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2 unusual facts about Mussel Slough Tragedy


Mussel Slough Tragedy

Muckraking novels such as W. C. Morrow's Blood-Money (1882) and Charles Cyril Post's Driven from Sea to Sea; or, Just A' Campin (1884) exaggerate the fault of the railroad for the events as they unfolded in San Joaquin and romanticize the ranchers according to a Jeffersonian agrarian ideal.

Besides the 1874 Supreme Court ruling, a critical moment came on December 15, 1879, when Judge Lorenzo Sawyer of the Ninth Circuit Court ruled in Orton, 32 F. 457 (C.C.D. Cal. 1879), that the federal government controlled the railroad land grants, and more importantly, the state could not control ultra vires acts of corporations.



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