The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murrieta
Title page
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| Author | John Rollin Ridge |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publisher | W.R. Cooke and Company |
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Publication date
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1854 |
The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit was originally published in 1854 by John Rollin Ridge, writing as "Yellow Bird". It is considered to be one of the first novels written in California and the first novel to be published by a Native American. The novel describes the life of a legendary bandit named Joaquín Murieta who, once a dignified citizen of Mexico, becomes corrupt after traveling to California during the Gold Rush. The book was originally published as a fictional biography, but was taken as truth by many historians of the time. The novel received mass attention and was translated to various European languages, including French and Spanish. Unfortunately, the novel was highly plagiarized and Ridge never received the economic gain he hoped for.
John Rollin Ridge was born in the Cherokee Nation of New Echota in 1827 (now present day Georgia). He was given the Indian name Chees-quat-a-law-ny, or Yellow Bird. In 1850, after killing a man over a horse dispute, Ridge fled to California where he attempted to become involved in the Gold Rush. After little success, he turned to newspaper companies for employment, where he published The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta in 1854. He died in Grass Valley, California in 1867.
The dime novel, intended for the general public, is an early example of “borderland literature", which represents the struggles of a person of mixed blood to find his or her place while stuck between two very different worlds. These writings often include themes of transition, shifting identity, and allegiance. California, having recently been seized by the United States after the Mexican War, was an area where American and Mexican cultures were constantly intermixing. The novel demonstrated the ethnic tensions present in California after the Mexican War, which concluded in 1848. Soon after the war, many Mexicans, having heard about the Gold Rush in California, would travel north in hopes of striking it rich. During this time, discrimination against Mexicans and Spanish speaking people was ever-present. In fact, white settlers went so far as to pass the foreign miner's tax law in 1850, which required foreign miners to pay twenty dollars a month to mine gold (less than one year later the law was declared to be unconstitutional and repealed). Interestingly, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta was the first English-language novel describing California’s Mexican community after the Mexican War.
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