by Sarah A. Peterson-Camacho

Read Part 1 of this ghost story perfect for your Halloween reading!

“Out of the fog of fiction that has been woven about the story of Joaquin Murrieta and the law, the fight at the mouth of Arroyo Cantua stands out to all as one indisputable reality. There a battle really took place. Actual guns were fired. Men were killed. Graves were filled with dead bodies. Two heads and one hand were cut off…” –Frank F. Latta, Joaquin Murrieta and His Horse Gangs, 1980

What began as a joke by a San Francisco pundit in 1906—the earliest Joaquin Murrieta ghost reference I could find in the California press—would become a headless paranormal powerhouse by mid-century.

First appearing as a put-upon spirit placating the weepy wraith of Scottish pirate Captain Kidd in A.J. Waterhouse’s “Occidental Accidentals” humor column in The San Francisco Call and Post, the ghost of Joaquin Murrieta retained his head—but not his sense of humor—in Why Kidd’s Ghost Wept.

Published the month before the 7.9-magnitude San Francisco earthquake leveled 80% of the City by the Bay—and allegedly taking with it his head—Murrieta suffers along with the reader through an uninspired ditty about…life insurance companies. It wasn’t the otherworldly bandit’s best look, but at least he’d kept his noggin.

The double whammy of World War I and the 1918 influenza epidemic would pass before the undead desperado would again pop up in print, his head still intact.

“A man who had leased some nearby property for cattle and hogs has relinquished all his rights,” noted The Pasadena Post of Thursday, October 9, 1919. “He has chased his herds and droves to another pasture and followed them hastily. The reason he gives is that the house on the property is haunted…by the spirit of Joaquin Murrieta.

“It cannot be thought that he is hanging around for any good purpose. He was a bandit. Perhaps some of his loot is buried at the spot he haunts…”

And “while the vanished tenant is the third to have folded his cattle and hogs and stolen silently away,” the Post opined, “the hard-headed observer fails to see why there is occasion to run from the wraith of the old land pirate…Even if the Murrieta ghost was armed with the ghosts of his old pistols, the ammunition was equally ghostly. One is wounded only in his mind by the ghost of a bullet.”

Expanding on the buried treasure angle, California folklorist Cora Ives laid out a ghostly legend of hidden loot for readers of The Fresno Morning Republican in 1924. Guarded over by the watchful spirit of a “Walking Murietta,” this missing gold is eventually dug up by a Mariposa gentleman working in his garden, in Ives’ confusing, but atmospheric, tale of lost love and found fortune. But one does wonder how “Joaquin” became “Walking”…

Just two years later, a group of The Fresno Morning Republican reporters—including F.T. Humphrey, John D.K. Perry, and a couple of adventurous cameramen—braved the rocky foothills of Cantua Canyon in the autumn of 1926, searching in vain for Joaquin Murrieta’s secret cave hideout and its rumored buried gold.

“Wrapped in impenetrable mystery,” Humphrey wrote with flair in the Sunday, October 17, 1926, edition of The Fresno Morning Republican. “So shrouded in legend and unbelievable superstition as to be impossible to locate. Such is the cave in which Joaquin Murieta—famous California bandit of 75 years ago—is supposed to have used in the Cantua hills southwest of Fresno.

“It is still sought for the valuable relics it is supposed to contain—still cited as the possible hiding place of thousands of dollars’ worth of loot seized in the bloody hands of the cut-throat gang, which raided towns and gold camps from Marysville to Los Angeles in the roaring, crimson days of old.”

Renewed interest in the buried treasure tale—perhaps, in part, spurred on by Ives’ fanciful rendition—had brought out the aspiring prospectors in a mini Gold Rush of sorts, no doubt prompting the journalists’ bold trek into the mountainous unknown.

“The cave, which has been sought and sought again in recent years—and, in fact, recent days—still defies discovery,” Humphrey continued. “It is as shifty and fantastic as the headless ghost of the ruthless marauder, whose bloody raids struck terror into the hearts of even the hardy pioneers—and whose head was sought and paid for by the great and dignified state of California.

