Avelino Martinez came to California from Sonora, Mexico, at age 13 searching for his father. During the period when Alta California was looking to statehood and being annexed from Mexico, he encountered a group of ladrones whom Mexicanos regarded as revolutionists or heroes, and he joined them. He became the hostler, sometimes cook, and most often go-fer for Joaquin Valenzuela, one of Joaquin Murrieta’s horse gang lieutenants. After Joaquin Murrieta was reportedly killed by the California Rangers on July 25, 1853, at Cantua Canyon in Fresno County, Avelino and the real Murrieta went to the canyon and helped bury the dead. The remaining members dispersed, and Avelino went into hiding while working on Rancho El Tejon. He had worked there for more than 20 years when Don Jose Jesus Lopez, known as J.J., was hired to manage the ranch’s sheep. Later, after J.J. became mayordomo, a cook was needed, and Avelino, who liked to cook, took the position and held it for more than 40 years. He left El Tejon in the 1920s and, at age 94, went to work for E.J. “Bud” Cummings on his ranch in Tehachapi. When he died at age 112, one story held that Buddy Cummings paid a local town drinker called Okey Dokey two bottles of wine to bury him, while another said Buddy paid two ranch hands one bottle of wine to bury him at the Catholic Cemetery, now Westside Cemetery. The men had never dug a grave before and made it three feet wide, six feet long, and six feet deep, and the grave was oriented north-south rather than east-west like all the others; Avelino Martinez remains the only person buried in that cemetery north-south.