In the summer of 1853, two California rangers stood over the body of the most wanted man in the state. With the afternoon sun burning their hands and faces, Bill Burns pulled a canvas sack from his saddlebag, stuffed it with willow branches, and walked back to the corpse of Joaquin Murrieta. Only minutes earlier, he and his fellow ranger William Henderson had shot the outlaw dead, entitling them to the bounty placed on his head by the state of California itself. But to claim that prize, they needed proof.
Their commanding officer, Captain Harry Love, had ordered that the bandit leader’s head be removed, placed in the sack, and carried to Fort Miller, some sixty miles away in the Sierra foothills. The task was grim, but with five thousand dollars on the line, Burns set to work. When he finished, he and Henderson carried the sack back to the dry riverbed where Love and the rest of the company held two prisoners. One was a terrified twenty-three-year-old named José María Ochoa, who begged for release and muttered vague information.
The other was a heavyset, muscular man named Antonio López, who stood motionless, sneering at his captors, refusing to speak. Love demanded to know where the rest of the band had gone. López remained silent. Then Love motioned for Burns to take over.
Burns walked up to the prisoner, reached into the sack, and presented the head of the man López had sworn loyalty to. “Tell all you know or say your prayers,” Burns said. López glanced at the severed head and answered, “Cut away. I’ll not tell.
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Love ordered Burns and Henderson to repeat the operation on the body of Three-Fingered Jack, who lay dead nearby, before riding to Fort Miller to claim the bounty. The rangers carried out the order without question. They were rough men, assembled by official state decree for a single purpose: to kill or capture Murrieta and his gang. They were not a formal military unit but a state-sponsored volunteer force of bounty hunters, bound not by discipline but by respect for a captain they trusted with their lives.
That captain was Harry Love, a living legend on the California frontier. Born in Vermont in 1810, he had run away as a teenager to serve as a cabin boy on his uncle’s vessel, sailing the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and around Cape Horn. He reached California ports in 1839 and later arrived in Texas in 1842, just as the Mexican army under Santa Anna attempted to reclaim the breakaway republic. Love enlisted in the Army of the Republic of Texas, served a short term, and then worked as a laborer on Mississippi River barges and a stevedore in Mobile, Alabama.
When the Mexican-American War broke out, he joined the Alabama Volunteers in May 1846, though his unit saw no combat and was relegated to border patrol. After the war, he served as a civilian dispatch rider for the army, carrying correspondence along the Rio Grande. His journeys were harrowing. On one 700-mile ride from Chihuahua to Brownsville, he survived an ambush by Comanche warriors.
Later, traveling with a companion named William Sherman, he was attacked by Apache raiders, lost a horse and weapons in a flooded creek, and escaped only after shooting the Apache chief leading the charge. In San Antonio, locals had long reported him dead, and his safe return caused an uproar, with one admirer describing him as “a perfect specimen of the border dandy. ”
In 1849, word of gold at Sutter’s Mill reached Texas. Love, like so many others, planned to try his luck in California, but the army was loath to lose him and offered him command of an exploratory expedition up the Rio Grande.
He spent a year charting the river aboard a keelboat dubbed the Harry Love before finally heading west in the fall of 1850. He sailed from Mazatlán to San Francisco, arriving in December, and spent months prospecting in the Sierra foothills without success. He found little gold, but he did find his true calling: hunting criminals. In May 1852, a newspaper article from Fort Miller reached Mariposa warning of a bandit gang ravaging the central San Joaquin Valley.
The murder of a miner named Alan Ruddle in the town of Snelling had shaken the region. Vigilante parties formed and pursued the outlaws, but one by one they gave up. Only Harry Love and an unnamed companion remained on the trail. They followed Murrieta and his men south through the Tehachapi Pass to Los Angeles, where the gang split up.
Love tracked Murrieta and a cohort named Pedro González to a seaside roadhouse. A gunfight broke out. Murrieta escaped, but Love arrested González, who attempted to flee and was shot in the back of the head. Though Love had not captured the leader, word of his relentless pursuit spread throughout California.
That reputation mattered, because Murrieta had become a catastrophe. His gang had committed at least forty-five murders by 1853, a toll rivaled only by outlaws like John Wesley Hardin. Towns from San Diego to Humboldt County lived in terror. Newspapers demanded action.
In March 1853, Mariposa assemblyman Phil Herbert introduced legislation raising the bounty on Murrieta to five thousand dollars, a princely sum worth over two hundred thousand dollars today. But the bill met stiff resistance. Santa Barbara assemblyman José María Covarrubias objected on principle, arguing that setting a price on a man who had not been convicted by due process was unjust and could tempt unscrupulous men to defraud the state. The legislation failed.
Public outrage only grew. Two petitions circulated in Mariposa County, one initiated by Harry Love himself, describing a county “ravaged by a band of robbers” and demanding a state-sponsored response force. The petitions gathered more than two hundred signatures and explicitly recommended Captain Harry Love as the man to command such a force. This time the legislation passed.
On May 17, 1853, Governor John Bigler signed an act authorizing Love to raise a company of mounted rangers, not to exceed twenty men, for a three-month term, for the explicit purpose of capturing the gang commanded by Joaquín Murrieta. While Love recruited, Murrieta’s crime spree continued. The twenty-three-year-old outlaw, born in Sonora, Mexico, had been robbed and mistreated by Anglo miners and had turned to a violent campaign of vengeance. He had become a figure of legend, with some working-class Latinos viewing him as a Robin Hood fighting an exploitative system, an image that would later inspire the creation of Zorro.
