California Bandidos: Social Bandits or Sociopaths? · California Bandidos: Social Bandits or Sociopaths? by John Boessenecker historians have painted a group of frontier California's

California Bandidos: Social Bandits or Sociopaths?

by John Boessenecker

historians have painted a group of frontier California's

Revisionist Hispanic outlaws as "social bandits," "primitive rebels," "avengers," or "revolutionaries" who struck out in self defense against the con-

quering Anglos. Relying on terms and concepts used by Eric J. Hobsbawm in Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries (1959), historians Pedro Castillo and Albert Camarillo write that these bandidos "can be described as victims of injustice. They were forced into a life that was outside of the newly imposed Anglo- Amer- ican law; theirs was a banditry in the form of retribution and for purpose of survival."1

The "social bandit" concept was developed by British historian Hobs- bawm in an attempt to define and explain certain movements of peasant brigandage in Europe, India, Asia, and South America from the Middle Ages until modern times. Hobsbawm defines three types of social bandits: the "noble robber" or Robin Hood, the primitive rebel, and the terrorist avenger.

Writes Hobsbawm: "Social banditry, a universal and virtually unchang- ing phenomenon, is little more than endemic peasant protest against op- pression and poverty, a cry for vengeance on the rich and the oppressors, a vague dream of some curb upon them, a righting of individual wrongs."2

lFuria y Muette: Los Bandidos Chiamos (Los Angeles: University of California, 1973), p. 2. zEric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement m the 19th and 20th Centuries

(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1959; reprint 1965), p. 5.

420 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA QUARTERLY Hobsbawm sees social banditry as a social movement, primarily rural in nature. "The point about social bandits is that they are peasant outlaws whom the lord and state regard as criminals, but who remain within peasant society, and are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped, and supported/'3 Whether Hobsbawirťs theory can be taken out of this context and adequately applied in an Amer- ican setting is debatable.

Three California bandidos who have been pointed out as social bandits are Joaquin Murrieta, Tiburcio Vasquez, and Salomon Pico. During their heydays they were considered by many Spanish-speaking Californians to be heroic, romantic figures, rebelling against Anglo injustice. This view seems to have been adopted by a number of modern writers, including Castillo and Camarillo, who see these bandidos as social bandits and as "sources of pride to their people." They conclude: "In actuality, many Chicanos, seen as bandits through Anglo-American eyes, were not lawbreakers. They were instead victims of the Anglo-American invasion "4 Whether this view is accurate can be determined only by examining the careers of these bandidos.

Tiburcio Vasquez was born in Monterey in the late 1830s. The exact date of his birth, as well as many details of his early life, are unclear. Monterey County in the 1850s was an extremely violent frontier community, with a high homicide rate and an active vigilance committee. The picturesque adobe village of Monterey, with its sweeping panoramas of the Pacific, was the favorite stomping grounds of many homegrown Californio badmen as well as Anglo thugs who had been driven out of San Francisco by the 1851 and 1856 Committees of Vigilance. While still a teenager, Vasquez fell in with Anastácio Garcia, one of the most dangerous killers in California. In 1854 Vasquez, Garcia, and one José Higuera took part in a disturbance in a Monterey fandango house which left Constable William Hardmount dead. Higuera was quickly lynched and Vasquez and Garcia fled. Anastácio Gar- cia was later captured and lynched in 1857, reportedly confessing to four- teen murders before he died. Despite his violent record, Garcia was a dashing, handsome man who had been popular with many in both the Anglo and Hispanic communities in Monterey County. He played a lead-

3Eric ]. Hobsbawm, Bandits (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969), p. 13. *Furia y Muerte, p. 2.

CALIFORNIA BANDIDOS 421

A carte de visite of Tiburcio Vasquez, circa 1870.

