Dan Walters: California bullet train feud echoes old conflict

It's doubtful whether members of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, who voted this month to pursue an alternative route through Kings County for a north-south bullet train, have ever heard of the Mussel Slough Tragedy, even though it was a seminal event in the state's history.

If they had, they might not have done what they did.

On May 11, 1880, a long-simmering conflict between the Southern Pacific Railroad and local farmers over changes in the railroad's route and its seizure of land from homesteaders escalated into a shootout that left seven men dead.

It became a national cause célèbre, especially after being recounted in Frank Norris' muckraking novel "The Octopus," and fueled a nascent populist movement in California that eventually became a rebellion against the railroad's control of state politics.

The Mussel Slough Tragedy is commemorated with a small historical marker a few miles northwest of Hanford, the Kings County seat that is named after a Southern Pacific official. And by an almost eerie happenstance, that marker is virtually adjacent to the new bullet train alignment.

The agency ginned up the new route west of Hanford because of mounting opposition to a route east of the city, but the shift has not placated the local critics. The county has become ground zero of rural resistance to the bullet train, just as it was the hotbed of opposition to the Southern Pacific's high-handed ways.

"Kings County is first up on this," Kole Upton, a San Joaquin Valley farmer who's active in Preserve Our Heritage, an anti-bullet train group, told the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee last week.

Kings County residents and politicians complain that the CHSRA has drawn routes through the county without regard to local impacts. Farmers have been especially critical, saying that construction of the line would take their land, force them to move or make farming virtually impossible.

Greg Gatzka, a Kings County representative, told the committee that local residents had received "deplorable treatment," that "impacts (on farmers) are not addressed," and that CHSRA agents threaten to seize land by eminent domain if owners are not willing to sell.

The agency has denied that it's mistreating Kings County, but Kings has sued, citing the legal issues raised by the Legislature's budget analyst, Mac Taylor. The suit alleges that as designed, the system would violate Proposition 1A, the ballot measure that authorized its construction and approved $9.95 billion in state bonds to finance it.

The parallels between the events leading to the Mussel Slough Tragedy and today's wrangling over the bullet train are uncanny. They settled the former with guns, while the latter will be fought out in Congress, the Legislature and the courts.