The Trial of "Indian Joe": Race and Justice in the Nineteenth-Century West

On the night of 16 October 1892, a double homicide occurred on Otay Mesa in San Diego County near the Mexican border. The two victims were an elderly couple, John and Wilhelmina Geyser, who lived on a farm on the edge of the mesa. Within minutes of discovering the crime, neighbors subdued and tied up the alleged killer, José Gabriel, a sixty-year-old itinerant Native American handyman from El Rosario, California, who worked for the couple. Since Gabriel was apprehended at the scene, most pres…