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
The author of Zorro, which is originally released as a magazine sequel in 1919, never did say that he based Joaquin on Zorro.
However, during the 1920s, a fellow, he was a reporter, the author of Zorro was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and one of his fellow LA Times reporters said as early as the 1920s,
that Zorro was based on Joaquin Murrieta.
So we don't have it from the horse's mouth, but the myth goes back very soon after the release of the book Zorro, which, as you mentioned, became a very popular TV series, multiple movies, and is very much a legendary character today.
Well, Joaquin was a young miner from Alamos in northern Mexico in the state of Sonora, and he married quite young.
He was born about 1829 or 1830, and by the time word of the California gold rush arrived,
in Sonora in the summer of 1848.
He was married to a young woman named Rosa Feliz, and many of the miners in northern Mexico were experienced silver miners, but to transition into gold miners wasn't a big deal.
And so when the word came of the discovery of gold, they just got on their horses and mules and wagons and headed north.
So many people from northern Mexico
immigrated to California so quickly that Mexican officials thought that their northern frontier was going to be depopulated.
Well, the story, as I mentioned, about his wife being raped by a group of Anglo miners who then drove him off his claim, flogged him, and lynched his half-brother, that's a myth created by John Rollin Ridge in his novel about Joaquin Murrieta.
What actually happened was Joaquin settled in and around the mining town of Sonora, at that time the most prominent mining camp in the southern Sierra Nevada, named after the miners from the state of Sonora, Mexico.
And there were more than 10,000 in that area.
And they mined in places like Campo Seco, in Sawmill Flat, and in the town of Columbia, which is today a very popular state park.
You can't drive a car on the streets of Columbia.
in the old town because it's the best preserved gold camp of California.
And what happened was Joaquin was driven off his mining claim.
The Anglo miners showed up later.
By the time they got there in the spring, summer, and fall of 1849, the Mexican miners had already been there for almost a year.
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