A marker in Kings County notes the site of the Mussel Slough massacre, an 1880 shootout between Californians and agents of the U.S. government and Southern Pacific Railroad that left seven dead.

Remember Mussel Slough!

Most of you can’t remember the massacre that birthed modern California. Because you never learned about it in the first place.

Maybe Mussel Slough has been forgotten because the powers-that-be want it that way.

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They don’t want us remembering Mussel Slough because it would teach us that the U.S. government’s attacks against Californians are not some Trump-era anomaly. They don’t want us to remember that the feds always take the side of a powerful industry against the citizenry. And never stop trying to blame regular people for the government’s own violence.

Mussel Slough was a slough, or waterway, 30 miles south of Fresno — and the site of an 1880 shootout between Californians and Southern Pacific Railroad agents, including at least one U.S. marshal.

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The details are still contested. Settlers had built homes near Mussel Slough on railroad land, in anticipation of the construction of a new rail line nearby. This was standard practice. The railroad allowed people to build first and then purchase land from them later, once the railroad route was decided.

But Southern Pacific........

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