Courtesy author's collection.

ing role in the bloody Roach-Belcher feud in Monterey County, and was widely admired for his skill as a horseman and fighting man.5

Many writers have claimed that Tiburcio Vasquez embarked on his career of crime in order to wreak vengeance upon the Yankees and to rebel against injustice. Before his death Vasquez himself made such claims. Yet his asso- ciation with Anastácio Garcia, who was closely aligned with the Lewis Beicher faction in Monterey County and who committed murders and rob- beries of both Anglo and Hispanic alike, casts some doubt on Vasquez's claims. His motives in pursuing a criminal career are made clearer by the fact that Vasquez's first conviction was for a crime committed against a fellow Hispanic, not a Yankee. On July 15, 1857, he stole a mule and nine horses from Luis Francisco in Los Angeles County and was arrested and sentenced to five years in San Quentin. With respect to any claim that Vasquez may have been treated unfairly by the courts, it should be noted that eight of the seventeen grand jurors who indicted him for this offense were Hispanic.

5Paul P. Parker, "The Roach-Belcher Feud," California Historical Society Quarterly, XXII (March 1950): 19-28; Monterey County Jail Register, 1850-1872, copy in author's collection.

422 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA QUARTERLY And to dispel any notion that he may have been innocent, the court records show that he pled guilty to the charges.6

In 1867 Vasquez entered San Quentin for his final prison term. All later writers, relying on George Beers's Vasquez, or The Hunted Bandits of the San Joaquin (1875), have claimed that this prison sentence was for cattle rustling, a crime which is generally associated with the Hispanic social bandit. But Beers and those who relied upon him were mistaken. In fact, Vasquez was imprisoned for breaking into the Sargent & Barnes store in Petaluma - the act of a petty burglar and sneak thief, not that of a primitive rebel or revolutionary. His accomplice was not a fellow Hispanic avenger, but an Anglo burglar and highway robber, Horace Dade.7

During Vasquez's final crime spree of 1873-1874, he and his gang terror- ized parts of central and southern California. During a bungled robbery at Três Pinos, three innocent men were slain. Vasquez's band consisted mainly of Hispanic vaqueros but included at least one black man, one Anglo, and one Frenchman. By this time Vasquez preyed mainly upon Anglos and received much support from Hispanic cattle and sheep herders who lived in the remote heights of the Coast Range. Nonetheless, the strongest denial of any status as a revolutionary comes from Tiburcio Vasquez himself. When captured near Los Angeles in 1874 he had boasted, "With the arms and pro- visions I could have purchased with fifty or sixty thousand dollars, I could raise a force with which I could revolutionize California."8

However, this self-serving declaration is hardly dispositive of the issue. A year later, convicted of one of the Três Pinos murders and sentenced to death, Vasquez changed his tune. He asked for pardon "from each and every one whom I have in any way injured" and from "the Great Father whose laws I have so ruthlessly trampled upon." He denied ever having personally killed anyone, but added, "Common sense compels me to realize the just- ness of the law which holds me responsible for the innocent lives lost in the prosecution of my unlawful calling of robbery."9 At the moment of truth, Vasquez made no excuses for his lengthy criminal career, and on March 19, 1875, met his death bravely on the gallows in San Jose.

George Beers, Vasquez, or The Hunted Bandits of the San Joaquin (1875), reprinted and edited by Robert Green- wood as The California Outlaw: Tiburcio Vasquez (Los Gatos, CA: The Talisman Press, 1960). See pp. 162- 163.

7Petaluma Journal & Argus, December 20, 1866. eBenjamin С Truman, Life, Adventures and Capture of Tiburcio Vasquez (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Star, 1874),

p. 29. 'Beers, The California Outlaw, p. 287.


Like Vasquez, Joaquin Murrieta hardly fits the mold of a noble robber. Murrieta's origins are very obscure. For years, many historians have assumed that he was a mythical character, created in large part by the Cherokee journalist John Rollin Ridge, who published The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, The Celebrated California Bandit in 1854, a year after the bandiťs death. However, research by Frank F. Latta, William B. Secrest, Remi Nadeau, and James F. Varley has established that Murrieta was very real indeed, and that Ridge's book is part fact and part fiction. Joaquin Murri- eta appears to have been born in Vayoreca, a tiny village in southern Sonora, Mexico, about 1830. Like many Scmarenos, he joined the mass migration north to the California gold fields in 1849. According to legend,

Broadside announcing the exhibition of the head of

Joaquin Murrieta and the hand of Bernandino Garcia, alias "Three Fingered Jack," who was killed with Murri-

eta in 1853. Courtesy author's collection.

