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
Well, and three fingers was actually a common injury for a vaquero.
They'd lasso cattle, whip the end of the lariat around the saddle horn, and if you didn't do it correctly, it'd take off your thumb or finger.
So he was variously called three-fingered jack or four-fingered jack, depending upon whether you counted his thumb as a finger or not.
That's very true.
And people saw the American West no matter where you lived.
We've talked about people from all over the world saw the American frontier as a place of new beginnings, a place of hope, a place where you could become independent and financially responsible and reinvent yourselves in many cases.
And so it was sort of like a dream for people from all over the world to come to the American West.
And this story of banditry was something that became even more and more common with stories about Jesse James, Billy the Kid, the Dalton Gang, and many, many more.
Many of them were subjects of dime novels long before the introduction of motion pictures.
Well, really, even in more recent years, a number of books have come out, especially since the 1950s, about Joaquin Murrieta.
One in particular claimed that he wasn't even a real person, that he was a fabrication.
And then other books came out that relied on John Rolland Ridge, even books written by academics that relied on the Ridge book as a source when just any kind of perfunctory research would tell you that, hey, we need to look into some of this stuff.
This may be fiction.
And so a detailed, researched, and resourced book about Joaquin had never been written.
And so the result is my book, which is perhaps overly long.
It's almost 500 pages, several hundred end notes, which document every statement in the book.
Because I wanted to, as a historian who loves the Wild West, I wanted to tell the true story, bring in all the characters, tell you who they were, where they came from, what happened to them, and tell the real story of Joaquin Murrieta, which really had never been done before.
You're more than welcome.
And thank you for having me.
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