I swore by heck I’d break his neck
for the jolt he gave my pride,
so I threw my noose on that old cayoose
and once more took a ride;
then he turned around and soon I found
his tail where his head should be.
So I says, ‘Says I, perhaps he’s shy,
or he just don’t care for me.’
(‘The Devil’s Great Grandson’, Bob Nolan)
Like Skyball Paint, the devil’s horse and subject of Bob Nolan’s
hillbilly song, here’s a tale where a head should be. The head
belonged to Joaquin Murrieta, a horse-thief and bandit active during
the Californian gold-rush, and the tale belonged to Harry Love, a
veteran of the Mexican-American War contracted by California’s
embryonic government to put a stop to Murrieta’s career and that of
his associates: four more bandits, each also called Joaquin. Love had
been hired for a three-month term, concluding in mid-August 1853, and
there is little doubt that there was a tacit agreement of a
substantial bonus if Love brought down his man. On August 4th, Love
reported to Governor Bigler that the deed was done; as proof, he
brought with him Murrieta’s severed head, preserved in a jar of
alcohol. It was taken on a tour of the state by two of Love’s
confederates, with admission charged at a dollar, and during this
period a number of affidavits were taken as to the identity of the
head. The route, however, seemed to purposefully avoid those areas
where Murrieta had been well-known, and most of the affidavits were
signed with Xs, indicating that the witnesses had not been able to
read what they were signing. One of Love’s confederates was
reported as bragging in a pub that ‘one pickled head was as good as
another if they [sic] was a scar on the face and no-one knew the
difference’.
 |
| An illustration from Captain Love and the Five Joaquins |
This is history, of
a sort. My poem ‘
Captain Love and the Five Joaquins’ plays
thoroughly fast
and loose with it. My real inspiration was the legend of Zorro: the
serials, the Douglas Fairbanks film, Youtube clips of the Mexican
telenovela (in which Zorro battles pirates and zombies, and is
assisted by a flamboyant coterie of gypsies), and especially the 1998
film starring Antonio Banderas. All of these (apart from possibly the
telenovela, which plays by rules of its own) engage with history but
are not bound by it. To get a clearer view of Love alone, as his lie
begins to close in on him, I have made him a solitary figure, erasing
the twenty California Rangers he rode with; on the other hand I have
made the Five Joaquins real, whereas all evidence suggests they are a
joke being played on the California legislature by a cynical state
senator called De La Guerra. I have also played merry hell with
Californian geography: Fresno was not a city at this point and
certainly not a seat of government, and Laredo is mentioned in
tribute to the beautiful song rather than out of any topographic
plausibility.
And in a way this is
honesty towards the source, because in fact Murrieta
is Zorro.
The early newspaper accounts were turned into a sensational novel by
John Rollin Ridge (who was incidentally the first Native American
novelist), pirated and corrupted by the
California Police Gazette,
and thereafter told and retold as much or more than any other piece
of Gold Rush folklore; and these accounts were plainly the main
source material Johnston McCulley drew on when he created for the
pulp serials his ‘masked man dressed all in black’, the fox, so
cunning and free, and who is especially free with carving his initial
on stationary objects.
— John Clegg
* * *
Captain Love and the Five Joaquins, by John Clegg and illustrated by Emma Wright, is publishing on 29th May 2014 with The Emma Press. You can read more about it and buy it for £5 on The Emma Press site.
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