“That headless ghost, by the way, still rides its phantom horse over the bleak Cantua hills at night; weird music still emanates from the mouth of the Murieta cavern, if one were to believe the superstitious tales…”

Well, the intrepid explorers never did find the mythical cave, but Humphrey’s sprawling, colorful prose did spur a number of spooked readers to send in their own personal ghost stories of encounters with California’s headless horseman. So F.T. Humphrey obliged them all that very next Sunday.

“Replete as was the life of Joaquin Murieta, famous California bandit of 1850-1853—with romance, deeds of daring robbery, and ghastly murder—it is no small wonder that with his death,” he wrote one week before Halloween, 1926, “a myriad of so-called ghost stories sprang up among the credulous people of his time—and that those same stories are still passed from mouth to mouth, even in the days when most of us laugh at apparitions and ghoulish tales of goblins…

“In any case—granting that California’s Robin Hood was duly shot to death, and beheaded, and his body left for the coyotes—one could hardly or reasonably expect the spirit of one whose life was filled with crimson episodes to rest idly peaceful in death…Far easier and much more romantic it were to imagine the headless ghost of Murieta riding again the highways…and laughing—in death as he did in life—at the terror he struck into the hearts of all who saw him.

“Perhaps it is for this reason that the most popular specter story of the outlaw chief, now dead these 75 years, is that of the headless horseman.”

One of the letters Humphrey had received was from a Hanford woman who told of a cold spring night in 1904, when she and her husband—recent transplants from England—were returning home from Lemoore in their horse-drawn wagon. It was close to midnight, and the dark, cloudy sky threatened rain.

“Conversation between us was desultory,” the anonymous woman wrote. “The horse we were driving knew every inch of the road, so no particular energy was required to keep her in the way.

“Suddenly, without sound or warning, a man on horseback loomed before us. Instinctively, I waited for my husband to draw aside. Our own horse, at the moment, shied violently, and broke into a gallop.

“The horse and man passed so close to my side of the buggy, that I could have touched them. But there was no sound whatever.

“‘What made the mare do that?’ asked my husband irritably, when he got her under control again.

“‘It was a man on horseback,’ I said. ‘You gave him no room to pass. He almost touched us.’

“‘What horseman?’ My husband was incredulous. He said no one had passed us for miles, that I must have imagined it. I insisted emphatically the horse was white, though I did not notice if the rider was headless.

“We discussed it all the way home, and laughingly came to the conclusion that the mare and I had seen a ghost. Four years later, I heard of the legend from an old resident of Kings County.”

Another of the letters Humphrey received concerned two Russian residents of Biola, who—having heard the tales of Murrieta’s buried treasure—hired an elderly Mexican man who was familiar with the terrain, to escort them both out to Cantua Canyon to search for the hidden gold.

By nightfall, they had reached the canyon, but their elderly guide was nowhere to be found; he had ditched them at dusk. “The two—undaunted by walking corpses and headless horsemen—proceeded with their task of digging for the purported treasure…starting to work on the range near the famous Murieta rocks.”

But by the very next night, the pair had returned to Biola empty-handed. Why had they given up in such a hurry? their perplexed acquaintances had asked.

“They explained their lost appetite for buried gold by telling neighbors of weird music on the lonely heights at midnight; of clattering hoof beats on the rocky trail; of mysterious, moving lights where honest lights had no business shining; and, but naturally, of a headless horseman plainly silhouetted against a starlit ridge.

“He pointed an accusing finger at them, and spoke clearly to them, before dissolving into thin air.”

Several years later, mere months before the Stock Market Crash of 1929 plunged the country into the Great Depression, the lure of Joaquin Murrieta’s hidden treasure still held sway over the South Valley.

“Tales of dreams concerning the bandit Murietta of old days has led ranch hands of this vicinity to dig feverishly for gold supposed to have been hidden by the famous marauder,” reported The Ventura Morning Free Press of Thursday, February 7, 1929. “Superstitions telling that Murietta’s ghost returns to his hordes of ill-gotten treasure are the basis of recent searches by Mexicans of the Ojai.”

