Where I Was From (5 page)

Thirteen years before, in 1880, there had been, at a place then called Mussel Slough but after the incident renamed “Lucerne,” the shootout between federal marshals acting for the Southern Pacific, which had become through its federal land grants the largest landowner in California, and a group of local ranchers who were growing wheat on land leased from the railroad. The ranchers, under the rather willful misapprehension that their lease agreements gave them the right to buy the land at $2.50 an acre (the agreements were vaguely worded, but quite clearly stated that the land would be made available “at various figures from $2.50 upward per acre,” “upward” being the word the ranchers preferred to miss), refused to pay the price, $17 to $40 an acre, ultimately set on the land. The railroad obtained eviction orders, the ranchers resisted, and both the ranchers and the federal marshals sent to evict them began firing. Six ranchers ultimately died in this confrontation, which not only provided the climactic incident for
The Octopus
—the showdown between eleven ranchers and the U.S. marshals sent in to enforce eviction orders—but also influenced the final scenes in Josiah Royce’s only work of fiction,
The Feud of Oakfield Creek: A Novel of California Life
, based on the Sacramento squatters’ riots of 1850.

For the San Francisco threads in his narrative, Norris drew on even more recent events: in 1899, there had been the celebrated publication in
The San Francisco Examiner
of Edwin Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe,” a rhetorical poem that decried the exploitation of labor. An epic poem in the style of “The Man with the Hoe” appears in
The Octopus
as “The Toilers,” the newspaper poem that makes an instant celebrity of its author, Presley, the irresolute graduate of “an Eastern college” who is the novel’s protagonist. The publication of “The Toilers” enables Presley to dine at the table of “the Railroad King” (Blue Point oysters,
purée a la Derby
, ortolan patties,
grenadins
of bass and stuffed salmon, Londonderry pheasants,
escalopes
of duck,
rissolettes á la pompadour
, asparagus rushed to the kitchen of the Railroad King by special train within hours of its cutting), even as, outside in the fog, the dispossessed widow of one of the evicted and killed San Joaquin wheat growers is literally starving to death, falling into her terminal coma on a vacant lot at the top of the Clay Street hill, her small daughter at her side, her older daughter already descended into prostitution.

Presley knows nothing of the fate of the widow, but had by fortuitous narrative design run into the older daughter, her degradation apparent, that very afternoon, rendering this dinner an occasion for him of considerable clarity. He sits at the opulent table of the Railroad King as the Château Latour is poured and imagines the clink of the glasses “drowned in the explosion of revolvers” in the San Joaquin Valley. He sees, for an instant, “that splendid house sacked to its foundations, the tables overturned, the pictures torn, the hangings blazing, and Liberty, the red-handed Man in the Street, grimed with powder smoke, foul with the gutter, rush yelling, torch in hand, through every door.” The intercutting from the dinner table inside to the dying widow and child outside is insistently allegorical, operatic, outsized, as is the subsequent death of the railroad’s agent in the hold of a cargo ship taking on wheat destined for Asia, consigned there by the blind force of the market even as widows and orphans starve for want of a heel of bread on the streets of San Francisco:

Deafened with the roar of the grain, blinded and made dumb with its chaff, he threw himself forward with clutching fingers, rolling upon his back, and lay there, moving feebly, the head rolling from side to side. The Wheat, leaping continuously from the chute, poured around him. It filled the pockets of the coat, it crept up the sleeves and trouser legs, it covered the great, protuberant stomach, it ran at last in rivulets into the distended, gasping mouth. It covered the face.

Upon the surface of the Wheat, under the chute, nothing moved but the Wheat itself. There was no sign of life. Then, for an instant, the surface stirred. A hand, fat, with short fingers and swollen veins, reached up, clutching, then fell limp and prone. In another instant it was covered.

