When the West Was Young. Frederick R. Bechdolt
in by the mountains on both sides, one 24 of the mothers lifted her arm in a gesture of farewell.
“Good-bye, Death Valley!” she cried.
That is the way the place was named.
They turned their backs on it and descended the long western slope. The dog, which they had taken with them all this distance, limped along behind the little train. The mule went on before. And in Los Angeles, where they joined the other survivors of the company weeks later and told the people of the pueblo of their sufferings, they called the sink Death Valley when they spoke of it.
Later, when they had gone into the north––for all of them pressed on as soon as they were able to travel again––they separated, seeking their fortunes in the mines. Years passed and occasionally some of them met again. At such times, or when they told others of the pitfall into which they descended striving toward the snow peak, they always used the name Death Valley. And so it has come down to us to-day.
25
JOAQUIN MURIETA
In the days of ’49 when Murphy’s Diggings was as lively a little placer camp as one could find in a long ride through the red foot-hills of the Sierras, a young Mexican monte-dealer disappeared. He was a handsome fellow, lighter of complexion than most of his countrymen, owned a sunny smile and spoke English fluently, all of which things made him a favorite among the American customers and consequently an asset to the house. So when dusk came and the booted miners began drifting into the long canvas-roofed hall, the proprietor scanned the crowd for him with some anxiety.
But the proprietor might as well have saved himself the trouble of that search; the monte-dealer had forsaken his table for a different sort of job.
Just at this time he was on the hill beyond the upper end of the camp kneeling beside an open grave; and in his clasped hands, uplifted high above his head, he held a naked bowie-knife. Some light still lingered here among the stiff-branched digger-pines, a faint reflection of the sunset far beyond the flat lands of the San Joaquin valley. It shone upon his face revealing a multitude of lines, so deeply scored, so terrible in their proclamation of deadly hate, that the sight of them would have startled the most case-hardened member of 26 the crowds down there where the candles were twinkling in the humming camp.
The waning light which sifted through the long plumed tassels of the digger-pines showed a little group of Mexicans standing at some distance listening in frightened silence to what he was saying. He spoke to the dead man in the open grave; and when events that followed brought the words back to their minds some of these auditors repeated the vow he made: to color that knife-blade and his hands bright red with the blood of twenty men of Murphy’s Diggings; and after that to devote his life to killing Americans.
This was the monte-dealer’s new job, and in order to understand how he came to undertake such a piece of work it is necessary to go back a little.
He was only nineteen, but life had been moving so swiftly with him that the beginning of these events finds him in that year overseer of his father’s great rancho down in Sonora, a Mexican of the better class, well educated as education went in those days, a good dancer as every girl in the section could bear witness, pleasure-loving, easy-going, and able to play the guitar very prettily. Sometimes––and more often as the weeks went by––he played and sang at the home of Reyes Feliz, a packer in his father’s employ; and Rosita, the packer’s daughter, liked his music well enough to encourage his visits.
Class counted then, as it does to this day in Mexico, and parents liked to have a hand in marriages. But Reyes Feliz was away from home a great deal with his train of mules, the landholder was busy at his own affairs; the girl was a beauty and the landholder’s son 27 had a winsome way with him. So one night Rosita took the horse which he brought for her and rode off with him to California.
They made their journey with their mounts and a single pack animal across the hot plains and arid mountains of the south, then up the long King’s Highway which the padres had beaten down nearly one hundred years before their time. It was winter and California winter means Eastern spring; green grass rippling in the soft breezes, poppy-fields and a rioting of meadow-larks to make their honeymoon ideal. They rode on northward into the Santa Clara valley where a gleaming mist of mustard blossoms hung under the great live oaks as far as the eye could reach; then they struck off eastward across the Coast Range and the flat lands of the San Joaquin, to climb into the red foot-hills where the Stanislaus comes out from the Sierras. Here they settled down and took a mining claim.
The feeling engendered by the Mexican War still rankled in many neighborhoods; and every mining camp had its lawless element whose members took full advantage of that prejudice against the conquered race. The claim proved rich enough to tempt some ne’er-do-wells. They gathered a crowd of their own breed and the mob came to the young pair’s cabin one evening with the purpose of jumping the property. When the owner made a show of resistance they bound him hand and foot, after which they subjected the girl to such abuses as will not bear the telling. She pleaded with her lover when the crowd had gone and managed to induce him to leave the place without attempting vengeance. They went to Columbia and within the month 28 were driven out by another anti-Mexican mob. Their next move took them to Murphy’s Diggings, where the boy got his job at dealing monte and was doing very well––until this evening came, and with it, tragedy.
He had been visiting his brother, who had come to California and settled near Murphy’s; and the latter had lent him a horse to ride home. As he was nearing the upper end of the camp a group of miners stepped out into the road before him and halted him. The horse had been stolen from one of their number and they were searching for it at the time.
They listened to his explanations and went with him to his brother who told them how he had bought the animal in good faith from a stranger. Whereat they seized the narrator, bound him, and hanged him to the nearest live-oak tree; then stripped the monte-dealer to the waist, tied him to the same tree, and flogged him until the blood ran down his bare back. After which they departed, satisfied that they had done their share to bring about law and order in a neighborhood where thefts were becoming altogether too frequent. But some of them mentioned in Murphy’s Diggings––during the brief space of time while they had the opportunity––the strange expression which came over their victim’s face while the lash was being applied. Each of these men spoke of the look as having been directed at himself. Had they been members of one of the dark-skinned races, to whom the vendetta is peculiarly an institution, they would have understood the purport of that look.
But none of them understood and the monte-dealer was left to keep his promise to his dead brother. He 29 turned his back upon the grave and went about the fulfilment of that vow as ambitious men go about the making of careers; and in the days that followed, while his swarthy company was sweeping through California like fire on a chaparral hillside when the wind is high, he gained a dark fame, so lasting that there is hardly an old settled community from Mount Shasta to the Mexican line which has not some tale of the bandit, Joaquin Murieta.
Sometimes during the weeks after the lynching a miner on his way to the gambling-houses after supper got a glimpse of Joaquin Murieta in the outskirts of Murphy’s Diggings, as he glided among the tents cloaked to his eyes in his serape. Occasionally a late reveler, returning to his cabin in the darkness, was startled by the sight of his figure beside the road, as black and silent as the night itself; or was chilled to dead sobriety by the vision of that drawn face confronting him on a narrow trail. And in the chilly mornings men going to their work came on the bodies of his victims in the soft red dust of path or wagon-track, or stumbled over them in the chaparral.
And now fear began to seize the survivors of that lynching party. By the time its twenty members had dwindled to something like a dozen, the succession of spectacles afforded by the companions whom they had been summoned to identify was getting on the stoutest nerves; the dullest imaginations were working feverishly. Some found friends to act as body-guards; others moved away to try their fortunes