And then, the very next year, came a bombshell claim from the second memoir of a Civil War veteran who had been dead a dozen years.

Born around the same time as Joaquin Murrieta, Major Horace Bell (1830-1918) would wear many hats in his long, storied career: failed gold prospector, Union soldier, trader, lawyer, Los Angeles Ranger, author, journalist, newspaper publisher, husband, and father of nine.

His first memoir, Reminiscences of a Ranger (1881), was followed up by a second one five decades later, published on what would have been Bell’s 100th birthday as On the Old West Coast, in 1930. And in it, Bell related what came to be known as one of the spine-chilling standouts in the growing canon of California headless horseman legends.

“There was a Billy Henderson who was a member of the party that killed Murrieta,”
Bell wrote in On the Old West Coast. “Billy was the man who cut his head off. He was for several years my neighbor, and a more genial and generous fellow I never met…

“But Billy Henderson was haunted by Joaquin Murrieta…He used to tell me that there was not a day, or more usually, a night, that Joaquin did not come to him personally, headless, and speak—for his voice was recognizable even though his head was missing. He was always demanding his head” (Bell 35).

The first time William T. Henderson ever saw the headless apparition was at dawn, as he was riding back to his ranch from Los Angeles. A horseman suddenly appeared by his side, his horse matching Henderson’s stride for stride.

“‘Who are you and what do you want?’ demanded Billy, hardly yet aware of the gruesome nature of the rider in the faint light.

“‘I am Joaquin Murrieta,’ claimed the strange horseman, in a voice so uncanny, and yet so natural, that its effect was absolutely startling. ‘You cut off my head, and I want you to restore it to me. No rest can ever come to me until I get my head back.’

“Billy stared at the rider close beside him, and saw that he was, indeed, headless, and that he was dressed and mounted in every detail exactly as at the time of his death. Overcoming his feeling of horror, Henderson…replied honestly, man to man: ‘Joaquin, it is true that it was I who cut off your head, but I am powerless to restore it. All I can say is that I have always been sorry that I did cut it off” (Bell 35).

The decapitated spirit scoffed at his apology as too little, too late, and promised to haunt Henderson for the rest of his life, until his missing head was restored to him. And then the phantom rider vanished as the sun rose over the range.

“‘Then for years,’ continued Billy, ‘I would wake up in the middle of the night hearing my name called, and when I responded, I would hear that voice say: “I am Joaquin, and I want my head.” At such times, I cannot see him; it is only when he rides up beside me on lonely roads—and this has happened many times—that he is visible.’

“‘Why, Billy!’ I exclaimed, ‘I should think it would set you crazy to be thus haunted.’

“‘No,’ he replied, ‘I’m not afraid of Joaquin’s ghost any more than I was afraid of Joaquin in the flesh. It’s not the actual apparitions that disturb me, not at all. The only thing about it is I am really sorry that I can’t get that head for him’” (Bell 36).

Henderson claimed that he had tried in vain to buy back the head of Joaquin, but to no avail. His own days were numbered, however.

Roughly a decade after he had confided in Major Horace Bell of Joaquin Murrieta’s unearthly harassment, the retired California Ranger—now in his fifties and living in Coarsegold—dropped over dead of a heart attack “while dressing to attend a Christmas festival,” The San Francisco Examiner reported of his Christmas 1882 passing.

A decade later, with the Great Depression in America’s metaphorical rearview mirror, the Murrieta ghost story’s buried treasure aspect was all but forgotten in favor of celebrating the Gold Rush desperado as a legendary folk hero—one whose beheaded soul was doomed to roam in search of justice for all eternity.

“This ought to be a Hallowe’en story, but it isn’t,” proclaimed The Hanford Sentinel on Wednesday, March 20, 1940. “It is the tale of Joaquin Murietta’s ghost, which, spooky tradition says, rides a richly caparisoned charger—or perhaps a restive bronco—over an old trail leading from Tulare Lake to a former rendezvous of the notorious bandit, somewhere north and west of Kings County.

“The story was related at a recent meeting of the Kings County Historical Association by a pioneer woman whose veracity is vouched for by all who know her.”

