Harmony Posters

    Joaquin Carrillo Murrieta, {1829 – 1853} of Mexican or Chilean nationality, was a semi-legendary figure in California during the Californian Gold Rush of the 1850’s. He was either an infamous bandit, or a Mexican patriot, depending on one’s point of view. The site of Murrieta’s birth is disputed. Either Alamos in the north western state of Sonora, Mexico, or in Quillota. Folklore claims Murrieta, a noble landowner supposedly of Spanish Creole blood, sympathised with the struggle of Native Americans as well as that of the Mexicans and Spanish-Americans he encountered in his residence in 1850’s California.
    May  11^th 1853, Governor of California, John Bigler signed a legislative act creating the ‘California State Ranger,’ led by  Captain Harry Love, a former “Texas Ranger” whose mission it was to arrest the five Joaquins, Botellier, Carrillo, Ocomorenia and Valenzuela, a gang lead by Joaquin Murrieta. A group of Californian Rangers encountered a group of Mexican males near Panoche Pass in San Benito County. A confrontation occurred, and two of the Mexicans who were killed, in July 1853, were Joaquin Murrieta and Manuel “three fingered” Garcia. The Rangers took Garcia’s “three fingered” hand and Joaquin’s head as evidence of their deaths and displayed them in a jar, preserved in brandy. The jar was displayed in Mariposa County, Stockton, and San Francisco, and the exhibition travelled throughout California, where for $1 people could view the remains of the two outlaws. Seventeen people, including a priest, signed affidavits identifying the head as Joaquin. Both Joaquin’s head and the hand of Manuel “three fingers Jack” Garcia were lost in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. As this exhibition only travelled throughout the State of California, for the above poster to be relevant in the Silver Dollar Saloon, it places the town of Harmony firmly in the State of California.

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