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Gunfight at Mussel Slough:
Evolution of a Western Myth

Terry Beers
328 pages (6 x 9), with 14 b&w images
Trade paper, ISBN: 1-890771-82-1, $19.95

A California Legacy Book

"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Slough collects excerpts from five novels—among them Frank Norris’ masterpiece The Octopus—and places them alongside historical documents including poems, letters, photographs, maps, flyers, songs, editorials, and political cartoons, each selection recording, analyzing, and interpreting a single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. The book shows how these writers helped turn fact into fiction, crafting a tale of good versus evil that tells how California’s cattlemen gave way to virtuous, God-fearing farmers; how unmerciful capitalists threw off challenges from cooperative citizen leagues; how innovative settlers—steeped in the Jeffersonian ideal of the American family farmer—turned arid desert homestead and railroad sections into a "garden of the sun," a garden that for one brief moment became the site of one of the deadliest gunfights in the American west.

Part history, part anthology, Gunfight at Mussel Slough combines elements of literary criticism and historiography in an innovative approach to understanding the mythos of the American West.

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). General editor of the California Legacy Project, he lives in Monterey County, where he runs sled dogs.