It was, in fact, the very same anonymous Hanford woman who had shared her 1904 Murrieta ghost encounter with The Fresno Morning Republican’s F.T. Humphrey in October of 1926.

“‘It was several years later that I heard the story that Murietta’s ghost,’ she told the Kings County Historical Association, ‘mounted and perhaps headless, haunted the old trail.’

“Since the story was told to the historical group, others have come forward with stories of the ghost,” the Sentinel continued. “They have convinced Robert R. Brown—who is writing a history of Kings County (although he is neither psychic, nor a believer in ghosts)—that the story should be passed on as one of the folk tales of pioneers.”

And sure enough, four months later, Robert R. Brown kept his word, when his massive History of Kings County was published in July of 1940, in a handsome chestnut leatherbound volume.

“It is in connection with that old bridle path—later a well-travelled country road—that the most interesting, romantic story of Murietta comes to Kings County folk,” Brown wrote. “It deals with the supernatural, and as such, is recounted only to record folklore of the times—and to reveal the deep impression made on the minds of pioneers by the legendary figures of banditry.

“Murietta—some profess to believe—still haunts that old bridle path! Thus Kings County has her ‘Legend of Sleepy Hollow,’ for the ghost of the old brigand is another ‘headless horseman.’ The theory of those who speculate on the apparition—either with the irony of the agnostic, or the credence of the psychic—is that the spirit of the old killer continues a restless quest for the head he lost at Cantua!” (Brown 67-68).

But the good people of Coulterville, in Mariposa County, had gotten a head start (pun intended) on the Joaquin renaissance with their inaugural Days of Joaquin Murrieta festival two years prior.

“Plans are complete for the third annual Days of Joaquin Murietta celebration,” The Modesto Bee announced on Friday, June 21, 1940, “which is to be staged here tomorrow and Sunday under the auspices of the Coulterville Commercial Club.

“This city—the locale of some of the most daring exploits of California’s most daring bandit—will revive the atmosphere of the Mother Lode’s glamorous days in staging the two-day fete,” including: races, a pie-eating contest, panning for gold, greased pole climbing, a carnival, a grand parade (featuring the Angels Camp Miners Band), a costume ball, a tug of war between local fire departments, a barbeque—and, of course, one very special guest.

“At midnight, Murietta’s ghost will walk in a spine-shivering spectacle!”

But the second World War rumbled in the distance like rolling thunder, looming on the horizon like a gathering storm.

And in the catastrophic wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, that cherished link of living memory to the Gold Rush era snapped like a frayed tendon—the heartbeat of living history all but stopped, its importance rendered insignificant in a rain of blood and fire that showered the earth for over four years.

And by the time the smoke had cleared, and the dust had settled, the Old West was dead. America grieved its own dead, licked its wounds, and then rebuilt the American Dream, suburb by shining suburb.

As a whole new generation came of age with the advent of television, the swaggering, lawless reality of an extinct era was reborn—and repackaged—as a sanitized myth fit for public consumption. Cowboys now sang as they rode the range, and the Wild West was always “won” by the good guys at the end of the hour.

The restless ghost of Joaquin Murrieta found himself reborn as well—this time as a vengeful wraith, still headless, haunting the dreams of those who had wronged him in life. And the California Rangers found themselves recast as either historical villains, hopeless drunks, or even outright buffoons. Or sometimes all three at the same time!

“Harry Love, short-bearded, long-haired, mean-tempered, and quick on the draw”—wrote The Fresno Bee’s Joe Smith in his “Tales of the San Joaquin” column of Sunday, September 12, 1954—“used to boast the bullet never had been molded which could kill him…”

Smith goes on to recount the same old tired tale of the alleged 1853 assassination of Joaquin Murrieta, after which “recurring visions of a headless horseman—of curious resemblance to Joaquin—disturbed him [Love], and he tried hard to dispel his fanciful dreams with fancy liquor…”

The dissolute character of the perpetually inebriated Captain Love eventually hits rock bottom, Smith writes, and “Love, his mind clouded by fearsome nightmares and debilitating liquor,” attempts an ambush on his estranged wife and her farm hand lover, losing his life in the process.