WILL BE EXHIBITED

FOR OWE DAY OBTLYÎ

AT THE STOCKTON HOUSE! THIS DAT, AUC. IS, FROM · A. M-, UNTIL ·. P. M.

THE HEAD Of the renowned Bandit!

MM! - - AND THE - - - -

HAND 0Г THREE FINGERED JACK! THE NOTORIOUS ROBBER AND MURDERER.

" JOAQI IN" aatf "THREB-FinCERKD JACK** were taalare* by Cbe Hlmt* «a*. f*rt, aaa>r tb« »ваай ·€ (··(. llarrj La**, al tb« Arrata Caallaa. Jaly 141b. N· ггаяа«аЬ1« 4aabt fee b« ealertalaed la regard U Ibc McatlAeall·· ·€ lbe bead ■·«* aa •vblblll··. mm bela« (bat ф€ tb« a^arl·«· r«bbert Jmmqwto Jftmrimttm, a· II ba· beca г«ц <%тЫ*Л bj ЪшшЛг*4т mi а«г*мм wb· bave bracri; воет Ыш.

424 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA QUARTERLY

Joaquin Murrieta. This pen and ink sketch was made by an artist for the Overland Monthly in 1895 from the bandiťs severed head, which was then on display in a San Francisco museum. It matches exactly the earliest published descriptions of the head by journalists who saw it after Joaquin had been slain by the California Rangers in 1853. Courtesy author's collections.

Joaquin turned to crime after Anglos jumped his claim, raped his wife, lynched his brother, and flogged him when he was unjustly accused of theft. No documentation for these claims has surfaced. However, injustice against Hispanics was common during the gold rush and Murrieta may well have been mistreated.10

The details of Murrieta's early crimes remain somewhat unclear. How- ever, the weight of evidence suggests that he was the leader of a marauding gang of bandidos in the Southern Mines during January-March 1853. Dur- ing this so-called "Joaquin scare," some two dozen miners were robbed and slaughtered in Calaveras and Amador counties by this band. Approximately one half the victims were not Yankees but were inoffensive Chinese. Why were Chinese the victims of such butchery? The principal reason was sim-

10The most recent investigations of Joaquin Murrieta's life and death are Frank H Latta's Joaquin Murrieta and His Horse Gangs (Santa Cruz, CA: Bear State Books, 1980); Remi Nadeau's The Real Joaquin Murrieta (Corona del Mar, CA: Trans-Anglo Books, 1974); William B. Secresťs work, most notably Joaquin (Fresno, CA: Saga West Publishing Co., 1967) /The Return of Joaquin (Fresno, CA: Saga West Publishing Co.,1973), and "Who Died at Cantua СгеекГ Real West Special (Spring 1985): 20-25; and James F. Varley, The Legend of Joaquin Murrieta, California's Gold Rush Bandit (Twin Falls, Idaho: Big Lost River Press, 1995).


ply that the hard-working Chinese had gold but frequently lacked guns and horses. Unable to flee or fight, they were easy targets for robbers. Whether or not one credits the "Joaquin scare" killings to Murrieta's band or to anonym mous Mexican robbers, it is difficult to imagine what these bandidos were rebelling against when they murdered helpless Chinese.

One of the best authenticated crimes in the Murrieta saga is Joaquin Murrieta's theft of horses from the ranch of Yrenero Corona on Orestimba Creek in what is now Stanislaus County. This incident has been documented by William B. Secrest, who located contemporary newspaper accounts describing the affair, as well as by the late Frank F. Latta. In May 1852, Murrieta, his brother-in-law Reyes Feliz, and several of his band stole twenty head of horses from Corona's ranch and fled south. The bandidos were captured at Tejon Pass by a band of Tejon Indians led by Chief Jose Zapatero, who took away the horses, and sent the outlaws packing. Corona had followed the thieves, and Chief Zapatero returned the horses to him. Six months later, Reyes Feliz was arrested in Los Angeles for a murder he was suspected of there and was sentenced to death by a vigilance committee. His confession, published in the San Francisco Daily Alta California on December 15, 1852, read in part: "I belonged to the company of Joaquin Murieta [sic] In Avisimba [Orestimba] we robbed 20 horses, which we brought to the Tejon.' There the Indians took some of them from us; others, the owner took, who went in pursuit of us. I don't know his name; he was a Mexican." Murrieta's theft from a fellow Mexican and subsequent capture by Indians, who presumably would identify with a social bandit fighting against Anglo injustice, further weaken any arguments that Mur- rieta was a social bandit or a revolutionary.

