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
But the stories told by Ridge have no basis in fact.
What actually happened was it was his brother-in-law, Claudio Felice, the oldest brother of his wife, Rosa Felice, who became the first member of the family to engage in banditry.
Claudio was mining with a group of Anglo miners.
near sonora and he stole a pouch of gold there was a trial over this and eventually suspicion rested on claudio instead of the anglo sailor who was accused of stealing the gold and claudio just fled sonora and that was the beginning of his bandit career joaquin instead turned to gambling when he failed as a miner he gambled
in the mining region from Mariposa in the south to Marysville in the north.
And in doing so, he learned all the trails and wagon roads and the geography that would be very important to him in his later career as a bandit.
This is one of the first attacks that we know of.
One of the affiliates of the gang, who was later hanged in San Jose, gave a very detailed confession about all the crimes that the gang had done.
And the rancho owned by John Marsh can still be visited today.
in eastern contra costa county in the east bay in california and what they did was they rode up pretended to be a bunch of innocent passers-by they cased john marsh's ranch he was a very prominent rancher and doctor and then they looted the ranch they stole about
40-odd horses and murdered two Anglos who were camped in a tent on the property.
And this was a very typical bandit raid, kind of like the beginning of the raids by the gang that would eventually be led by Joaquin Murrieta.
And this was the method of operation of the gang.
Basically, the belief, I think, was dead men tell no tales.
And so this was really one of the most violent and certainly the most murderous bandit gang of the Old West.
I point out occasionally that even the cowboys who fought against the Earp brothers in Tombstone, they were the West's largest bandit gang, and they committed 35 murders, more or less.
Joaquin and his much smaller gang of about 10 men committed far more murders than that.
Yes, this was a very detailed account given in the papers where the bandits raided the Digby farm.
They butchered Digby and his partner.
Then they set the place on fire, not aware that a keg of gunpowder was
Showing 61–80 of 299 · page 4 of 15
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