Pacifying Paradise: Violence and Vigilantism in San Luis Obispo

PACIFYING PARADISE: VIOLENCE AND VIGILANTISM IN SAN LUIS OBISPO A Thesis presented to the Faculty of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in History by Joseph Hall-Patton June 2016 ii © 2016 Joseph Hall-Patton ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iii COMMITTEE MEMBERSHIP TITLE: Pacifying Paradise: Violence and Vigilantism in San Luis Obispo AUTHOR: Joseph Hall-Patton DATE SUBMITTED: June 2016 COMMITTEE CHAIR: James Tejani, Ph.D. Associate Professor of History COMMITTEE MEMBER: Kathleen Murphy, Ph.D. Associate Professor of History COMMITTEE MEMBER: Kathleen Cairns, Ph.D. Lecturer of History iv ABSTRACT Pacifying Paradise: Violence and Vigilantism in San Luis Obispo Joseph Hall-Patton San Luis Obispo, California was a violent place in the 1850s with numerous murders and lynchings in staggering proportions. This thesis studies the rise of violence in SLO, its causation, and effects. The vigilance committee of 1858 represents the culmination of the violence that came from sweeping changes in the region, stemming from its earliest conquest by the Spanish. The mounting violence built upon itself as extensive changes took place. These changes include the conquest of California, from the Spanish mission period, Mexican and Alvarado revolutions, Mexican-American War, and the Gold Rush. The history of the county is explored until 1863 to garner an understanding of the borderlands violence therein. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………... 1 PART I - CAUSATION…………………………………………………… 12 HISTORIOGRAPHY……………………………………………........ 12 BEFORE CONQUEST………………………………………..…….. 21 WAR……………………………………………………………..……. 36 GOLD RUSH……………………………………………………..….. 42 LACK OF LAW…………………………………………………….…. 45 RACIAL DISTRUST………………………………………………..... 50 OUTSIDE INFLUENCE………………………………………………58 LOCAL CRIME………………………………………………………..67 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………….. 77 PART II - VIGILANTES………………………………………………….. 79 LOCAL HISTORIOGRAPHY……………………………………….. 79 DOCUMENTS………………………………………………………... 83 FORMATION…………………………………………………………. 86 GREAT EXCITEMENT……………………………………………… 95 DISSOLUTION……………………………………………………… 101 REACTIONS………………………………………………………... 104 AFTERMATH……………………………………………………….. 108 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………….... 112 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………… 120 APPENDICES…………………………………………………………... 131 APPENDIX A…………………………………………………… 131 APPENDIX B…………………………………………………… 163 APPENDIX C…………………………………………………… 168 APPENDIX D…………………………………………………… 170 1 INTRODUCTION While I was out in the northern part of San Luis Obispo County, California, I went into Paso Robles for a general wine tasting. While I surveyed the varied array of bottles brought from all over the viticulture region, I was struck by one. Among the assorted standard images of pastoral scenes and reminders of nature, there was a picture that I instantly recognized. It was an old photograph from the 1850s of a man holding a pistol and staring into the camera. He was Pio Linares, a local legend, and the wine was “El Pistolero” from Chateau Margene. Having been studying the man’s exploits for some time beforehand, I was well aware of the mythology surrounding him, but I decided I could listen to it one more time. Talking to the operators who were incidentally related to the Linares family, they regaled me with how he was a misunderstood revolutionary and had been lied about by the victors who came to write the history. There was a heavy handed connotation of race being integral to the whole issue. On their website they say, “Standing up to the flood of white settlers trying to claim territory, including his family’s ranchos, most Californios saw him as a patriot.”1 I did not announce my own studies, for it would have been rude and contradictory, but this is indeed the folklore surrounding Pio Linares in San Luis Obispo (SLO). People all around California have found bandits to glorify since the actual time of their existence. The most notorious of these was Joaquin Murrieta. He was immortalized by the Cherokee novelist John Rollin Ridge only a year after his death at the hands of California 1 “The Story Behind El Pistolero,” El Pistolero Wines (2015). Accessed 10/11/15: http://www.elpistolerowines.com/the-story.html. The picture was also taken from that website. 