SOURCE: "Ridge's Life of Joaquin Murieta: The First and Revised Editions Compared," in California Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. XVI, No. 3, September, 1937, pp. 256-62.

In the following essay, Walker analyzes and compares the 1854 first edition of Ridge's novel Joaquín Murieta with the more widely-read revised 1871 edition.

Until recently it was feared that no copy existed of John Rollin Ridge's life of Joaquin Murieta in its original version of 1854. As late as 1932, Mr. Francis P. Farquhar, in preparing what is known as the Police Gazette version of the Joaquin Murieta story for a reissue by the Grabhorn Press, lamented that Ridge's first edition could not be found. This first detailed account of the career of the Mexican bandit who had been killed and beheaded but a few months before its issue was a ninety-page pamphlet which had become so rare that the only testimony to its existence was an...