New York Times bestselling author and award-winning historian John Boessenecker will release, Bring Me the Head of Joaquin Murrieta: The Bandit Chief Who Terrorized California and Launched the Legend of Zorro, on Oct. 21, and San Luis Obispo’s Wild West days are featured prominently throughout.
Boessenecker, a San Francisco trial lawyer and former police officer, begins his book by quoting one of his sources at length, Cherokee writer John Rollin Ridge’s 1854 novelization The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murrieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, published the year after Murrieta was killed by a posse who did indeed cut off his head, preserving it in a jar of alcohol and saving it as proof of his death.
Boessenecker’s sweeping account dispels the romanticization of Ridge’s book to paint a more realistic and violent portrait of the murderous bandit said to have inspired Johnston McCulley’s 1919 pulp novel The Curse of Capistrano, the first work featuring Don Diego de la Vega, the masked hero called Zorro. Despite his folk hero mythos of a wronged Latino fighting the evil gringos, in Boessenecker’s research, Murrieta was little more than a thief and a murderer preying on the weak.
Detailed, compelling, and dotted with historic photos, paintings, and etchings, this book will be of interest to history buffs and Wild West aficionados. ∆
This article appears in Oct 9-19, 2025.