A marker in Kings County notes the site of the Mussel Slough massacre, an 1880 shootout between Californians and agents of the U.S. government and Southern Pacific Railroad that left seven dead.
Tulare County Library
Most of you can’t remember the massacre that birthed modern California. Because you never learned about it in the first place.
Maybe Mussel Slough has been forgotten because the powers-that-be want it that way.
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They don’t want us remembering Mussel Slough because it would teach us that the U.S. government’s attacks against Californians are not some Trump-era anomaly. They don’t want us to remember that the feds always take the side of a powerful industry against the citizenry. And never stop trying to blame regular people for the government’s own violence.
Mussel Slough was a slough, or waterway, 30 miles south of Fresno — and the site of an 1880 shootout between Californians and Southern Pacific Railroad agents, including at least one U.S. marshal.
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The details are still contested. Settlers had built homes near Mussel Slough on railroad land, in anticipation of the construction of a new rail line nearby. This was standard practice. The railroad allowed people to build first and then purchase land from them later, once the railroad route was decided.
But Southern Pacific raised the land prices in Mussel Slough. The settlers — migrants, Civil War refugees, land speculators — wouldn’t pay and wouldn’t leave. So, the railroad sent agents to chase after settlers and evict them. The settlers resisted.
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On May 11, 1880, five “railroad men” — U.S. Marshal Alonso Poole, Southern Pacific land appraiser William Clark, and locals Walter J. Crow and Mills Hartt (who some accounts describe as deputy U.S. marshals) — started evicting settlers from Mussel Slough.
Twenty or so settlers confronted them. An argument ensued. One railroad man, Harrt, opened fire on one settler, who returned fire, killing Hartt. Crow, another railroad man, then killed five members of the settlers’ party. Another gunfight victim succumbed later. Seven people died in all.
But the railroad men were never held accountable for the settlers’ deaths. Instead, the federal government indicted 17 settlers, and won convictions against five of them, for “willfully interfering” with a U.S. marshal.
The shootout and those convictions stirred national outrage at railroad impunity. Mussel Slough became a fixture of popular culture for a half-century—in plays, early films and books.
Among these were Frank Norris’ 1901 novel “The Octopus: A Story of California,” a fictionalized account of Mussel Slough that channels despair at a corrupt political and economic system:
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“They own us, these task-masters of ours; they own our homes, they own our legislatures. … We are told we can defeat them by the ballot-box. They own the ballot-box. We are told that we must look to the courts for redress; they own the courts. We know them for what they are — ruffians in politics, ruffians in finance, ruffians in law, ruffians in trade, bribers, swindlers, and tricksters.”
If such anger feels familiar today, it should. The fix is in. The U.S. government violates the law and the Constitution with impunity, and attacks migrants and critics, while Big Tech executives — the railroad barons of today — go unchecked.
That’s why the history that followed Mussel Slough is also worth remembering.
Across California and the U.S., everyday people did not accept federal violence. They fought back and formed immense movements that birthed the Progressive Era, during which citizens and politicians overhauled the government to make it more responsive to the people. Teddy Roosevelt, quoting Norris and invoking Mussel Slough, took on the great trusts and corporate power.
California was a center of the Progressive Era. A new statewide Progressive Party formed to challenge the railroads. The political fight was nasty and at times violent, especially in San Francisco. But the Progressives prevailed.
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They established new regulators and agencies to govern California and the railroads. The state Legislature and the voters approved women’s suffrage, nonpartisan local elections and direct democracy.
Californians also enacted sweeping social reforms to benefit everyday people — like the Mussel Slough settlers — including eight-hour workdays, workers’ compensation, child-labor laws, and new food safety and public health systems.
Unfortunately, you learn nothing of this by going to the Mussel Slough site, as I did recently. There’s a historical marker with a weather-beaten plaque, hard by the side of 14th Avenue, with limited information about the massacre. There is no parking lot, so stopping to check out the marker means pulling over into the dirt, with cars speeding past you just a few feet away. There wasn’t much water in a nearby slough.
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But there is still plenty of blood in the old story and no shortage of courage left in us. Fight the Power! Remember Mussel Slough!
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Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.