Remember Mussel Slough!
Easy for me to say. It’s difficult to remember an event that no one ever taught you—even though that event was the massacre that birthed modern California.
Maybe Mussel Slough has been forgotten because it’s hard to find. The massacre site is a field in the San Joaquin Valley, 30 miles south of Fresno. Or maybe Mussel Slough has been forgotten because the powers-that-be want it that way.
They don’t want us to remember Mussel Slough, because it would remind us that the U.S. government’s relentless attacks against Californians are not some Trump-era anomaly. They don’t want us to remember that the feds never fight fair, and almost always take the side of a rich and rising industry against the citizenry. And they don’t want us to understand that American rulers never stop trying to blame regular people for the violence their governments visit upon them.
Mussel Slough was the name of a slough, or waterway, between Kings River and Tulare Lake. It was also the site, and then the famous name, of an 1880 shootout between Californians defending their dreams and Southern Pacific Railroad agents, including at least one U.S. marshal.
The details are complicated, and long contested. Settlers had built homes in the area, on railroad land they didn’t own, in anticipation of the construction of a new rail line nearby. This was standard practice. During the fast-paced 19th-century construction of new lines across the country, there often wasn’t time for legal niceties. The railroad allowed people to build first and then purchase land from them later, once the railroad route was decided.
But Southern Pacific kept raising the prices in Mussel Slough. The settlers—migrants, Civil War refugees, local merchants, and land speculators—wouldn’t pay, and wouldn’t leave. So the railroad leveraged its power in federal government and in the courts to enforce its control over the land, sending agents to chase after settlers and evict them. The settlers resisted.
The conflict came to a head on May 11, 1880, when 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, who had been attending a picnic, went to confront the railroad men. An argument ensued. One of the railroad men, Hartt, opened fire on one of the settlers, 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.