Presley, a poet seeking an epic subject, spends a season on the great wheat ranches of the San Joaquin Valley. There Magnus Derrick and his neighbours are squeezed by the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad’s freight rates and land grabs, and their fight, with bribery, political schemes and finally guns, is drawn from the real Mussel Slough tragedy of 1880.
A grand muckraking novel of 1901 about land, money and monopoly, the first of Norris’s planned trilogy of wheat. Download the free EPUB.