Railroad Monopoly as The Octopus

In the arms of the octopus, clockwise from top left:

• Railroad directors' mansions subsidized by federal bonds
  
• Wheat Export
  
• Stage Lines
  
• Lumber Dealers
  
• Fruit Growers
  
• The Farmers
  
• Mining
  
• Wine
  
• The Telegraph
  

G. Frederick Keller's 1882 cartoon "The Curse of California" appeared in The Wasp, a satirical newspaper edited by the notorious Ambrose Bierce.

A giant octopus stands for the Southern Pacific Railroad Company's stranglehold on commerce. The image was memorialized in Frank Norris' 1901 novel of wheat farmers, The Octopus.

For its eyes the Railroad octopus has Charles Crocker, the construction magnate, and Leland Stanford, the Company's political glad-hander in California and later founder of a university.

At left a tenth arm waits, as if held in reserve for a new victim. Perhaps the tenth arm has just finished laying to rest the men shot in the Mussel Slough Tragedy. Their graves are marked "Killed By the Railroad Monster."

Chris Evans recounts the Battle of Mussel Slough with his typical bravado in the first episode of Eva's Outlaws. Listen to a podcast of the show in "Passerby: 04/15/09" at the halfway point.

...Or perhaps the tenth arm in its concealed position is hiding the Railroad's imported Chinese laborers and California's race problems?

What is most striking in "The Curse of California"? While one might view the severe cruelty of Keller's octopus in aesthetic terms, its size and spread are no exaggeration of the economic circumstances.

We can't really intuit how profoundly the Southern Pacific wielded its influence in the California of those times. The Railroad monopoly exerted very broad control, far greater than functions of dollars or miles of track... influence without quantity.

What was it, some strange genus unclassified to this day?

At any rate, one can imagine Chris Evans and his friends, yeoman farmers, railroad workers, looking at this political cartoon in wonder...

What is that thing?!

Somewhere from within the blank mugs of those railroad barons (or in spite of them) projects the image of the modern faceless corporation... the behemoth, unique, beyond the limit, extension of man.