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
And they put it into a barrel of alcohol.
And they cut off the hand of Three-Fingered Jack because his head has been shot up by several pistol bullet wounds and is unrecognizable.
And they then display the head throughout the mining region.
And so what you're doing here is the nearest photographer was a two days ride.
The temperature was 112 degrees in the San Joaquin Valley.
And the head would have been non-existent really for purposes of taking a photograph.
So they wanted the reward.
And how do we get the reward?
We have to prove we got the right guy.
We can't get a photograph taken.
There's only a handful of photographers in the entire state of California at this time.
And so they cut the head off and they display it throughout the mining region.
They collect scores of affidavits, many from the Chinese miners who'd been victimized, other people, some Latino who knew Joaquin in Mexico.
many others who identified him as a notorious gambler, that kind of thing, because he had been quite well known in the mining region before he turned to banditry.
And then they used these affidavits to collect the $5,000 reward that the state legislature had placed on the head of Joaquin Murrieta.
Whatever happened to that head?
The head, bizarrely, its ownership was contested at one point in what I call the most bizarre auction in American history.
It was auctioned by the sheriff of San Francisco on the courthouse steps.
because the owner had failed to pay his debts.
And in 1866, it ended up in a freak museum in San Francisco and was on display there for 40 years, a very well-known object seen by many, many people, and finally was destroyed along with the entire museum in the fire and earthquake of 1906.
Showing 221–240 of 299 · page 12 of 15
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