Mexican Travelers, Miners, and Legends

Read by Mary Lou Dieterich, men came to the area from the Sonora territory in now-northern Mexico to capture wild horses since the early 1800s. Their descendants and families were among the first to move into the gold-mining foothills in 1848, kicking off the California Gold Rush. The rise in notoriety of Joaquin Murrieta was the most famous product of this sequence of events.