LITMIR.BIZ

      A red letter week for unwonted excitement must have been the closing one in July, 1853, when the railroad route topographical survey party and its train of baggage wagons raised the dust of town towards a camp at the fort, followed in a day or so by Harry S. Love's dust-powdered cavalcade of twenty rangers, in red-hot from the killing of Bandit Joaquin Murieta, whose head was brought in pickle, also the hand of Manuel Garcia, "Three Fingered Jack." Garcia was also decapitated but the skull was so shattered with Love's shots that it could not be preserved and was cast to the coyotes.

      The survey party was protected by a detachment of dragoons, commanded by Lieut. George Stoneman. Little dreamed he then of the honors in store for him as a cavalry and corps commander ten years later in the war, or that in 1879 under the new constitution he would be elected one of the state's first railroad commissioners and on his masterly negative record as the minority member of three he would pave the easy way for the 1883-87 governorship of the state.

      Certain, however, that a vermilion hued dash of color was given to the picture when there came into the village the sun-browned gun fighters of Love, deputy sheriff of Los Angeles, a Texan, who had served as scout and express rider in the Mexican War and inured himself to border dangers and hardships. Bancroft describes him as "a law abiding desperado who delighted to kill wild men and wild beasts," a leader "with bright, burning and glossy ringlets falling over his shoulders," one who "wore a sword given by a Spanish count whom he had rescued from the savages." a personage the "way and walk of whom were knightly as of ancient cavalier," while "savages he had butchered until the business afforded him no further pleasure." That in the rude frontier settlement of rough men as at Millerton, Love was lionized goes without saying. Among his gun men were Harvey, who murdered Savage, and Philemon T. Herbert, the California congressman (1855-56), who distinguished himself by shooting an inoffensive negro hotel waiter in Washington.

      Truth to tell, the end of Murieta, with his pickled head as evidence of the fact, and the extermination of his band of cutthroats were events of state wide moment, the importance of which cannot be measured in these staid days of governmental regulation. The end of Murieta, described by Bancroft as the "King of California Cutthroats." and the "Fra Diavolo of El Dorado," merits more than passing reference, because a state verily rejoiced in h.is death.

      One unquestioned result of the enforcement of the foreign miner's tax law was the prejudice which it fomented, depriving many of employment and driving them to theft and even murder. This prejudice was evidenced in the passage, by the first legislature in April, 1850, of this tax law. It forbade anyone mining in the state, unless holding a thirty-days' twenty-dollar license, the sheriff empowered to assemble a posse of Americans to drive him off on nonpayment, and the governor's appointed tax gatherers receiving three dollars out of every license collected, to make them active and persistent. In March, 1851, this trouble-making law was repealed, but subsequently another was enacted fixing the license at four dollars per month and making the sheriffs the collectors. Except for harassing the inoffensive Chinese, it was not always strictly enforced. Persecution in 1850 growing out of this tax, in being driven from the Stanislaus River, followed by binding to a tree and public flogging in Calaveras, on an unfounded charge of horse stealing is said to have prompted Murieta to take an oath of vengeance that was relentlessly kept, sparing not even the innocent, such an implacable foe of every Gringo American came he to be.

      Besides the tax, there were laws prohibiting mining by any save such as could or intended to become citizens, and regulations of this character were not unusual in the Southern Mines until the four-dollar tax law was passed. But it was when the Chinese began to flock into the mining regions that the most violent hatred of the foreign element was aroused by their thrift and industry and the withdrawal of gold for which, as claimed, they left no compensating return. Driven from the mines, the Chinese accommodated themselves to the situation and became house servants, work hands and railroad builders, working more injury to white labor than if they had been left undisturbed in the mines among only a restricted class as to number.

      For some years in connection with the tax collections, the waste upper San Joaquin Valley region, and especially that west of Tulare Lake was roamed over by bands of Spanish speaking vagabonds, whose nominal vocation was running mustangs, but whose real activities were robbery and the protection of robbers. In October, 1855, the evil had so grown that on the Merced a company of rangers was formed and a bloody fight was had on the Chowchilla River with a band of horse and mule thieves. Sheriff's posses after these bands were not infrequent, nor sanguinary encounters either.

      It is an interesting coincidence that in his career Murieta came in early contact with Ira McCray, who was such a notable and conspicuous personage in the history of Millerton. It was about 1853 in Tuolumne County, at Sawmill Flat that McCray was a store keeper and obnoxious, to Murieta and his band, and that attempt was made to poison the spring furnishing drinking water. Fortunately the poison was so liberally applied that the project failed. McCray and others, it was

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