Fool's Gold: The Myth of Tiburcio Vasquez

 

 

Tiburcio Vasquez committed an impressive resume of crimes, but he would have needed several lifetimes to have stolen—and buried—all of the gold he is said to have had. His story, like that of all legends, has taken on a life of its own. This is the famous portrait taken of Vasquez while he was in prison in San Jose awaiting trial for the final time. Vasquez is said to have paid for his legal fees with money made selling autographed prints of the photo, but his popularity couldn’t save him from the hangman’s rope. Image courtesy of Bancroft Library, Berkeley University

Many of us who grew up here heard stories about how the famous highwayman Tiburcio Vasquez hid out in the Santa Monica Mountains and buried his ill-gotten gold in a canyon or a beach cave. He's especially associated with Topanga, but Calabasas and Malibu have stories about him, too—although, so does half of California! I'm one of those children who dreamed of finding that treasure, so when I had the opportunity to to research the legend of Tiburcio Vasquez for the Topanga New Times I seized it! It's a fascinating story, even if it doesn't lead to buried gold. 

 

Here's an excerpt:

 

 

 

 

 

 

This image from Topanga school teacher Theresa Sletton’s 1913 photo album has a hand-written caption that says “hideout of horse thief, one of several local locations associated with Vasquez.” The ruined building became a tourist destination for early motorists and was described as one of Vasquez’ hideouts in numerous descriptions of the sights of Topanga. While it may have sheltered horse thieves, it never housed Tibercio Vasquez, California’s most legendary highwayman. It is extremely unlikely that Vasquez ever came anywhere near the canon, but that hasn’t stopped him from taking up residence in Topangans' imagination. How did he become associated with the canyon? That’s a tall tale of its own. Photo courtesy Ernest Marquez Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA

“And still of a winter’s night, they say, 

when the wind is in the trees,

When the moon is a ghostly galleon 

tossed upon cloudy seas,   

When the road is a ribbon of moonlight 

over the purple moor,   

A highwayman comes riding—

Riding—riding—

A highwayman comes riding, 

up to the old inn-door.

—Alfred Noyes, “The Highwayman”

 

I was one of the children who grew up hearing about our own highwaymen. Desperados who rustled cattle in the Santa Monica Mountains or hid there after robbing stagecoaches; bandits who buried treasure in sea caves and hid it in secret places in the canyons and never returned for it. The man responsible for most of those legends was California’s own favorite legendary highwayman, Tiburcio Vasquez, who is said to have buried gold in Topanga Canyon.

When the coast route through Malibu opened to the public in 1928, newspaper accounts spoke of “Eerie tales of smugglers, pirates and bad men.” In the early years of the twentieth century there were stories of mountain men paying for their goods in town with Spanish gold or raw gold nuggets. Treasure hunters made headlines seeking gold said to be buried by Vasquez. They would surely find it along the beach between Malibu and Santa Monica, or hidden in a Topanga cave, or buried beneath a Calabasas oak tree, or buried deep among the distinctive stones of the Santa Susana Pass. They hunted, and dug, and theorized, and sometimes even lost their lives in the process, but no treasure was ever found.

When Las Tunas Road was paved in 1915, the Los Angeles Evening Express headline read: “Trail Used by Bandit Will Be Obliterated By Las Tunas Road.” The news item states that, “according to a well defined legend of [Topanga] canyon, Vasquez, a horse thief who is claimed to have made the juncture of Topanga and Garapatos canyons his headquarters, at one time used the trail going through the Trejila [sic] ranch into Las Tunas for cattle rustling. 

Vasquez wouldn’t have appreciated being described as a horse thief. He regarded himself as a gentleman highwayman, like the character in Alfred Noyes’ poem—a sort of Californio RobinHood, who stole from the invading Americans. His crimes did include stealing horses—and cattle—but he also held up stagecoaches, and ransacked stores. On one occasion, he and his gang ransacked an entire town. Vasquez had a reputation for not shooting, provided his victims cooperated—he would leave them face-down in the dust with their hands bound behind them. He went to his death maintaining that he never actually killed anyone himself, but he did shoot a man, and he committed so many other crimes that a jury had no qualms about sentencing him to death...

