Free Which Way to the Wild West? by Steve Sheinkin

clashing with Americans as well. There was plenty of leftover anger from the recent U.S.-Mexican War. Also, many Mexicans had mining experience and were good at digging gold, which some Americans found annoying.
    This hostility led to one of the most famous stories of the gold rush. According to one version, it all began one day when a young miner from Mexico named Joaquin Murrieta was riding a horse that belonged to his brother. A group of American miners thought they recognized the horse as one that had been stolen from them, and they approached Murrieta. One of the Americans said:
    â€œYou are the chap that’s been a’stealing horses and mules around here, for the last six months, are you?”
    â€œYou charge me unjustly,” replied Murrieta. “I borrowed this horse of my half brother, who bought it from an American, which he can easily prove.”
    â€œYou are nothing but a dirty thief!” the American yelled.
    â€œHang him! Hang him!” the others shouted.
    The men pulled Murrieta off the horse, tied him up, and dragged him to his brother’s cabin. They wrapped a rope around his brother’s neck and hanged him from a tree. Then they tied Murrieta to the
same tree and whipped him while his brother’s body swung back and forth from the branch above.
    After burying his brother’s body that night, Murrieta swore he would never rest until he spilled the blood of his enemies. One by one, over the following weeks, the men who had attacked him were found dead at their campsites. And from that point on, no American miner was safe from Murrieta’s fury.
    At least, this is how the story went in a book called The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murrieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, published in 1854 by a Cherokee Indian author named Yellow Bird. Yellow Bird claimed to have collected the tale from local sources. He must have made up the dialogue, though, and probably some of the details too.
    But he definitely didn’t make up the person. There really was a miner named Joaquin Murrieta who moved with his family from Mexico to the California mines in 1850. Murrieta family members report that Joaquin and his brother were attacked just as the book described.
    Murrieta shows up in California newspapers too, which printed story after story about “the notorious outlaw, Joaquin.” The papers described Murrieta as a vicious killer who led a band of bloody thieves, including a three-fingered sidekick named Manuel “Tres Dedos” Garcia. But to Mexicans he became a heroic figure, a Robin Hood battling back against gold-grabbing Americans.
    Soon after the governor of California offered a five-thousanddollar reward for capture of Joaquin Murrieta, a company of rangers surrounded what they believed to be his gang. They shot the men, cut off Joaquin’s head, put it in a jar of brandy, brought it back to town, and charged people a dollar to see it. They didn’t seem to mind that people who knew Murrieta said it was not his head.

    For years after this, people continued to claim they had seen the mysterious Joaquin—or to have been robbed by him. What really happened to Joaquin Murrieta? No one knows.
    Time to Give Up?
    N ow back to the diggings, where it was getting harder and harder for miners to make a living. Most of the easy-to-find gold had already been found.
    â€œI have no pile yet,” one miner wrote home. “But you can bet your life I will never come home until I have something more than when I started.”
    Most of the miners felt that way—it was embarrassing to go home empty-handed. But the longer they stayed, the more homesick they got. “I feel bad sometimes when I think of home,” James Maxfeld wrote to his wife in Massachusetts. “Then again, come to think of how dull it is at home, I do not want to be there.”
    Four months later Maxfeld was a changed man. “I want to be home,” he wrote. “I would give