John Boessenecker
speaker
299 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 20 Jul
John Boessenecker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Absolutely.
This was the biggest gold rush in the history of mankind.
And gold was discovered almost at the same time the treaty that you mentioned, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, was signed ending the Mexican War and made California a territory of the United States as well as much of the Southwest.
And so what happened was after gold was discovered, because northern Sonora was closer, 500 or 600 miles away, word arrived there within three, four, five months, whereas word of the gold discovery did not arrive on the east coast of the United States until the fall of that year.
And it was largely discredited.
Everybody thought it was a hoax until the president of the United States confirmed it in November of 1848.
And that set off this massive gold rush.
Well, Joaquin was actually born in Alamos, which is a mining town in Sonora in northern Mexico.
And when word arrived in the summer of 1848, he and his young wife, Rosa Feliz, and his three brothers-in-law, who became very prominent in the outlaw gang,
all joined the gold rush.
And within just a few months, 20,000 Sonoran miners arrived in California from northern Mexico.
And Joaquin and his wife and brothers-in-law were just a handful of the many experienced miners that came from northern Mexico.
Well, the legend of Joaquin began to develop just about the time he was killed.
It's sort of a common human inclination from the days of Robin Hood to take a common criminal and adorn them with certain mythical character traits.
Robbing from the rich and giving to the poor is one of those traits.
In Joaquin's case, he died in 1853.
And of course, we'll get into that as we go forward.
But within a year of his death, a novel was written about his life by a Cherokee author named John Rollin Ridge.
And Ridge, in his novel, created most of the myths about Joaquin, including the one that Anglo miners stole his claim, they raped his wife Rosa, they lynched his half-brother and flogged him mercilessly.
And he was so outraged by disgraceful treatment that he then turned to a life of banditry.
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