Strange, maybe true, story of Joaquin Murieta’s head
Many strange objects have appeared in San Francisco, but none odder than the head of Joaquin Murieta.
For more than 50 years, the notorious outlaw’s head was displayed in various places in the city, until it disappeared after the 1906 earthquake and fire. To this day, no one knows exactly where it is.
It’s fitting that the whereabouts of Murieta’s head are shrouded in ambiguity, for his entire life is. As Bruce Thornton writes in “Searching for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta and History in California,” “All the details of (Murieta’s) story … from the crimes Murieta presumably committed to the true identity of the head, can be doubted or disbelieved because of conflicting, contradictory, fraudulent or uncertain evidence.”
As a result of this murkiness, Murieta has become a mythical figure, a righteous avenger of the wrongs done to his fellow Latinos. The fountainhead of this myth was a dime novel that depicted Murieta as an innocent miner who was driven from his claim by brutal Americans who raped his beloved in front of him, lynched his brother and whipped him — the last act driving him to vow bloody vengeance.
Both Mexicans and Californios were indeed often the victims of American brutality, but as Thornton points out, “No evidence has been found that such injustices were ever actually experienced by the historical Joaquin.”
The exact facts about Murieta will never be known. But according to the confession of a man named Teodor Vasquez, who got his information from a cellmate thought to be Murieta’s brotherin-law, Murieta was the leader of a gang made up of Mexicans,
Californios and Americans that killed and robbed people of all ethnic groups.
The gang’s crime spree began at the Marsh Ranch near Mount Diablo, where they killed a visitor. Then they attacked a nearby ranch, decapitating one man and splitting another’s head open with an ax.
On the Feather River, they cut the throats of a traveler named Gallagher and his servant for $34 in gold, then murdered a teamster and two passersby who came to help.
After a string of additional bloody crimes, the Murieta gang ended up in Calaveras County in 1853. There, they killed dozens of people, many of them Chinese.
Public outrage soon led state officials to create the California Rangers, a force inspired by the Texas Rangers. Led by Harry Love, the Rangers caught up with Murieta’s gang in the southern San Joaquin Valley on July 25, 1853. In the ensuing gunfight, Murieta and a confederate named ThreeFingered Jack were shot dead.
To ensure that the Rangers collected the $1,000 reward, the story goes, Love ordered the head of Murieta and the head and hand of ThreeFingered Jack cut off and sent to the nearest fort. Jack’s head didn’t survive the journey, but what was advertised as his hand and Murieta’s head — pickled in whiskey and placed in a glass jar — made their way to San Francisco, where they were displayed at John King’s Saloon on Sansome Street, admission $1.
Some newspapers reported that the head wasn’t Murieta’s; others even denied that an outlaw by that name had ever existed. One correspondent mocked the whole story, writing that the outlaw, far from being dead, had been seen swimming the Tuolumne River, “carrying his head in his mouth.”
Other newspapers decried the display as ghoulish. The Alta California criticized “the brutalized wretch who has been exhibiting in this city — when he could get a spectator — the horrible spectacle of a human head severed from the body.”
After its stint at John King’s Saloon, the head was displayed elsewhere in San Francisco by Ranger John Chiles, who said it was the only way he and his colleagues could recoup the money they had spent tracking the gang. The head and hand then dropped out of sight: According to one story, both were stolen.
By 1855, however, the head had reappeared: The sheriff seized it from someone named Wothring for nonpayment of debt, and it was sold at auction for $36. Eventually it ended up in the possession of a gun dealer named Natchez, who later fatally shot himself by accident — a contribution to the head’s increasingly spooky lore. Various ghost stories surrounded the head, including one in which Murieta appeared nightly to the Ranger who had killed him and said, “I am Joaquin and I want my head back.”
The head’s next owner was a Mr. Craigmiles, who dreamed of making $50,000 by taking it on a national tour. The tour never happened, and Craigmiles apparently unloaded the head for $11.
In 1865, the head arrived at its final known destination — a strange place called Dr. Jordan’s Pacific Museum of Anatomy and Science. Dr. Jordan’s museum, on Market Street, was an “anatomical museum,” a genre that no longer exists but which in the 19th century served a quasipornographic, quasiscientific, quasi-freak show function. Such establishments allowed men to leer at naked figures of women, observe examples of venereal disease, and marvel at four-headed chickens, Egyptian mummies, body parts of famous criminals and the like.
Dr. Jordan’s museum also supported his dubious medical practice. According to a 1916 article in the California State Journal of Medicine, Jordan was a quack whose male visitors, alarmed by the hideous examples of tertiary syphilis they had just seen, would visit his medical office on Union Square. After charging $5 for a urine test, Jordan would gravely inform his patients that their sample was filled with semen and “brain particles,” and that if they did not begin treatment with him immediately, they would end up looking like the displays they had just seen. The terrified men would pay up to $600 for Jordan’s bogus cure.
By the time of the 1906 earthquake, Dr. Jordan’s museum, and Murieta’s head, had moved to 1209 McAllister St. in the Western Addition. According to one supposed eyewitness account, the quake smashed a glass bowl “and lying on its ear among the fragments was the gruesome head of Murrieta (sic).” But this eyewitness also claimed that the fire soon destroyed the museum, which didn’t happen — the Western Addition didn’t burn. More plausible is the account of a museum janitor, who said all the specimen jars were smashed and that the specimens that could not be saved were buried in the alley.
If this is true, the head of Joaquin Murieta is entombed beneath tons of concrete, next to other now-decomposed specimens from Dr. Jordan’s bizarre collection.
But that is not the last word. As Thornton writes, in the 1970s, a Santa Rosa man named Walter Johnson claimed to have the head, which for a time he stored in a vault. According to his granddaughter, Johnson eventually grew tired of being bothered by the health department and buried it in a secret location. Gary Kamiya is the author of the best-selling book “Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco,” awarded the Northern California Book Award in creative nonfiction. All the material in Portals of the Past is original for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: metro@sfchronicle.com