Yellow Bird (aka) John Rollins
Ridge
The Life and
Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit,
is a unique book in several ways. It was the first novel published in
California, and it is also the first novel written by a Native
American. Yellow Bird was the son and grandson of famous Cherokee
chiefs, and he lived a vigorous and dangerous life as an Indian.
But he was also a
well-educated and literate man, known in the white man’s world as
John Rollins Ridge. Both a novelist and poet, Yellow Bird made his
living in California as a newspaperman, ending his short life in Grass
Valley as the editor of the Grass Valley National newspaper, of
which he was a part owner. He was just forty when he died, but he had
lived a fuller life than most.
While The Life
and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta was not wildly successful in
its own right, the novel sparked a number of knockoffs and created the
enduring myth of Joaquín Murieta. In addition, it was the genesis of
the “dime novel” industry of the late nineteenth-century that
persists even today as the paperback Westerns found in every
bookstore, newsstand, and even supermarket. It was truly a first in
that regard.
But it is worth
reading for more than those reasons – it is a colorful and romantic
story that fires the imagination of the reader, portraying in no
uncertain terms what life was like in those times.
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