T
he Octopus
has been, from the outset, a troubling work, in part because its apparent relentlessness could be so readily dismissed. As recently as 1991, in a discussion of the railroad’s role in the development of California, the quarterly publication of the California Historical Society was trying to separate the significance of that role from Norris’s “shrill, anti-corporate rhetoric,” his “superficial and distorted tale,” and pointing out that the cartoon image of the Southern Pacific as an octopus, with portraits of Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker for its eyes, long predated Norris’s use of it. There would seem on the face of it to be nothing subtle in
The Octopus:
the novel is barely under way when Presley catches sight of a train, and immediately translates it into:

the galloping monster, the terror of steel and steam, with its single eye, cyclopean, red, shooting from horizon to horizon … the symbol of a vast power, huge, terrible, flinging the echo of its thunder over all the reaches of the valley, leaving blood and destruction in its path; the leviathan, with tentacles of steel clutching into the soil, the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus.

Yet
The Octopus
remains perhaps the most complex statement to date of the California condition, and a deeply ambiguous work. Nothing about the novel, on examination, is quite what it seems. Edwin Markham’s “The Man with the Hoe” may have galvanized sentiment against the exploitation of labor, but it was said by its author to have been inspired, curiously, in one of the many apparent connections in California life that serve only as baffles to further inquiry, by study of a Millet painting owned by Charles Crocker, one of the Central and Southern Pacific’s “Big Four,” in other words a Railroad King. Frank Norris may have considered the Southern Pacific “the soulless Force, the iron-hearted Power, the monster, the Colossus, the Octopus,” but two years before he conceived the novel he was an editor of, and writing regularly for,
The Wave
, a San Francisco weekly financed by the Southern Pacific to promote Charles Crocker’s new Del Monte Hotel in Monterey.
The Octopus
is not, as it might logically seem to be, a story of an agrarian society overtaken by the brute momentum of industrialization: the octopus, if there is one, turns out to be neither the railroad nor corporate ownership but indifferent nature, which is characterized, to somewhat unsettling effect, in much the same language as the railroad was earlier: “a gigantic engine, a vast Cyclopean power, huge, terrible, a leviathan with a heart of steel, knowing no compunction, no forgiveness, no tolerance; crushing out the human atom standing in its way, with nirvanic calm, the agony of destruction sending never a jar.…”

There are, as drawn by Norris, serious ambiguities about even the climactic shootout, not the least of which are that the ranchers had never owned the land in dispute, had chosen to misread the lease agreements on the gamble that other growers would band together in such force as to render the papers useless (“Oh, rot!” one of them cries when warned to take a closer look at the leases. “Of course the railroad will sell at two-fifty. We’ve got the contracts”), and had taken up raising wheat on railroad land in the first place only because the railroad was there to transport the wheat. These wheat ranchers in
The Octopus
are in no sense simple farmers. They are farmers with tickers in their offices, connecting the San Joaquin by wire with San Francisco and Chicago and New York and finally with Liverpool, at that time the nerve center of the wheat market. “Fluctuations in the price of the world’s crop during and after the harvest,” Norris wrote, “thrilled straight to the office of Los Muertos, to that of the Quien Sabe, to Osterman’s, and to Broderson’s [the ranches in the novel]. During a flurry in the Chicago wheat pits in the August of that year, which had affected even the San Francisco market, Harran and Magnus had sat up nearly half of one night watching the strip of white tape jerking unsteadily from the reel.”

Nor are Magnus Derrick and his son Harran and Osterman and Broderson and Annixter even “farmers” at all, in the conventional sense of the word: they had come to the San Joaquin as an entrepreneurial move, after other ventures (in mining, in politics, in whatever had presented itself) had failed or gone dry, and after, most significantly and most ambiguously, the railroad had opened the San Joaquin to profitable cultivation by offering, for the first time, a way to move its crops to market. The proprietor of Los Muertos, Magnus Derrick, the nearest the novel gets to a tragic hero, is nonetheless characterized by Norris as a high-stakes gambler, a miner at heart, come to the San Joaquin in search of the quick killing that had eluded him in the Comstock Lode:

It was the true California spirit that found expression through him, the spirit of the West, unwilling to occupy itself with details, refusing to wait, to be patient, to achieve by legitimate plodding; the miner’s instinct of wealth acquired in a single night prevailed, in spite of all. It was in this frame of mind that Magnus and the multitude of other ranchers of whom he was a type, farmed their ranches. They had no love for their land. They were not attached to the soil. They worked their ranches as a quarter of a century before they had worked their mines.… To get all there was out of the land, to squeeze it dry, to exhaust it, seemed their policy. When, at last, the land worn out, would refuse to yield, they would invest their money in something else; by then, they would all have made fortunes. They did not care.

