“Lori Lee Wilson has produced an eloquent, provocative, and compelling work. Her study will impress scholars and students alike, as well as contribute to our understanding about the life and politics of nineteenth-century California.”—Michael Gonzalez, author of This Small City Will Be a Mexican Paradise: Exploring the Origins of Mexican Culture in Los Angeles, 1821–1846
“This is a remarkable book showing tremendous scholarship and amazing facility in weaving stories together to present nuanced and sophisticated points of view. The author’s work on this theme will immediately be recognized by scholars as monumental. This work will become the most authoritative work on not just Joaquín Murrieta’s history but on the social history of early California.”—Richard Griswold del Castillo, coauthor of Competing Visions: A History of California and the editor of World War II and Mexican American Civil Rights
"Thorough and engrossing, this book will likely spark the interest of scholars and rabble-rousers alike."—Publishers Weekly
"Wilson's original contribution to the Murrieta literature is her analysis of how race, nationality, and partisan politics affected newspaper coverage of California bandits and vigilantes in the 1850s. . . . Readers looking for a place to enter the labyrinth of Murrieta studies would do well to start here."—Glen Gendzel, New Mexico Historical Review
"This is one of the best books about the real Joaquin Murrieta, and it does a great job of separating fact from fiction."—True West
"Wilson crafts a rich and nuanced history not only of the Murrieta bands, but also of a violent, ethnically diverse nineteenth-century California in which many groups were struggling to assert their identity and legitimacy as Californians and Americans."—Elisa Warford, Western American Literature