The Crimson Trail Of Joaquin Murieta

Novel based on life of bandit Murieta in Gold Rush California, whose life is mostly legend.

Here, in its original English translation, is the dime-novelesque biography of one of the most infamous bandits in the history of the Old West, for decades a source of fear and legend in the state of California. To Mexicans and Indians, however, Joaquin Murrieta became a symbol of resistance to the displacement and oppression visited on them in the wake of the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), particularly by the "'Forty-Niners" who flooded into California from all over the world during the Gold Rush. In his introduction, literary critic Luis Leal has researched and written the first definitive history of the Murrieta legend in its various incarnations. Ireneo Paz's Spanish-language biography was first published in Mexico City in 1904; it was translated into English by Frances P. Belle in 1925. This edition includes several line-drawings that appeared in the original volume, heightening the strong sense evoked here of this turbulent period in U. S. history.

Novel based on life of bandit Murieta in Gold Rush California, whose life is mostly legend.

In 1854, a Cherokee Indian called Yellow Bird (better known as John Rollin Ridge) launched in this book the myth of Joaquin Murieta, based on the California criminal career of a 19th century Mexican bandit. Today this folk hero has been written into state histories, sensationalized in books, poems, and articles throughout America, Spain, France, Chile, and Mexico, and made into a motion picture. The Ridge account is here reproduced from the only known copy of the first edition, owned by Thomas W. Streeter, of Morristown, New Jersey. According to it, the passionate, wronged Murieta organized an outlaw company numbering over 2,000 men, who for two years terrorized gold-rush Californians by kidnapping, bank robberies, cattle thefts, and murders. So bloodthirsty as to be considered five men, Joaquin was aided by several hardy subordinates, including the sadistic cutthroat, "Three-Fingered Jack." Finally, the state legislature authorized organization of the Mounted Rangers to capture the outlaws. The drama is fittingly climaxed by the ensuing chase, "good, gory" battle, and the shocking fate of the badmen.

Presents essays dealing with literature written by Hispanic Americans from the sixteenth century through 1960, evaluates individual authors, and examines the contributions of Latino authors in a multicultural, multilingual society.

A unique excavation of how U.S. cross-border, anti-imperialist movements shaped cultural modernism

"American Sensations is an erudite and sweeping cultural history of the sensationalist literatures and mass cultures of the American 1848. It is the finest book yet written on the U.S.-Mexican War, and how it was central to the making and unmaking of U.S. mass culture, class, and racial formation."—José David Saldívar, author of Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies "A major work that will challenge current paradigms of nineteenth-century literature and culture. American Sensations brilliantly succeeds in remapping the volatile and shifting terrain of both national identity and literary history in the mid-nineteenth century."—Amy Kaplan, co-editor of Cultures of United States Imperialism

Republishes profiles of Joaquin Murieta, Tom Bell, Rattlesnake Dick, Black Bart, Dick Fellows, and Tiburcio Vasquez