SOURCE: "Origin Mists: John Rollin Ridge's Masquerade and Mourning Dove's Mixed Bloods," in Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, University of Oklahoma Press, 1992, pp. 32-48.

In the following essay, Owens discusses Joaquín Murieta as a work that expresses the internal conflict Ridge experienced as an individual trapped between Native and white cultures.

John Rollin Ridge, the first American Indian to publish a novel, arrived in California in 1850, a mixedblood Cherokee fleeing the turmoil set loose by the injustices of the Removal Act. If the "Indian Territory" that would become Oklahoma was a displaced setting wrought out of violence and confusion, however, the gold-fevered place to which Ridge fled was no promised land for Native Americans. The same year that Ridge arrived in California—a new state with an already well established history of genocide against Indians—California's governor, Peter H. Burnett, announced what amounted to a...