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 homicide rates there were 30 times higher than they are today.
And so there were a lot of outlaws, a lot of ruffians.
A lot of the people that came to California were very rough and tumble frontiersmen, and many were highly disreputable.
Even some of the wealthier people
that came to California turned out to be escaping charges back in the eastern states.
The gang pretty much was opportunistic.
Their principal target during this period,
And this is one of the real puzzlements for those who believe that Joaquin was a Robin Hood or what revisionist historians have called a social bandit, meaning a primitive rebel, somebody who's striking back against the upper class, against the capitalists.
But their principal target was Chinese miners.
What had happened was this was a worldwide gold rush.
People came from Europe, from Asia, from South America, and developed this incredibly diverse society in California.
And among the earliest miners...
were those in Guangdong or what we call Canton province in Southern China.
And 20,000 Chinese joined the gold rush just in the first year or so.
They just boarded ships, came to San Francisco, went up to the mining country.
And in the culture of the Chinese, these were generally working class men.
Very few women came at that period from China.
And they call California Gold Mountain,
And for them, it was an opportunity to escape poverty.
Just the same, the motivations were the same no matter where you came from.
Showing 121–140 of 299 · page 7 of 15
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