2 Rangers who were sent out to kill or capture the most infamous of the “Five Joaquins.”2 Ridge’s novel evidently drew heavily on his personal past with the Indian Removal Act, and he placed Murrieta as the outlet of racial tension - a man on a mission of vengeance against all Yankees for the two who had supposedly raped and murdered his wife. This was all fictitious of course, though Ridge denied that as such in his book, but the romanticization has stuck. Murrieta remains a symbol of vituperative rebellion on behalf of the racially maligned, especially among the Chicano movement.3 Some say he was the inspiration behind the Zorro stories, though if there is an inspiration, it is more likely to be another legendary bandit named Solomon Pico.4 Pio Linares falls into the same myth-making as Murrieta. Many of the bandits associated with the Linares Gang were famous in their own right, such as Jack Powers, Joaquin Valenzuela, and Miguel Blanco. Though the fame of Linares has never exceeded that of Murrieta outside of San Luis Obispo, the same tropes remain from Murrieta locally. Historians have even endorsed the idea of revolutionary activity through banditry. Eric Hobsbawm, in his books Primitive Rebels and Bandits, espoused a theory that made a justification of these illegal activities.5 He terms the idea “Social Banditry.”6 Even though Hobsbawm was certainly looking at other localities half a world away, his ideas are just as applicable (or inapplicable if one denies them) in California as where he originally applied them in Sicilian history. These social bandits represent a primitive form of rebellion for Hobsbawm, 2 John Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (CA: Cooke and Company, 1854). 3 Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (CA: University of California Press, 2002) 274-287. 4 This is a common refrain, but there is no evidence as to the inspiration of the 1919 series. Murrieta is normally said to be the inspiration. There is even a section in wikipedia on his being thus (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaquin_Murrieta#The_Real_Zorro), but the original story is much closer to that of Solomon Pico. Pico was a notable Californio, since he was related to the Pico family, and was even allowed to live peacefully after his capture in San Luis Obispo in 1851. After the race riots in Los Angeles in 1856, he fled California, but was quickly executed in Mexico during the cleansing mission of 1860 by Governor Feliciano Ruiz de Esparza. For another who has argued this see David Middlecamp, “Outlaw Solomon Pico,” San Luis Obispo Tribune (1/5/2013). Accessed 2/1/2016: http://sloblogs.thetribunenews.com/slovault/2013/01/outlaw-solomon-pico-was-he-the-real-zorro/. 5 Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (NY: WW Norton & Company, 1965). Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (NY: The New Press, 2000). 6 Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, 3. 3 even harbingers of revolutions to come.7 “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, but in all cases as men to be admired, helped, and supported.”8 An easy way to conceptualize this is to call social banditry a robin-hood complex. Murrieta has certainly seen this romanticization. He even was the subject of a film called The Robin Hood of El Dorado in 1936 based on the biography of the same name, which anticipated the revisionist western genre of the 1960s.9 Linares has not received this kind of attention, and his legend remains word-of-mouth, spoken among the denizens of San Luis Obispo in hushed tones as the oral history continues its telephone game of misrepresentation. Unlike Murrieta, who has John Rollin Ridge’s account, there is no written record to show any basis for Linares’s mythology, hence why it remains only spoken of in SLO. Most historians do not use Hobsbawm’s social banditry theory when interrogating figures like Pio Linares. Indeed, many even refute it. In a much forgotten article by John Boessenecker, called “California Bandidos,” he takes on the Hobsbawmian theory in regard to the titular characters, including Pio Linares himself.10 He states that “the bandits were simply economically-motivated predators rather than revolutionaries.”11 Others are not so explicit. They mostly look to the actual history of these legendary figures to find the truth behind the fiction. It is a noble pursuit, and one that should be followed, but not without acknowledging the vital role mythology plays in that truth. One scholar has theorized about the role of mythology and violence in American history. Richard Slotkin, in a trilogy of books, developed an advanced theory of how mythology and 7 Eric Hobsbawm was a Marxist historian, so he was using the idea of social banditry to support the Marxist ideals of class-consciousness and resistance to the bourgeois order. 8 Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels, 13. 9 Robin Hood of El Dorado, directed by William Wellman (CA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1936). 10 John Boessenecker, “California Bandidos,” Southern California Quarterly, v80 i4 (1 Dec. 1998) 419- 434. 11 Ibid 427.

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