The Octopus, published in 1901 and based on what was at the time quite recent history in the San Joaquin Valley, was, in the best sense, worked up: through well-situated friends, Ernest Peixotto and his wife (the Peixottos were a prominent San Francisco Jewish family, and Ernest Peixotto’s older sister Jessica, an economist, was one of the first women on the faculty of the University of California), Norris managed an introduction to a couple who ran five thousand acres of wheat in San Benito County, and arranged to spend the summer of 1899 on their ranch near Hollister. San Benito County presented a gentler, more coastal landscape than the San Joaquin, which was where Norris intended to set his novel (“San Juan de Guadalajara,” the mission in The Octopus, was a borrow from Mission San Juan Bautista near Hollister, there being no missions in the San Joaquin), but it was nonetheless a setting in which an attentive reporter could absorb the mechanics of a big wheat operation.
The Octopus opens on a day in “the last half of September, the very end of the dry season,” a day when “all Tulare County, all the vast reaches of the San Joaquin Valley—in fact all South Central California, was bone dry, parched, and baked and crisped after four months of cloudless weather, when the day seemed always at noon, and the sun blazed white hot over the valley from the Coast Range in the west to the foothills of the Sierras in the east.” The stuff of the novel, the incidents on which the narrative turns, came directly from actual events in what was then Tulare County. In 1893 in Tulare County there had been the killing by a sheriff’s posse of John Sontag, an embittered Southern Pacific brakeman who had spent the previous three years dynamiting track and robbing trains, killing and wounding several lawmen. In The Octopus Son-tag would become “Dyke,” who commandeers an engineer to escape his pursuers, foils their attempt to derail him by reversing the engine, abandons it, and is taken by the posse.
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, puree 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.
The 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