Accompanied by a comic illustration of a petrified Captain Love surrendering to the headless phantom bearing down from a stormy sky on his ghostly steed, The Fresno Bee columnist’s humor-tinged take on the Murrieta legend was the first of several different incarnations penned by Smith over the next two decades.

But though his hot takes changed over the years, Joe Smith’s core belief did not: that “Love…was so troubled by the frequent visitations of Murieta’s ghost, that he lost his mind.”

As the 1950s sailed placidly into the 1960s, there was change on the horizon, however. Another storm gathered in a tornado of movements demanding justice and equal rights, and as the tides of cultural evolution swept the globe over by the end of the sixties, they carried the Old West—its myths and legends, its pop culture, its literature, its televisual media—along for the ride.

Things were about to get real again.

By the early 1970s, the Westerns of the silver screen had returned to their roots: darker, grittier, and morally ambiguous. John Wayne was in his twilight years, and Clint Eastwood was in his prime. The Old West—both as a concept and as a philosophy—wasn’t so much a myth as it was a tragedy.

For these people of the past were not parts to be played, nor were they characters on the page or screen, their destinies preordained in ink or on celluloid. They had been flesh-and-blood human beings who lived and loved, who slaughtered one another—and then had to live with what they had done.

This is at the very heart of The Fresno Bee columnist Joe Smith’s final rendition of Joaquin Murrieta’s legacy (or, at least, the last one I could find). In it, he summed up the final, whiskey-drenched days and nights Captain Harry S. Love.

“With his share of the reward [for the alleged head of Joaquin Murrieta], Love bought a sawmill in the Santa Cruz Mountains,” wrote Smith on Sunday, September 16, 1973, “where at night he dreamed—and by day had recurring visions of—a headless horseman, of curious resemblance to the decapitated Joaquin Murieta.

“The years passed, and Love’s troubled mind became more clouded by the fearsome nightmares and prodigious quantities of whiskey he consumed. In bed at night, a shotgun lay beside him, and he carried the weapon wherever he went in his waking hours.”

Love’s hallucinations eventually got the better of him, leading to his humiliating demise. “One day in 1868, Love’s wife and his hired man drove to Santa Clara for supplies,” Smith continued. “When they returned, Harry was crouched behind a picket fence…his double-barrel shotgun at the ready.

“To him, they undoubtedly were apparitional twins, and he pulled both triggers.” Did Love really believe he was taking out the headless demon who haunted him night and day? We will never truly know, but the delusional captain ended up dead just the same—bleeding out as his bullet-shattered arm was amputated.

In this final retelling of Murrieta’s ghost legend, Joe Smith plays it out for the tragedy that it is, not the biting satire of a hopeless drunk’s comeuppance and downfall of two decades previous. When a man is mentally scarred by trauma, Smith ascertains, guilt and regret can ruin his life just as surely as bullets and whiskey.

If there is one kernel of truth in this whole epic saga, it is that one can be haunted by one’s memories just as surely as one can be haunted by the spirits of the dead. One such individual was Captain William Wallace Byrnes, alleged killer of Joaquin Murrieta.

In the spring of 1892, a reporter for The San Francisco Call and Post sought out the divorced daughter of Captain Byrnes, who had died eighteen years previous at the insane asylum in Stockton.

Running a small variety store in Berkeley in the wake of her divorce, Mrs. Nellie J. Abbott invited the journalist into a small, tastefully-furnished parlor at the back of her shop—and revealed the story of her troubled father for the first time.

“It is a fact, though it has never been published,” she told the Call and Post of Sunday, April 3, 1892, “that my father knew Joaquin long before the desperado came to California from Mexico.”

Born in Maine in 1824, her father had studied for the priesthood as a young man in St. Louis, before joining the Texas Rangers. “He went with the Rangers in the war with Mexico,” Abbott continued, “and was soon afterward taken prisoner…with other Americans, and was marched to Sonora. There he was kept under guard, but was…permitted to remain for some time at the mission. At that same mission, Joaquin Murietta…was being schooled.

