new territory out west
that is gonna 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,
and that would tip the
balance in congress,
and that was something
the southern states
could not possibly 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 the
basics of state government.
Trying to impose law and order,
like-minded settlers form armed posses
and call them self 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 a Mexican bandit
by the name of Joaquin murrieta.
But for most californians,
he will continue to be
known simply as Joaquin.
The stock ton newspaper,
the Sacramento newspaper,
the Los Angeles newspaper
aren't reporting the stories of Joaquin.
It was sensationalized
in the press at the time,
and because newspapers
have to sell copies,
and so the 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
somehow immune to gunfire.
And this leads to speculation that maybe
he's wearing some 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
that takes place 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 of
the printing process.
Suddenly the printing
presses are everywhere,
mass producing 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.
You know, 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 there 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,
because 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.
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 organization
that is gonna impose order
where there is banditry and lawlessness.
But their principle tools are
violence, intimidation, and murder.
The governor of California
has now sanctioned
the California rangers to go after Joaquin
without due process.
So 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 official police force,
he can end the chase.
Our republic is based on due
process and the rule of law,
and yet on every frontier,
extralegal 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.
And what he found is that
his ability to kill other people
was, for him, 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 around
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
where they change the course of rivers,
and erode away 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
that's taking place in america
just about this time
and a little 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,
that we see 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 paycheck:
$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 rumors that Joaquin
is moving between
son or a and California.
He could be hiding in the mountains
and disguising himself
in urban environments.
He seems to appear out of nowhere,
just kills somebody and then
disappears almost 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,
and there is 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.
Throughout the summer of 1853,
captain Harry love and his rangers
scour northern California
for a bandit named Joaquin.
Now these are all relatively young men,
armed to the teeth.
Well, a $1,000 was a lot of money.
They were intent on being successful
in capturing and or killing 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 people who went to California
went thinking that it was temporary.
They would go, they
would make their fortune,
they would 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 popularized
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
that they were wearing
when they had these photographs 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 who are 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.
California had over a 100
different indigenous languages
and a diversity of indigenous peoples
that is hard to summarize.
In the two decades after
this acquisition by the United States,
the native population
of California's 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 disease.
To a terrible extent,
the 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 Harry love to find Joaquin
and maybe even, in the back
of his mind, to get creative.
There were lots of Joaquin's
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 these 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
with his head in a jar.
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, "great! 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 realizes 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 actually 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 rumors
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 dead,
we can continue to publish
stories of his exploits,
stories of his deeds and sell newspapers.
A young cherokee journalist
is paying close attention.
John roll in 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 pay dirt
by spinning the Joaquin
story out of the headlines
and into a popular novel.
But he also has an axe to grind.
John roll in 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 roll in 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 wishes of the tribe,
Ridge's father, grandfather, and uncle
all signed a treaty with
the U.S. government,
giving up 7 million acres
of cherokee land in the east.
The federal government
organizes a series
of 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 a 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, is he takes
all these stories about Joaquin,
and he formulates them into
a really compelling narrative,
because 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 roll in Ridge,
those 12 miners, he finds
them and kills them all.
As Harry love is celebrated
as a hero for killing Joaquin murrieta,
cherokee writer John roll in Ridge
writes his own version of the story,
with murrieta as the
hero seeking vengeance
against the miners who
attacked him and his family.
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
that 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 plagiarized 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 Americans,
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 realize there's money to be made,
not simply from gathering the gold,
but from attracting people to California.
Once people got there, they realized
that 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,
the Jesse James, and the kind of people
who emerge in this 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 Joaquin 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 wake
and his actions will help push
the nation towards civil war.