Though Salomon Pico's career is not as heavily documented as those of Murrieta or Vasquez, available details belie any claims that he was a revolutionary hero. Born near San Juan Bautista on September 5, 1821, he was the younger brother of the prominent and highly respected José de Jesus Pico and was first cousin of Pio Pico, governor of California from 1845-1846, and Andres Pico, the dashing warrior who defeated Kearney's force at the Battle of San Pascual in 1846. Salomon Pico's connection with one of the most dominant families in California did not, however, prevent him from becoming one of the most feared outlaws of the 1850s. Pico was suspected of murdering many travelers along El Camino Real between Monterey and Los Angeles. His close companion in crime was Yankee cut-


throat William 0. Hall, alias William Otis, who was captured on August 5, 1851, and lynched in his Monterey jail cell five days later.11

In the mid 1850s Pico fled to Baja California. There, according to pio- neer Alfred Green, he boasted that he had slain 39 Yankees during his career of crime. Green's recollections hardly put Salomon Pico in a heroic light: "In 1856 I was at the port of Mazatlan, when word was sent to the English Consul at that place that an Englishman had been killed at La Paz, and they wanted a war vessel sent there. It seems that Salomon Pico, who had found his way to La Paz, on entering a restaurant there, saw a man siť ting at a table eating his meal, and supposing that he was an American, drew his knife and killed him on the spot . . . ." Such murderous acts sounded Pico's death knell, for on May 1, 1860, he was rounded up with several other suspected outlaws on the orders of the governor of Baja Cai- ifornia and was executed by firing squad.12

The facts of Salomon Pico's career - his birth into a distinguished, powerful Californio family; his closest bandit compadre an Anglo; his victims, mainly innocent strangers who had never personally harmed him; and his execution at the hands of his own people - do not support a profile of a noble robber or a primitive rebel.

One more California bandido has been designated by some historians as a social bandit. Juan Flores broke out of San Quentin in 1856 and embarked on what many Anglos and Hispanics viewed as a small-scale revolt in Los Angeles County in January-February 1857. In his most violent feat, Flores and his men ambushed and killed Sheriff James Barton and three of his posse. Flores surrounded himself with such hardened criminals as Pancho Daniel and Andres Fontes and engaged primarily in rustling, petty thiev- ery, and robbery. Thus the so-called "Flores revolution" was in reality little more than a rampant crime spree. The Flores band was broken up by posses of both Anglos and Californios.13

Another major flaw in applying the social bandit concept to California

"Hubert H. Bancroft, Popular Tribunals (2 vols., San Francisco: The History Company, 1887), 1: 516-517; Leonard Pitt, The Decline of the Californios (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 149; Albert Camarillo, Chkanos in a Changing Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 20-21; Marie E. Northrup, Spanish-Mexican Families of Early California (2 vols., New Orleans: Polyanthos, 1976), 2: 207.

"Alfred A. Green, Dictation, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 13Pitt, Decline of the Californios, pp. 167- 1 7 1 ; Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Los Angeles Barrio, 1 850- 1 890:

A Social History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 109-113; Ronald C. Woolsey, "An Outlaw as Outcast: Juan Flores," The Caiifomians, 1 1 (1994): 44-50.


bandidos exists. With the exception of Salomon Pico and a few others, it was overwhelmingly poor immigrants from Sonora and the peasant class of Californios who made up the ranks of the bandidos. Often, as in the case of the "Flores revolution" and in the roundup of Ρίο Linares's band in San Luis Obispo County in 1858, California's ricos and rancheros took leading roles in hunting down bandidos.14 This only makes sense if the bandits were simply economically-motivated predators rather than revolutionaries. After all, the Hispanic ricos had as much to lose as anyone from Yankee seizure of property and political power and might have been expected to be the most ardent supporters of any true revolutionary.

