The painting at the left, reputed to be painted from life by a Franciscan friar resident at Carmel, is said to show the face of the notorious bandit Joaquin Murrieta. It is not known, for certain, if there was ever a Joaquin Murrieta who single-handedly terrorized the Forty-Niners. One Captain Harry Love, a slovenly former Texas Ranger, showed up in San Francisco with the head of a Latin man, pickled in brandy, who he claimed was the newly demised outlaw. The head remained on display at a San Francisco "museum" until the Great Earthquake and Fire; when it was looted and passed through the hands of several collectors. It was recently the subject of an effort by a Catholic priest to secure a proper burial.
Joaquin may have been several men, fused by the panic of the recently intruded miners from the east and the words of a newsman named John Rollins Ridge, into a single rumor and legend. The bandit did not merely defy capture, he scoffed at it. One story has a lawman nailing a wanted poster offering $100 for his capture. A Mexican strode boldly out of the crowd and wrote something on the poster. As he rode off, onlookers went to see what he wrote: "I will give $1000. Joaquin Murietta."
Cincinatus Hiner Miller wrote of the Californio rebel in the late 1860s and named his second book of poetry for the subject of a long poem contained therein. In 1870, Ina Coolbrith persuaded C. Hiner that his was no name for a great poet to "climb the slopes of Parnassus" and so, he appropriated the name of his brigand hero for his own.
The version of the poem which appears here is the shorter 1909 version. Miller cut a lengthy confessional scene and the killing of Murietta by the California Rangers, leaving several sections which reflect his vague, transcendentalist philosophy.