The novel The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit (1854) by John Rollin Ridge is ostensibly his story.

Historian Susan Lee Johnson says: "So many tales have grown up around Murrieta that it is hard to disentangle the fabulous from the factual.

There seems to be a consensus that Anglos drove him from a rich mining claim, and that, in rapid succession, his wife was raped, his half-brother lynched, and Murrieta himself horse-whipped.

The French version was translated into Spanish by Roberto Hyenne, who took Ridge's original story and changed every "Mexican" reference to "Chilean".

Like many Sonorans, Murrieta and a party including his new wife Rosa Feliz, traveled there across the Altar and Colorado Deserts in 1849.

However, the only source for this account was a dime novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, written by John Rollin Ridge and published in 1854.

Latta documented that the core of these men had gathered to help Murrieta kill at least six of the Americans who had lynched his stepbrother Jesus Carrillo and whipped him on the false charge of the theft of a mule.

They drove herds of stolen horses from as far north as Contra Costa County, the gold camps of the Sierras, and the Central Valley via the remote La Vereda del Monte trail through the Diablo Range, then south to Sonora for sale.

By 1853, the California state legislature listed Murrieta as one of the so-called "Five Joaquins", suspected criminals in a bill passed in May 1853.

On July 25, 1853, a group of rangers encountered a band of armed Mexican men near Arroyo de Cantua on the edge of the Diablo Range near Coalinga.

[11] A California Historical Landmark plaque has been installed near Coalinga at the intersection of State Routes 33 and 198 to mark the approximate site of the incident.

In August 1853, an anonymous Los Angeles-based man wrote to the San Francisco Alta California Daily, claiming that Love and his rangers had murdered some innocent Mexican mustang catchers, and bribed people to swear out affidavits as to their identities.

[17] Joaquin Murrieta has been used frequently as a romantic outlaw figure in novels, stories, and comics, and in films and TV series.

In the late 20th century a Los Angeles Chicano community center was named Centro Joaquin Murrieta de Aztlan.