The reasons for Hispanic peasant banditry are complex, and seem to be closely tied to the causes of violent crime in the frontier. Crime and vio- lence were commonplace in California during the 1850s. Homicide rates were much higher than those of today. Gold rush society was unsettled. Hordes of ambitious young men flocked to California, leaving behind their families, and most significantly their mothers, sisters, wives and sweet- hearts. The simple presence of women in a community exerts a strong set- tling influence upon antisocial male behavior. This scarcity of women is perhaps the single most important root cause of violent crime on the western frontier. The development of Colťs revolving pistol, a huge improve- ment over the old single-shot weapons, made it possible for every man to carry six-fold firepower in his holster. The rough ethic of that era which required a man to withstand insults with deadly force and to never back down from a fight, coupled with the ready availability of Bowie knives, six- shooters, and liquor, was a recipe for carnage.

With human life so cheap, it is little wonder that some men held little regard for property rights. Incidents of claim jumping, sluice robbing, highway robbery, and stock theft were common during the gold rush. Many young men who came to the mining frontier were by nature adventuresome and perhaps somewhat reckless. Most were consumed by gold fever, if not greed; most did not "strike it rich." The San Quentin prison registers in the California State Archives demonstrate that men of many races and nation- alities turned to crime after 1850. At or near the bottom of the social heap were the poorest of the Hispanics. Bad blood between American and Mex- ican had been stirred up in the Mexican War, and many Anglos still looked upon all Hispanics as the enemy. Racism, fueled by ignorance and religious

14John Boessenecker, "Pio Linares: Californio Bandido," The Californians, 5 (November- December 1987): 34-44.


bigotry, was the order of the day· Many Hispanics were driven from the mines, savaged by callous Anglos, and occasionally flogged and hanged without just cause by vigilantes. Denied a means by which to earn a living, it is not surprising that numerous Hispanics turned to robbery and stock theft.

Although the plight of these Hispanics certainly deserves sympathy and understanding, the view that Joaquin Murrieta, Salomon Pico, and Tibur- cio Vasquez were social bandits or revolutionaries does not withstand close scrutiny. Each of them appears to have had a magnetic personality and strong leadership qualities which attracted followers and supporters. Mur- rieta, Pico, and Vasquez were not sociopaths. Undoubtedly they had griev- ances against Anglo society. But the facts surrounding the careers of these three bandits demonstrate that they were more motivated by hopes of plun- der and profit than by any wish to aid their fellow man. There is abundant evidence that Murrieta, Pico, and Vasquez were opportunistic thieves who generally preyed upon innocent victims, sometimes including fellow His- panics.

The weaknesses of Hobsbawm's social bandit concept go far deeper than its inapplicability to a handful of California bandidos. A close inspection of the definition of the social bandit and the rationale behind the concept raise serious questions about its validity as applied to conditions in the western frontier.

Hobsbawm sees the social bandit as one who is both perceived by the public to be a rebel or a Robin Hood and is in fact a rebel or a Robin Hood. Hob- sbawm writes that "in one sense banditry is a rather primitive form of organized social protest "15 Of the noble robber/Robin Hood model of the social bandit, Hobsbawm describes it in detail: he is the victim of injustice, he rights wrongs, he takes from the rich and gives to the poor, he kills only in self defense. Hobsbawm contends that "the facts largely confirm the image" and that "genuine Robin Hoods have been known," but fails to offer any proof for such conclusions.16 Hobsbawm believes that bandits "will almost certainly try to conform to the Robin Hood stereotype in some respects," that is, they do good to gain public sympathy.17 Yet the concept of the "good outlaw" is entirely mythic and without basis in the historiography of the American West.

