Y e l l o w B ir d a n d t h e B a n d it : M in o r it y A u t h o r s h ip , C l a s s , a n d A u d ie n c e in J o h n R o l l in R id g e ’s T h e L ife a n d A d v e n tu r e s o f J o a q u in M u r ie ta J o e G o e k e In September 1854, Franklin Buck, a twenty-eight-year-old general store owner in Weaverville, California, mailed a package holding a brief letter and a yellow-covered pamphlet to his sister in Bucksport, Maine. “I send you by this mail,” Buck explained, “a specimen of our California literature. The author of the book is a good letter writer and quite a poet. A great many of the incidents in the book, I suspect, are romance but the greater part is fact” (142). The “specimen” Buck had enclosed was the recently published crime pamphlet The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta by John Rollin Ridge, a mixedblood Cherokee who wrote under his Indian name, Yellow Bird. Although Joaquin Murieta resembled other products of the sensational press in its dramatization of a timely story from regional newspapers, graphic vio lence, and appeals to American nationalism, Ridge framed the narrative with moral warnings about the consequences of racial prejudice. Using his own experience to “authenticate” this biography of a Mexican ban dit whose identity had been a source of controversy among Californians, Ridge encouraged his mining country audience, made up largely of middle-class Anglo-American immigrants such as Buck, to identify with Murieta on the grounds of class distinction. However, the classbased rhetoric Ridge used to gain sympathy for Joaquin led him also to contradict his antiracist message in ways that made his narrative vul nerable to appropriation by the emerging dime-novel industry. This essay examines the contemporary rhetorical context for Ridge’s class-conscious assault on racial prejudice in gold rush California, and it calls attention to changing conditions in nineteenth-century American print culture that made it possible for later publishers to strip the Murieta character of Ridge’s authorial identity and suppress his moral message. In the midst of an increasingly national literary marketplace where large urban audiences were developing a taste for sensational dime-novel Westerns, Ridge’s tale, written for a roughly egalitarian frontier audience, became an exotic outlaw adventure story sold to citydwellers living within stratified class systems. The result was an ironic 454 W AL 37.4 WINTER 2 0 0 3 separation of Ridge from the semi-autobiographical character that in many ways embodied the displacement and determination he felt as a mixedblood Cherokee in nineteenth-century America. From Buck’s letter to his sister back East, one can see how the divi sion of Ridge and his Murieta character began in part from the notori ety that Joaquin had acquired in California newspapers before Ridge’s narrative was published. While Buck does show some awareness of Ridge’s skills as a correspondent and poet, he focuses most of his atten tion on Joaquin, enthusiastically stating, “I lived at the ranch six miles from Marysville during the winter of ’51 and ’52 and no doubt saw the real Joaquin at the camp, three miles from the city, where I frequently went to fandangoes” (142). Buck would have known about Joaquin at least a year before the publication of Ridge’s narrative, as local newspa pers had created a flurry of publicity about the bandit, attributing crimes throughout the California mining country to “the notorious Joaquin,” whose surname remained a mystery. Occasionally, conflicting reports even located Joaquin at sites of robbery and murder perpetrated on the same day but so remote from each other as to defy their con nection to the same man.1 As public excitement about “Joaquin” came to include demands for intervention by the state government, Captain Harry Love, a veteran of the Mexican-American War, petitioned...