Norris’s San Joaquin wheat growers, then, were of a type common enough in California: the speculators noted by Charles Nordhoff in 1874, entrepreneurs in search of the shrewd venture, men who might themselves have been running the railroad had they seen the opportunity, held the right cards, been quicker players. Confronted with the demands of the railroad (which was pressing not only to evict the ranchers but to raise freight rates) and its bought members of the Railroad Commission, the first response of the ranchers in
The Octopus
is to buy a commissioner of their own. Even in this venture not quick enough players, they buy the wrong man: Magnus Derrick’s politically ambitious older son, who sells out to the railroad. That the only actual conflict in
The Octopus
turns out to be between successful and failed members of the same entrepreneurial class (members in some cases of the same families) creates a deep and troubled confusion in the novel, a dissonance its author grasped but failed to resolve. This dissonance, which had to do with the slippage between the way Californians perceived themselves and the way they were, between what they believed to be their unlimited possibilities and the limitations implicit in their own character and history, might have been Norris’s great subject, but he died, at thirty-two, of peritonitis, before he could work it through. The confusions here have not been mine alone.

In the 1860s … William Henry Brewer [the chief assistant to Josiah Dwight Whitney in his 1860–64 geological survey of California] … described the southwestern San Joaquin Valley as a “plain of absolute desolation.” At the turn-of-the-century, the crusading novelist Frank Norris pictured the valley as “bone dry, parched, and baked and crisped” where the “day seemed always at noon.” But, a century after Brewer’s report, and less than half a century after Norris’s observations, it became clear that by just adding water, this vale of sterility would bloom as the nation’s garden.

J
ust by adding water.
The above appears on the United States Bureau of Reclamation’s web site, on the page prepared by the Bureau’s History Program to deal with the Central Valley Project’s San Luis Unit, West San Joaquin Division.
We had an irrigation problem, so we built the greatest dams the world has known
, was my equally can-do approach to the subject in “Our California Heritage.” This, according to the same Bureau of Reclamation web page, is what it takes to “just add water” to the San Joaquin:

Melting snow and runoff high in the mountains of Northern California are the first steps of a trek through the heart of the state. Once in the Sacramento—San Joaquin River Delta, water is released from storage and lifted 197 feet by the Tracy Pumping Plant. The flow is then conveyed about 70 miles south to the O’Neill Forebay via the California Aqueduct (a State Water Project, or SWP, feature) and the Federal Delta-Mendota Canal. Delta-Mendota carries water southeasterly from the Tracy Pumping Plant, eventually arriving at the O’Neill Pumping-Generating Plant. Running parallel to the Delta-Mendota Canal, the Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct travels directly into the O’Neill Forebay. The O’Neill Dam, Pumping-Generating Plant and Forebay are all a half mile from the San Luis Dam and Reservoir. Units of the William R. Gianelli Pumping-Generating Plant (formerly known as the San Luis Pumping-Generating Plant) raises water from O’Neill Forebay into San Luis Reservoir. Releases from San Luis Reservoir are directed into the 101.3-mile-long San Luis Canal. Seventeen miles south of San Luis Reservoir, the Dos Amigos Pumping Station lifts the water again, so the flow can continue another 85 miles across central California. Journey’s end for the San Luis Canal is the Federal terminus at Kettleman City. At Kettleman City, the SWP’s California Aqueduct carries on to service farms, recreational users and municipalities as far south as Los Angeles. When drought strikes California, and Delta flows cannot supply State and Federal water projects, water is released back into the O’Neill Forebay, coursing southward through the California Aqueduct. During irrigation season, water is released from the reservoir back through the pump-generator units of Gianelli to the O’Neill Forebay, generating electric power. Protecting the canal from streams crossing its path are the Los Banos and Little Panoche Detention Dams and Reservoirs. Other Unit features include the San Luis Drain, Pleasant Valley Pumping Plant, and the Coalinga Canal. The operation of the San Luis Unit is a fairly simple procedure for those brief periods when man and nature are in harmony, but both seldom have been in synchronization.