was to reduce the land price slightly. In the end, most people (including Doyle, who later reconciled and became good friends with Collis Potter Huntington, one of the SP's leaders) simply stayed where they were and purchased the land. Squatting continued for years, though, despite the SP's best attempts to squash it. The Mussel Slough myth The Mussel Slough affair was seized upon by newspaper editors as well as a number of popular writers soon after the tragic shootout, as an example of corporate greed and the abuses of freewheeling market capitalism around the start of the 20th century. Muckraking novels such as W. C. Morrow's Blood-Money (1882) and Charles Cyril Post's Driven from Sea to Sea; or, Just A' Campin (1884) exaggerate the fault of the railroad for the events as they unfolded in San Joaquin and romanticize the ranchers according to a Jeffersonian agrarian ideal. Ambrose Bierce attempted to lionize Crow, calling him "this bravest of Americans." Later novels depicting the affair, such as the philosopher Josiah Royce's The Feud of Oakfield Creek (1887) and novelist Frank Norris' The Octopus (1901) are slightly less hagiographic in their portrayals of the Mussel Slough ranchers, but nevertheless give a fairly one-sided, anti-railroad view of the Mussel Slough affair. Richard Orsi's suggests in his history of the Southern Pacific, Sunset Limited that some common misconceptions about the Mussel Slough affair have been perpetuated through the mythic retellings of Morrow, Post, Royce, and Norris, among others. The significance of the Mussel Slough myth in the history of California and the Southern Pacific Railroad is evident from a quote by Theodore Roosevelt, who as president focused considerable time and energy in redressing the wrongs and abuses of corporate monopolies throughout the U.S. After reading Norris' The Octopus, Roosevelt stated he was "inclined to think [...] that conditions were worse in California than elsewhere." These mythic narratives about Mussel Slough helped bolster public anti-railroad sentiments, and encouraged continued rebellion among homesteaders, squatters and poachers against railroad land agents, who "came to accept squatters as an ordinary, if disagreeable, part of the land business". Despite the nationwide attention the incident received, the Mussel Slough Tragedy is not remembered much today as well as later gunfights such as the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Richard Maxwell Brown argues in No Duty to Retreat that the Mussel Slough shootout did not fit the mold of the gunfight/hero