Mussel Slough Tragedy

The Mussel Slough Tragedy was a dispute over land titles between settlers and the Southern Pacific Railroad (SP) that took place on May 11, 1880, on a farm located 5.6 miles (9 km) northwest of Hanford, California, in the central San Joaquin Valley, leaving seven people dead. Frank Norris' 1901 novel, The Octopus: A Story of California, was inspired by this incident, as was W. C. Morrow's 1882 novel Blood-Money. The exact history of the incident has been the source of some disagreement, largely because popular anti-railroad sentiment in the 1880s made the incident to be a clear example of corrupt and cold-blooded corporate greed. Muckraking journalists and anti-railroad activists glorified the settlers and used the events as evidence and justification for their anti-corporate crusades. The site of the episode is now registered as California Historical Landmark #245.^[1] A historical marker on the east side of 14th Avenue, 350 yards (320 m) north of Elder Avenue, memorializes the site.^[3]

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mussel Slough Tragedy