15Hobsbawm, Primitive RebeU, p. 13. 16Hobsbawm, Banãts, pp. 34-36. "Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebeh, p. 19.


California bandidos such as Tiburcio Vasquez, Joaquin Murrieta, and Salomon Pico, as well as their Anglo counterparts like Jesse James, the Younger brothers, the Dalton boys, and Billy the Kid, were bad men who wreaked havoc on society. Kent Ladd Steckmesser, after studying the western hero and the relationship between fact and legend, comments that "outlaws of history are not out for social justice, but for a fast buck." Steckmesser concludes, "The outlaw hero, from Robin Hood to Sam Bass, is a thoroughly folkloric product. His concern for the poor, his exemplary character, his clev- erness, his betrayal by a traitor are all aspects of legend rather than of history."18

Frank Richard Prassel has examined the American social bandit and points out that he is a "stereotyped figment of imagination rather than a creature of recorded history."19

The theory that crime is caused by criminals who want to perform good by stealing or killing, or that thieves steal from the rich to give to the poor, would surprise most authorities in the fields of sociology, psychology, psy- chiatry, or criminal jurisprudence. As Clare V. McKanna has observed, "Hobsbawm's ideas are thought-provoking, but he seems to ignore the fact that men turn to crime for a multiplicity of reasons."20 In the American frontier, social banditry as Hobsbawm defines it appears to have been nei- ther a cause of crime nor a social movement. No historian has yet intro- duced evidence to show a movement of the rural western poor to engage in a primitive revolt or banditry against the rich or the oppressors.21

The causes of crime on the frontier, as today, were exceedingly complex and ranged from the societal to the personal. The societal causes of crime are manifold and may never be fully understood. In order for the historian to attempt to understand why a certain community experienced a particular crime rate at a particular time, the scholar must examine a myriad of factors, among them religion, education, death rates, divorce rates, family income, employment opportunity, political and social unrest, racial composition, religious, racial or economic discrimination, and mobility and stability of the

18Kent Ladd Steckmesser, "Robin Hood and the American Outlaw," Journal of American Folklore, 79 (April- June 1966): 353-354.

19Frank Richard Prassel, The Great American Oudaw (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), p. 1 14. 20Clare V. McKanna, "Banditry in California, 1850-1880: Myth and Reality," in Brand Book Number Eight (San

Diego Corral of the Westerners, 1987), p. 46. 21 A recent exhaustive study of the history of American crime and criminal justice, which includes a compre-

hensive survey of the scholarship to date, is Lawrence Friedman, Cnme and Punishment in American His- tory (New York: Basicbooks, 1993). Not surprisingly, it contains no reference to the social bandit concept.


Community. Humans by their nature tend to have consistent emotions from generation to generation and from century to century. Thus the common personal causes of crime - greed, lust, despair, anger, jealousy, mental ill- ness - do not, and will not, change. These are basic human conditions, consistent since the dawn of man. The social bandit concept is not one of them. Men might kill to do good, but they rarely steal to do good. Banditry and theft are acts of moral turpitude and dishonesty, not acts of nobility or benev- olence.

Hobsbawm claims that social banditry takes place in pre-industrial soci- eties, such as in Medieval England, and that social banditry no longer exists in "developed" countries.22 Yet the reason for this is not that there really were social bandits in primitive or pastoral communities, but rather that they were created by ancient story tellers and minstrels who wove myth and fact together to produce outlaw heroes. Robin Hood characters appear frequently in legends of the past not because they actually existed, but because modern methods of communication and recording of news and history did not exist. This void was filled in by folklore and oral history. Common criminals were adorned with heroic traits so as to make them fit the popular concept of the outlaw hero. The real Joaquin Murrieta was no hero, but after his death vaqueras wove tales and sang corridas about him. Thus the legend of a His- panic avenger was born. The journalist John Rollin Ridge read the newspaper accounts during the "Joaquin scare" in 1853, listened to the wild tales and rumors about the outlaw, and after concocting his own brew of fictitious Murrieta adventures, mixed them all together in book form and created a new myth. The roles played by Ridge and Murrieta are crucial in illustrating the development of outlaw folklore. As Frank Richard Prassel has explained, "Badmen were greedy, violent brigands transformed into heroes after death by journalists fulfilling roles once occupied by minstrels and balladeers."23