“My father became very well acquainted with Joaquin, and they were what may be called chums for some time. A priest at the mission had taught my father to speak Spanish, and the two young men carried on conversations very well together.”

But later, after escaping with other prisoners and making his way back to California, William Wallace Byrnes fought in the Mexican-American War, then worked as a trapper and bounty hunter. One particularly gruesome job in 1846, however, would change him forever.

“After their first excursion [scalping for bounty], Byrnes was sickened by what they had done,” writes author Don Chaddock, “and plagued by nightmares after that first night. He told others they were visions. The next morning, he left the group.”

But by 1853, he had joined Captain Love and the California Rangers in the hunt for the Five Joaquins, and allegedly gunned down the only friend he had made while a captive down in Sonora. “He [Murrieta] saw my father standing ready to fire at him…” Byrnes’ daughter stated. “‘Don’t shoot,’ he cried, ‘I’m a dead man!’

“Then, as my father came nearer, the desperado said: ‘And to think that you should have killed me—you, Burns [sic], the only American I ever loved.’ Then he died…

“My father was not particularly proud of the feat of having killed him [Murrieta],” Mrs. Nellie J. Abbott concluded. “He said very little about it to strangers, but I have often heard him say that—immediately after the killing—he felt sorry to think that it had been his hand that had laid the outlaw low.”

“Byrnes has been variously reported as having lost his mind because the headless body of Joaquin pursued him, begging for the return of the head” (Latta 585), but in reality, Byrnes missed his shot—and quite possibly on purpose.

“One fact stands out above all others,” Murrieta historian Frank F. Latta writes in Joaquin Murrieta and His Horse Gangs (1980). “By no stretch of the imagination could the head brought forward and offered as that of Joaquin Murrieta be reconciled with the description given…by the Rangers themselves, or anyone who knew Joaquin Murrieta…

“Know that Joaquin Murrieta was a different man as described by the Rangers in the same newspaper that [their sworn] affidavits appeared. There Murrieta was described as very blond, with blue eyes, fair complexion, and light brown curly hair.

“Also, at this same minute, Love’s men had in their hands the head of a…California Indian: very dark complexion, inky-black hair and eyes, and straight hair. This they were representing as the head of the blond they described above.”

So just who’s head was it?

That of Murrieta’s horse wrangler Chappo (or Chapo), a California Native American who rode with the Five Joaquins—according to Avelino Martinez, the last surviving jinete (horseman) of Murrieta’s band. Author Frank F. Latta first met Martinez in 1916, when the then-92-year-old gave him the definitive story of what happened in the aftermath of the Cantua Canyon massacre on Monday, July 25, 1853.

“Avelino Martinez saw the battleground about 48 hours after the fight occurred,” Latta wrote. “He was in the first party to visit the place after the Rangers left…Avelino claimed that there were at least eight bodies,” and that “Murrieta left the battlefield alive after having helped bury those killed by the Rangers.”

Martinez—a 4’4” horse wrangler for Murrieta’s First Lieutenant Joaquin Valenzuela (who also lost his life that hot July morning in Cantua Canyon)—would live to be a legend in his own time as well. Living out his twilight years in Tehachapi, he died on Saturday, August 8, 1936, at the age of 112.

What we are left with, in the end, is the Golden State’s earliest urban legend, a folk tale evolved from once-upon-a-fact, of an ordinary man hardened by his grief, and by the cruelty of others—a devil-may-care desperado elevated to a mythical anti-hero of the Old West by the nation’s first Native American novelist.

In John Rollin Ridge’s 1854 novel—published the year after Joaquin Murrieta’s alleged 1853 assassination—the notorious leader of the Five Joaquins becomes the Robin Hood of El Dorado, exacting revenge and vigilante justice on those who lynched his brother, violated and murdered his pregnant wife, and horsewhipped him to the brink of death—in the name of family honor and self-preservation.

“Here was something a person could grasp and hold onto, even if John Rollin Ridge did cloud the event with doubt-arousing details…” (Latta 470).

