jun 5, 1852 - Murrieta Catalyst

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By this time Joaquín may have given up mining altogether—Rosa too would have abandoned whatever use she had made of the batea—and the couple seems to have turned to keeping a gaming table near Angels Camp. There Joaquín is said to have dealt monte, a popular Mexican pastime that drew in miners of all nationalities during the Gold Rush. Rosa, depending on how wary she had become of the Anglo men who were then swarming into the foothills like so many hornets, may have frequented the monte table herself; Mexican women in the town of Sonora were doing so at the time, and prior to the American conquest that began in 1846, women’s gambling was not uncommon on Mexico’s northern frontier.


Anglo ruffians raped Rosa, and then, after a dispute with Joaquín’s half brother, Jesús Carillo Murrieta, over either a horse or a mule, English-speaking toughs lynched Jesús and horsewhipped Joaquín.

Refusing to be driven out of the area altogether, most of the Murrieta men seem within a year or two to have turned to rounding up wild horses in the San Joaquin Valley and driving them south into Mexico for sale to wealthy rancheros.

But the young Mexican was subject to a litany of racist injustices shortly after entering the country: tied up and whipped, then made to watch his wife gang-raped and his brother hung from a tree after a crowd of white people falsely accused him of stealing a horse. Vowing revenge, Murrieta turned to a life of banditry, stealing from Anglo Americans until he was tracked down by law enforcement and killed.

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