 To read the rest of the story, click here. 

The Goblin Harp

The Goblin Harp, my first novel, was published this autumn. Why a novel? Why not that tenth book of harp music I’ve been working on for an equally long time? Or the next book on the history and natural history of the Santa Monica Mountains that was also supposed to be finished by now. All I can say is that the idea for the story took root in my imagination and kept growing. I needed to write it down, to capture it in words. The book is part mystery, part fairy tale, the kind of adventure story for and about children that I loved when I was a child, and still love to read. That’s what most people who read it will find and maybe that’s enough, but at its heart, this is a book about the harp: its history, its lore, and what I’ve learned about playing the harp over a lifetime, because the harp isn’t quite like any other instrument. It holds magic.

The seeds of this story were planted when I was child. My big brother read me The Hobbit when I was five. In it, Thorin Oakenshield brought a harp to Bilbo Baggin’s Unexpected Party. That was the first harp I remember encountering in books, but there would be others. It was the harp “strung with the wind” in Patricia McKillip’s novel The Harpist in the Wind that crystalized my desire for a harp of my own. I was 12. Celtic harps weren’t easy find back then, but I was determined. I spent part of a never to be forgotten summer vacation in Maine with my parents scouring music shops and found a particularly memorable one in Bar Harbor Maine. We didn’t find a harp there—later that year we found one much closer to home, at Triplett Harps, here in California—but that experience in Bar Harbor planted the seeds for the Goblin Harp.

 

Those seeds were planted in soil enriched with childhood memories of summer vacations in Maine, as well as a lifelong passion for history, nature, ghost stories, and fairy tales, and the excitement I still remember vividly of receiving my first harp and beginning to learn to play it. 

 

The main character of the Goblin Harp is a young girl who has just moved to Maine with her family. She has always dreamed of playing the traditional wire-strung Irish harp and receives a very special one for her twelfth birthday. All the things that happen are a result of that gift. She finds a teacher, makes friends with other young musicians, and uncovers a deadly mystery left behind by the Puritan settlers who claimed the island in the seventeenth century. With the help of her new friends Kate is able is uncover all the clues and tools she needs to solve the puzzle, but can she and her friends prevail before this old evil claims a new victim? This is a story about history, magic, folklore, but most especially about the harp and its traditions.

I gave the protagonist of my novel an ancient Irish harp—the true cláirseach, strung with wire, carved with mysterious symbols and designs, and imbued with a bit of magic—all harps have the potential for that, don’t they? I confess that, unlike my protagonist, I will never be as proficient at the wire-strung harp as I am with nylon strung harps, but it hasn’t stopped me from trying! 

 

I write a lot. As a longtime journalist, I’ve written hundreds of features, editorials, and news stories. I’ve written two books on the history and natural history of Malibu California—the town I grew up in—and nine books of early and traditional music for the harp. Writing this novel was different. It was much more personal. I loved writing this story, and feel a little sad that its finished, complete, set free to live is own life. If you have a story to tell, I encourage you to write it down. Even if it never makes its way into print, putting those thoughts into words is an adventure of its own, and you never know where it might take you. 

Patricia McKillip famously said that she wrote fiction because the ideas were there. “I have no other excuse for sitting down for several hours a day indulging my imagination. Daydreaming, thinking up imaginary people, impossible places,” she wrote. “Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored.” 

It’s true. Once you start, it’s hard to stop. There are so many stories waiting to be told.

The Goblin Harp is available on Amazon.com as a paperback or ebook. Kindle Unlimited readers are invited to read it for free. If you would like to read a sample chapter, you can do so here. 

 

I’m currently writing a second fiction story called The Coastwatchers. It’s a period story set in Malibu in WWII, and it runs as an old-fashioned monthly serial at www.topanganetimes.com, where it can also be read it for free. There aren’t any harps in it, but music is an important theme, and the setting provided an ideal opportunity to incorproate the many stories about life in Malibu in the 1940s that I heard growing up.

 

That tenth harp music book and the third history book? They are coming, I promise!

 

Suzanne Guldimann

31 October 2024