Modern outlaw heroes are rarely encountered because mass communication quickly uncovers and reveals the truth about notorious criminals and their crimes, and the truth about criminals is never pretty. A recent exam- ple of the heroic outlaw phenomenon was the flight of football superstar O.J. Simpson from murder charges in Los Angeles on June 17, 1994. With the entire nation watching the episode unfold as it was filmed by helicopter television crews, Simpson's flight captivated a vast audience and attracted crowds who cheered him on. Live commentary by television reporters

22Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (Rev. ed., New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), p. 152. "The Great American Outlaw, p. 327.


repeatedly compared the incident to such popular recent antihero films as Thelma and Louise and The Fugitive. In so doing they played on Americans' deep-rooted distrust of authority and identification with the underdog. Simpson quickly emerged at the outset of the case as an outlaw hero because he was already a sports hero and film star and because few details and no pho- tographs of the grisly double murders were released. The enormous media coverage of and public attention to Simpson's escape and surrender tell us nothing about why he may have slain two people, but reveal much about Americans and their attitudes toward fallen heroes and famous fugitives.24

Likewise the social bandit concept tells us nothing about why men rob or kill, but it does tell us about our attitudes toward famous criminals. In so doing, the concept is not a historical one, but one that is important in the realm of myth and literature. This has been recognized by Richard Slotkin, who has accepted the term social bandit, but has analyzed this figure as the fictional hero of dime novel literature and not as an historical western hero. Says Slotkin, "It was not his true and local history that made him a modern and American social bandit but the pseudo-history that was fabricated for him in the mythic space of the dime novel."25

Historian Richard White has identified the Jesse James and Dalton gangs as American social bandits. He defines social bandits in terms that are similar to Hobsbawnťs: "What separates social bandits from ordinary criminals ... is the existence of large numbers of other people who aid them but who are only technically implicated in their crimes When such people exist in large enough numbers to make an area a haven for a particular group of outlaws, then social banditry exists."26 Hobsbawnťs view is much the same; "This relation between the ordinary peasant and the rebel, outlaw, and robber is what makes social banditry interesting and significant. It also distin- guishes it from . . . mere freebooters ("common robbers") . . . ,"27

However, this analysis reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of criminal society. As Anton Blok has pointed out, "In a sense, all bandits are social in so far as they, like all human beings, are linked to other people by various ties."28 Although Blok referred to Sicilian bandits, his comments on

24O.J. Saga Made by (and for) TV," San Francisco Examiner, June 19, 1994, p. A-14. 25Richard Siotkin, Gunfigfiter Nation (New York: Atheneum, 1992), p. 132. 26Richard White, "Outlaw Gangs of the Middle Border: American Social Bandits," Western Historical Quar-

terly, 12 (October 1981): 389. "Hobsbawm, Bandits, pp. 13Ί4. 28 Anton Blok, "The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered," Comparative Studies in Society

and History, 14 (1972): 497.

432 SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA QUARTERLY social banditry apply equally to western outlaws: "Given the specific conditions of outlawry, bandits have to rely very strongly on other people. It is important to appreciate that all outlaws and robbers require protection in order to operate as bandits and to survive at all·"29

By way of comparison, New York City of the late nineteenth century was home to an enormous underworld of thieves, fences, garroters, counterfeit' ers, till-tappers, bank burglars, and light-fingered gentry of every stripe. The police maintained close connections with the criminal class, sometimes making deals with thieves to share the proceeds from the sale of stolen property. The result was a subculture based on crime, from which criminals, their friends, families, supporters and even some of the police all derived economic support.30 A New York tilltapper of the 1870s occupied a place in the deviant culture ofthat society: he had friends and a family who relied upon him for support; he spent his money in those saloons, gambling halls, and brothels which catered to the criminal class. Within that subculture he played an essential role, and in Hobsbawrrťs words, was no doubt "admired, helped, and supported." The support given the till-tapper in such criminal underworlds is no different from the support given by rural communities to Hobsbawm's social bandit. The only difference is that the social bandit is a romantic figure, a bold mounted outlaw or Robin Hood hero, and not a conniving sneak thief.

