their reward. Officials displayed the jar of remains in Mariposa County, Stockton, and San Francisco. The rangers took the display throughout California; spectators could pay $1 to see the relics. Love and his rangers received the $1,000 reward money. 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. Later that fall, California newspapers carried letters by a few men falsely claiming that Capt. Love had failed to display Murrieta's head at the mining camps. On May 28, 1854, the California State Legislature voted to reward the Rangers with another $5,000 for their defeat of Murrieta and his band. Some 25 years later, myths began to form about Murrieta. In 1879, O. P. Stidger reportedly heard Murrieta's sister say that the displayed head was not her brother's. At around the same time, numerous sightings were reported of Murrieta as a middle-aged man. These were never confirmed. His preserved head was destroyed during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fire. Murrieta's nephew, known as Procopio, became one of California's most notorious bandits of the 1860s and 1870s. He was said to have wanted to exceed the reputation of his uncle. The Real Zorro Murrieta is believed to have inspired the fictional character of Zorro, the lead character in the five-part serial story, The Curse of Capistrano, written by Johnston McCulley, and published in 1919 in a pulp fiction magazine. For some political activists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Murrieta has symbolized Mexican resistance against Anglo-American economic and cultural domination in California, as Spanish colonists, Native Americans, mixtos, and independent Mexicans were there first. The "Association of Descendants of Joaquin Murrieta" says that Murrieta was not a "gringo eater", but "He wanted to retrieve the part of Mexico that was lost at that time in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo" (after the Mexican-American War). Representations in media Joaquin Murrieta has been used frequently as a romantic outlaw figure in novels, stories, and comics, and in films and TV series. Literature Joaquin Miller, Joaquin Et. Al (1872) Louis Kretschman, Trail Of Vengeance (1977) John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854): Parts of this were translated into French and Spanish. Yellow Bird (John Rollin Ridge), The