The Author, in presenting this book to the public, is aware that its chief merit consists in the reliability of the ground-work upon which it stands and not in the beauty of its composition. He has aimed to do a service—in his humble way—to those who shall hereafter inquire into the early history of California, by preserving, in however rude a shape, a record of at least a portion of those events which have made the early settlement of this State a living romance through all time.
Besides, it is but doing justice to a people who have so far degenerated as to have been called by many, “A Nation of Cowards,” to hold up a manifest contradiction, or at least an exception to so sweeping an opinion, in the character of a man who, bad though he was, possessed a soul as full of unconquerable courage as ever belonged to a human being. Although the Mexicans may be whipped by every other nation, in a battle of two or five to one, yet no man who speaks the truth can ever deny that there lived one Mexican whose nerves were as iron in the face of danger and death.
The author has not thrown this work out into the world recklessly, or without authority for his assertions. In the main, it will be found to be strictly true. Where he has mentioned localities as being the harboring-places of Joaquín, he has meant invariably to say that persons then connected (at the date of the events narrated) with those localities stood in the doubtful position in which he has placed them.