Mt. Shasta, his friends had already begun to employ the more familiar name. According to this account, he had made several trips with Mexican horse and mule drivers down into Arizona and northern Mexico, and, on these expeditions, "these Mexicans were most kind to me." They, on the contrary, were treated by the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of California with a brutality which was "monstrous." "It was this," says Miller, "that had driven Joaquin Murietta, while yet a youth, to become the most terrible and bloody outlaw our land has ever known. A reward of many thousands had been offered for his head, he had been captured, killed, and his head was in spirits and on exhibition in San Francisco,[1] when I took up my pen for the first time and wrote a public letter in defence of the Mexicans." In consequence of this letter, he was banteringly identified by a Sacramento paper with the bandit. His friends continued the banter. The name was revived when he returned to Oregon, and was employed to twit him, when he became an editor. And so he finally accepted it and used it in the title of his first book.
In the chapter of his relations with the Indians, there are manifold obscurities and contradictions. He adhered pretty consistently throughout his life to the assertion that he was in three Indian battles
- ↑ In spite of this capital evidence, Miller elsewhere raises a doubt whether Joaquin Murietta had actually been killed, and plays with the notion that he himself may have been the original "Joaquin."
