Gunfight at Mussel Slough: Evolution of a Western Myth

Edited by Terry Beers

"On May 11, 1880—at Henry Brewer's homestead in the southern San Joaquin Valley district of Mussel Slough—seven men lost their lives during one of the deadliest shootouts in the history of the American West."

With this statement of fact begins Terry Beers' examination of how history—complex, incomplete, and often contradictory—becomes mythology, written and rewritten until its edges are polished into the "extraordinarily powerful images that preserve our most cherished values, those which we believe—or want to believe—shape our culture."

Gunfight at Mussel Slough collects excerpts from five novels—among them Frank Norris' masterpiece The Octopus—and places them alongside historical documents including poems, letters, photographs, maps, flyers, songs, editorials, and political cartoons, each selection recording, analyzing, and interpreting a single event in ways that ultimately change how history will be remembered.

Reviews

"A fascinating and illuminating exercise....Gunfight at Mussel Slough is Beers's sturdy effort to rescue history from the mythmakers. At that self-appointed task he is wholly successful. And yet he takes nothing away from the pain and pathos of the events he evokes in such telling detail. His book can be understood as nothing less than the re-invention and the re-imaging of the Western myth."—Los Angeles Times Book Review

About the Editor

Terry Beers is an associate professor of English at Santa Clara University and the author of A Thousand Graceful Subtleties: Rhetoric in the Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (1995) and Unfolding Beauty: Celebrating California’s Landscapes (2000). He is general editor of the California Legacy Project.