Yes, the Railroad had prevailed… . But the WHEAT remained. Untouched, unassailable, undefiled, that mighty world-force, that nourisher of nations, wrapped in Nirvanic calm, indifferent to the human swarm, gigantic, resistless, moved onward in its appointed grooves. He had laid his puny human grasp upon Creation and the very earth herself, the great mother, feeling the touch of the cobweb that the human insect had spun, had stirred at last in her sleep and sent her omnipotence moving through the grooves of the world, to find and crush the disturbers of her appointed courses. In The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903), Frank Norris devotes passages to romantic descriptions of wheat, following a seemingly familiar trope by associating wheat as a Great Mother figure and reducing humans in comparison. However, certain aspects of his descriptions destabilize this reading. Norris romanticizes a hybrid entity, wheat, an agricultural crop that is neither nature nor culture, and this agricultural “force” comes to represent Norris's idea of “nature” in his “Epic of the Wheat.” As an example of interspecies interconnectedness, the wheat and the growers of the wheat can be seen as being allied in their goal of production—the wheat's “appointed groove.” Norris also describes wheat in both quotations above as an avenging world force that can ultimately “crush” anyone who has disturbed its “appointed” purpose. Though his novels are named after forces like the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad—a fictitious version of the Southern Pacific Railroad—or the Chicago Board of Trade, Norris's overall epic is named after the natural substance of wheat itself. Wheat can therefore be read as the highest of the forces in Norris's work as opposed to those economic ones.1