And in the bullet-riddled wake of a state-sanctioned massacre, a vengeful headless wraith would emerge victorious over his killers—hounding them, for his missing head, until the end of their days—in a relentless pursuit of justice from beyond the grave.

What emerges is a message as profound as it is gratifying—that karma does not discriminate, that one can never escape the ghosts of one’s past transgressions without atonement. Haunted as they were by their racism, their betrayal, their greed, and their all-consuming guilt—Captains Harry S. Love, William Wallace Byrnes, and William T. Henderson found themselves held accountable for their ugliest deeds: mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically destroyed for the collective sins of their past.

And into the blood-red sunset of a mythic Mother Lode rides the Golden State’s own headless horseman—his death avenged, at long last, through the complete annihilation of his enemies—finally the immortal master of his own undead destiny.

All photos provided by the author.

Works Cited

“Fresno Items.” The San Francisco Examiner, Friday, December 29, 1882, p. 3.
“Joaquin Murietta’s Slayer.” The San Francisco Call and Post, Sunday, April 3, 1892, p. 13.
Waterhouse, A.J. “Why Kidd’s Ghost Wept.” The San Francisco Call and Post, Thursday, March 1, 1906, p. 8.
“Spirit of Murrieta.” The Pasadena Post, Thursday, October 9, 1919, p. 4.
Ives, Cora. “The Ghost of Agua Fria: A Romance of Buried Treasure.” The Fresno Morning Republican, Sunday, March 16, 1924, p. 13.
Humphrey, F.T. “In Which We Search for the Famous Murieta Cave.” The Fresno Morning Republican, Sunday, October 17, 1926, pp. 13, 26, 29.
Humphrey, F.T. “Ghosts of Joaquin Murieta.” The Fresno Morning Republican, Sunday, October 24, 1926, pp. 9, 12.
Bell, Major Horace. On the Old West Coast: Being Further Reminiscences of a Ranger. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1930. pp. 35-36.
“Five Years Ago: February 7, 1929.” The Ventura Morning Free Press, Wednesday, February 7, 1934, p. 4.
“Bandit Rides His Old Trail, Says Spooky Tradition.” The Hanford Sentinel, Wednesday, March 20, 1940, p. 3.
Brown, Robert R. History of Kings County. Hanford, California: A.H. Cawston, 1940, pp. 67-68.
“Burns and…” The Fresno Bee, Sunday, April 4, 1954, p. 15.
Smith, Joe. “Tales of the San Joaquin: Headless Ghost of Bandit Chieftain Disturbed Dreams of Ranger Captain.” The Fresno Bee, Sunday, September 12, 1954, p. 22.
Smith, Joe. “Tales of the San Joaquin: Fulfilling of a Boast.” The Fresno Bee, Sunday, September 16, 1973, p. 22.
Latta, Frank F. Joaquin Murrieta and His Horse Gangs. Santa Cruz, California: Bear State Books, 1980.
Secrest, William B. “Joaquin’s Ghost.” Undated.
Garza, Humberto. Joaquin Murrieta: A Quest for Justice! San Jose, California: Chusma House Publications, 2001.
Garza, Humberto. Joaquin: Demystifying the Murrieta Legend. San Jose, California: Sun House Publishing, 2004. pp. 8-35, 111-119.
Boose, Denise. “The Legend of Avelino Martinez.” The Historical Marker Database, Thursday, February 23, 2012. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=52918/
Chaddock, Don. “Ranger, Soldier Bill Byrnes was 1850s San Quentin Captain.” Unlocking History, Thursday, February 7, 2019. https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/insidecdcr/2019/02/07/unlocking-history-ranger-soldier-william-byrnes-was-sq-captain-in-1850/
www.findagrave.com
www.wikipedia.com

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Sarah A. Peterson-Camachois a library assistant with Fresno County Library, with a Bachelor’s in English and a Bachelor’s in Journalism from California State University, Fresno. In her free time, she makes soap and jewelry that she sells at Fresno-area craft fairs. She has written for The Clovis Roundup and the Central California Paranormal Investigators (CCPI) Newsletter.