It is this difference which unmasks the social bandit and reveals his true identity as a mythical and literary archetype and not as a historical figure. The mounted bandit is easy to imagine as a romantic hero. The sneak thief is anything but colorful and is rarely a hero in folklore or literature; at best he is a supporting comic character.

Further evidence that the American social bandit and the western folk hero are identical can be found by examining their public appeal. Says White of the social bandit: "The portrait of the outlaw as a strong man righting his own wrongs and taking his own revenge had a deep appeal to a society con- cerned with the place of masculinity and masculine virtues in a newly industrialized and seemingly effete order."31 Steckmesser, in analyzing the appeal of western folk heroes, writes that they "personify traits which Americans have always admired. Courage, self-reliance, and physical prowess have usu-

29Ibid., p. 498. ^Thomas Byrnes, Professional Criminals of America (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1У6У), pp. xiu-xxvi,

1-55. 31 White, "Outlaw Gangs of the Middle Border," p. 406.


ally been rated high on the scale. These traits may seem anachronistic in a settled and industrialized society. Indeed, much of the heroes1 appeal seems to be connected with a sentimental nostalgia for the freedom of a vanished frontier."32

Steckmesser's and White's analyses are identical because they are both examining the same thing: a folk hero. The social bandits identified by Hobsbawm, White, and other writers are no more than folk heroes in ana- lytical garb.

The image of the heroic outlaw is one that is common to all cultures, not just the American West. Joseph Campbell has found that myths are similar in disparate cultures and conform to universal themes. Regarding the mythic hero, whom he terms "the hero with a thousand faces," Campbell finds that "there is a certain typical hero sequence of actions which can be detected in stories from all over the world and from many periods of history."33 Steckmesser too has demonstrated the connections between the Robin Hood legend and the myth of the Western outlaw hero: "The similarities between Robin Hood and the American outlaws are clearly owing to the uniformity of folk belief across the centuries."34 And Stephen Tatum has sug- gested that the heroic outlaw of folklore and literature satisfies two basic human needs. "[T]he outlaw entrances and thrills us with his unrestrained self-assertion; yet . . . part of the heart of man requires the outlaw's defeat in fantasy as well as reality to satisfy a human desire for order."35

As a simple folk hero, the image of the social bandit allows us to conjure up the adventure of individualistic rebellion against the strictures of modern society. Humans naturally yearn for freedom, and modern man has an inbred skepticism of government, laws, and social controls. The outlaw rebels against these controls and symbolizes this subconscious distrust. By identifying with him, we too can rebel, albeit vicariously. Thus the outlaw hero remains one of mankind's most compelling and enduring symbols. This is the real significance of the social bandit concept.

The good outlaw of folklore and dime novels has developed into the outlaw hero of the western film. From John Wayne's Ringo Kid in Stagecoach 32Kent Ladd Steckmesser, The Western Hero in History and Legend (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,

1965), p. 255. "Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 136. 34Steckmesser, "Robin Hood and the American Outlaw," p. 354- ■"Stephen Tatum, Inventing ВШу the Kid: Visions of the Outlaw in America, 1881 -1981 (Albuquerque: Univer-

sity of New Mexico Press, 1981), p. 196.


(1939), to the partly honorable, partly murderous robber-heroes in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), to Clint Eastwood's reformed badman in The Unfargiven (1992), the western outlaw hero remains a powerful archetype as well as a powerful box office draw.

People of all cultures love the image of the romantic, elusive outlaw. Just as Jesse James is revered in myth as a Robin Hood, so Joaquin Murrieta, Tiburcio Vasquez, and Salomon Pico are remembered by many today as rebels and avengers and no amount of analysis, research, or debunking is likely to budge them from their undeserved niches as Hispanic heroes of frontier California.

Documents

California Bandidos: Social Bandits or Sociopaths? · California Bandidos: Social Bandits or Sociopaths? by John Boessenecker historians have painted a group of frontier California's