But his crimes were indiscriminate. His victims included Anglo, Mexican, Chilean, and Chinese miners alike, people no wealthier than he had been when he lost his claim. One raid on Chinese miners was captured in chilling detail. In February 1853, Murrieta, a teenager named Antonio Valencia, and a third rider swept down on camps near Jackson, killing miners, looting gold, and shooting a lone miner on the road.
They met another man, Joseph Lake, a butcher turned prospector, and shot him twice in the torso before one of them stabbed him in the neck. Lake died in agony moments after a posse found him. The vigilantes pursued the gang, wounding Valencia before he escaped. But Valencia was soon tracked down and dragged to the Jackson jail, where a mob overpowered the sheriff and hanged him from a local oak tree.
A witness recorded that a number of Chinese miners positively identified him, and no one doubted his guilt. The execution did nothing to stop Murrieta. Days later, he robbed a miner of six hundred dollars near the same spot. Four days after that, on February 20, he and four companions rode into Rich Gulch and held up some fifty Chinese miners.
When several refused to hand over their gold, the outlaws fired into the crowd, killing three and wounding five. The raid netted them between ten thousand and thirty thousand dollars, their deadliest and most profitable yet. Outrage reached a fever pitch. Local militia leader Charlie Clark led a pursuit that lasted for days, coming upon a trail of murdered Chinese miners, but his horses were worn out and the outlaws, mounted on fine animals, always escaped.
By late February, Murrieta and a band of more than a dozen men rode into the town of Hornitos, where he spent hours gambling and drinking until his companions had to restrain him and drag him out of town. Days later, rancher William Prescott had his entire horse herd stolen. Prescott followed the gang back into town, where he found them in a gambling hall. He recruited a posse and burst in.
One of his men hollered “Joaquin! ” and the element of surprise vanished. Murrieta charged at the armed men with ferocious violence, but he was stopped before he could escape. His men poured in through the tent flaps, guns blazing.
Prescott was shot in the torso, another man was wounded in the hip. In the chaos, Murrieta and his men fled into the night. The gang reappeared a month later near San Jose, where they murdered a rancher named James Walsh. On April 21, a posse nearly captured two of them, but one escaped and the other was shot dead by the sheriff when he refused to halt.
The gang then headed south toward Mexico. But before they could cross the border, one of Murrieta’s most trusted men, José Barrio, was arrested near Stockton. He was convicted of grand larceny and murder and sentenced to hang. On June 3, standing on the gallows, Barrio confessed to three murders, all committed at the behest of Joaquín Murrieta.
His dying words spread across California and hardened the public demand for action. Harry Love had already begun recruiting. He called upon the Howard brothers, successful miners and friends of the governor. His lieutenant, Patrick Connor, and Bill Howard carefully selected twenty men, every one of them an experienced marksman, courageous, well-mounted, and fully armed.
Among them were William Burns and William Henderson, both of whom had played monte with Murrieta in the gambling halls of the Sierra foothills and could personally identify him, a crucial asset for claiming the bounty. Prescott, still recovering from his wound in Hornitos, also joined. The rangers rode out of Mariposa in late spring of 1853. Their first attempts were hampered by flooded rivers in the San Joaquin Valley, and their lack of progress drew harsh criticism.
Detractors even claimed Murrieta was a fictional character invented by the governor. But Love pressed on. In early July, officials from Calaveras County turned over a prisoner to the rangers: Jesús Feliz, one of Murrieta’s trusted friends, facing execution. Love offered him full clemency if he led the rangers to Murrieta.
Feliz agreed, revealing that Murrieta planned one final sweep through central California before fleeing to Mexico. The rangers rode south with Feliz in chains. Love deliberately spread word in San Jose that the company intended to head to Los Angeles, hoping to lure Murrieta into a false sense of security. Instead, the rangers turned north and concealed themselves in the coastal mountains.
After nearly a week of scouting, they came upon a camp on Cantua Creek, only a few miles from the present-day town of Coalinga. They observed it for several days, watching men ride in and out. Convinced this was Murrieta’s camp, they rode in on the morning of July 25, 1853. The fight left Murrieta dead and Three-Fingered Jack dead beside him.
Both bodies were mutilated, the heads severed, and Three-Fingered Jack’s distinctive deformed hand removed as well. The trophies were stuffed into the canvas sack carried by Bill Burns. Now, with Antonio López refusing to talk, Love ordered Burns and John Sylvester to take the specimens to Fort Miller for identification and to bring the prisoner along for justice. But on the journey, López, his hands tethered to his horse, spurred his animal into a flooded slough and drowned himself in a final act of defiance.
Burns and Sylvester continued on, proudly displaying their grisly trophies to horrified onlookers as they passed through the Fresno Indian Reservation and the mining camps. They arrived at Fort Miller on July 27, 1853, and presented the proof of their deed. The rangers claimed their bounty, and the head of Joaquín Murrieta would serve as a museum artifact and sideshow attraction for decades until it was lost in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Harry Love lived on as a beloved figure of California history until his death in 1868 at the age of fifty-eight.
The California Rangers, like their Texas counterparts, would disband and reconfigure over the years, but they would never again take part in a manhunt of the size and scope of the one that ended the life of the most wanted man in California.