In the spring of 1899, twenty-nine-year-old Frank Norris (1870–1902) spent eight weeks on the San Anita Rancho, near Hollister, California. He went to the rancho to gather impressions for his next novel, The Octopus. The area around Hollister resembled the locale of the Mussel Slough affair. Norris planned to center his story around this bloody shoot-out, which had occurred between ranchers and agents of the Southern Pacific Railroad nearly twenty years before. During the 1870s, settlers had taken up land along the railroad's right-of-way with the pledge that they could someday buy it at $2.50 upward an acre. They improved the land and then, when the railroad finally acquired clear title, saw it offered for sale at prices between $17 and $40 an acre. After losing ejectment suits, members of the Grand Settlers' League confronted a U.S. marshal and would-be purchasers of their land near the town of Hanford in the Mussel Slough district of Tulare County. Firing broke out, and after the dust settled, one railroad agent and four settlers lay dead. Two settlers died thereafter, five were sentenced to prison, and others hunted down and killed another of the railroad's hired guns. After losing one more court battle, most of the settlers moved away, and those who stayed accepted the railroad's terms.

Mussel Slough, now part of Kings County, lies some 120 miles southeast of Hollister in the lower San Joaquin Valley. Norris went to Hollister the way John Ford went to Monument Valley, in search of a site that would provide his story with an answerable if enlarged historical scale.