Mussel Slough and the Contradictions of Squatter Capitalism

Abstract

Abstract In the early 1870s, the San Joaquin Valley was among the first of California’s agricultural areas to be singled out for extensive commercial potential. In books and pamphlets by the Central and Southern Pacific Railroads and by local boards of trade, the valley’s hundred-mile-wide, five-hundred-mile-long corridor was praised for its endless pastures and vast acreages of grain (e.g., Hittell 1874; Nordhoff 1872; Orr 1874; see also Starr 1981 and 1985). But in nearly the same breath, the authors of these tracts expected that bonanza farming and stock raising would not last forever. In isolated pockets, such as Mussel Slough near the southern end of the valley, in the Tulare Lake Basin, there had already begun more intensive agricultural practices based on irrigation.