Joaquin Murrieta’s caches

California Ranger records, 1853; the caches are folklore

Joaquin Murrieta is the great bandit of the California Gold Rush, the "Robin Hood of El Dorado," and how much of him was real is still argued. In the popular story he was a young Sonoran miner and vaquero who came north in 1849, was driven off a rich claim by Anglo miners, saw his wife raped and his brother hanged, and was himself horsewhipped, then rode out for revenge at the head of a horse gang that raided camps and stage roads. Evidence for the historical man is thin. Records show a minor horse thief by that name, and newspapers reported a bandit called Joaquin. In 1854 John Rollin Ridge's novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta turned him into a legend, translated into several European languages, and is said to have inspired Zorro.

In May 1853 the legislature named him among the so-called Five Joaquins and created the California State Rangers under Captain Harry Love, with a reward on Murrieta's head. On 25 July 1853 the rangers came on a band of armed Mexican men near the mouth of Arroyo de Cantua, on the edge of the Diablo Range near Coalinga, said to be the gang's headquarters, and in the fight they killed a man they swore was Murrieta and another they named as Manuel Garcia, Three-Fingered Jack. As proof they cut off the alleged Murrieta's head and Jack's hand and preserved them in a jar of alcohol, which was shown in Mariposa County, Stockton and San Francisco. Love's men collected the reward. Within weeks an anonymous letter to the Alta California charged that they had killed innocent mustang catchers, and Murrieta's sister was reported to say the head was not her brother's. It vanished in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.

The treasure stories grew from there. One newspaper story told how Murrieta and Three-Fingered Jack buried small sums all through the Coast Range, meaning to dig them up when every man had $20,000, and how Jack drew a map that was left with a priest. In the autumn of 1926 reporters from the Fresno Morning Republican hunted the Cantua hills for Murrieta's secret cave and its rumoured gold, and found nothing, though prospectors were searching too. By then a headless horseman was said to ride the Cantua country at night, and two Russian treasure seekers from Biola came home from the Murrieta rocks empty-handed and in a hurry.

A California Historical Landmark plaque on Highway 198 north of Coalinga marks the approximate site of the 1853 fight, near three large rocks in the foothills above Cantua Creek. No one has ever produced a cache.