The Octopus: A Story of California
Glossary
"
- "The Toilers"
- Presley's Socialistic poem, written in a fever of anger after witnessing the ranchers' treatment and printed with enormous success in a San Francisco Sunday supplement. Its popularity marks Presley's arrival as the epic voice he had been searching for, even as he doubts whether writing about suffering does anything to relieve it.
- Related: Presley
A
- Angele Varian
- The young woman Vanamee loved and lost, associated throughout with the old Mission garden at Guadalajara. Local legend calls the affair "the romance of the Mission garden, the mystery of the Other," and it drives Vanamee's years of wandering the southwestern deserts.
- Related: Vanamee, Guadalajara, Father Sarria
- Annixter
- The shrewd, gruff, quick-tempered owner of the Quien Sabe ranch, an early adopter of the ticker-tape wire that links the ranches' offices to San Francisco grain markets. His courtship and marriage to Hilma Tree softens him considerably before he is shot dead defending the ranchers' claim at the irrigating ditch.
- Related: Quien Sabe, Hilma Tree, Harran Derrick, The Ditch Fight
B
- Bonneville
- The county seat and market town nearest the wheat ranches, home to the railroad depot, Genslinger's newspaper office, and S. Behrman's real-estate business — the point where valley life and railroad power most visibly meet.
- Related: S. Behrman, Genslinger, The Octopus
- Broderson
- An elderly rancher whose land borders Los Muertos, and one of the founding members of the ranchers' resistance to the railroad's rate and land policies, alongside Magnus Derrick, Annixter, and Osterman.
- Related: The League, Los Muertos, Magnus Derrick
C
- Caraher
- The keeper of a saloon on the County Road who has lost his own wife to railroad violence and preaches anarchism to anyone who will listen. After the ditch fight kills Annixter and Harran, a devastated Presley briefly embraces Caraher's radicalism outright, declaring himself "a Red."
- Related: The Ditch Fight, Presley, The League
- Cedarquist
- A San Francisco manufacturer and family friend of the Derricks who argues that the American West's future lies in building its own ships to carry wheat directly to foreign markets, bypassing railroad-controlled domestic distribution. He gives Presley passage on the Swanhilda at the novel's close.
- Related: Swanhilda, Presley, The Wheat
D
- Delaney and Christian
- The railroad's "dummy" buyers, sent to take physical possession of Quien Sabe and Los Muertos under the company's regraded land titles; Christian is S. Behrman's cousin. Both men are killed at the irrigating ditch alongside Annixter and Harran Derrick.
- Related: The Ditch Fight, S. Behrman, Quien Sabe, Los Muertos
- Dyke
- A former railroad engineer discharged from his job after refusing an unfair wage cut, who turns to hop farming only to be ruined by an abrupt, punitive freight-rate hike set by the railroad on his crop. Driven to desperation, he robs a train and is hunted down and imprisoned — a smaller-scale echo of the ranchers' larger struggle against the same company.
- Related: The Octopus, P. and S. W. Railroad
F
- Father Sarria
- The Catholic priest at the Guadalajara mission and Vanamee's closest confidant, one of the few people who hears the full, strange story of Vanamee's grief and his eventual, seemingly miraculous reunion with a woman who resembles his lost Angele.
- Related: Vanamee, Guadalajara, Angele Varian
- Freight Rate Schedule
- The railroad's charge for hauling grain to market, set unilaterally by the company and adjustable without warning — as Dyke discovers when a punitive rate hike on hops ruins him. The ranchers' fight to force a fair, published rate schedule through the Railroad Commission is the novel's other central grievance alongside land grading.
- Related: Dyke, Railroad Commission, The Octopus, Lyman Derrick
G
- Genslinger
- The editor of the Bonneville newspaper, whose coverage of the ranchers' fight can be bought or turned by the railroad's money — a recurring reminder that the press in the valley is another lever the Octopus controls.
- Related: The Octopus, Bonneville, S. Behrman
- Guadalajara
- A small adobe mission town near the ranches, seat of the old Mission garden associated with Vanamee and Angele's romance and home to Father Sarria, the priest who alone hears Vanamee's confidences.
- Related: Vanamee, Angele Varian, Father Sarria
H
- Harran Derrick
- Magnus Derrick's son and the practical manager of Los Muertos, handling the ranch's day-to-day business while his father pursues the larger fight against the railroad. He is shot and killed alongside Annixter at the irrigating ditch when railroad marshals move to enforce eviction.
- Related: Magnus Derrick, Los Muertos, Annixter, The Ditch Fight
- Hilma Tree
- A young woman on the Quien Sabe ranch whom Annixter courts and marries; her presence draws out a gentleness in him largely hidden from the other ranchers. She is left widowed by the fight at the irrigating ditch and moves to Los Muertos after the railroad takes possession of Quien Sabe.
- Related: Annixter, Quien Sabe, Los Muertos
- Hooven
- A German-immigrant tenant farmer on Los Muertos whose family's poverty and eventual ruin, following the ditch fight and subsequent evictions, gives the novel one of its starkest portraits of what the railroad's land policy costs the valley's smallest holders.
- Related: Los Muertos, The Ditch Fight, Minna Hooven
L
- Land Grading
- The railroad's practice of setting, and later revising upward, the purchase price of the ranch land it originally sold or leased to settlers — the core financial mechanism by which the Octopus threatens to strip the ranchers of land they consider already theirs, distinct from but intertwined with its freight-rate disputes.
- Related: The Octopus, P. and S. W. Railroad, Los Muertos, Quien Sabe
- Los Muertos
- Magnus Derrick's wheat ranch, one of the largest in the San Joaquin Valley and the novel's central setting, home to Presley, Harran, and eventually Hilma Tree after Quien Sabe passes to the railroad.
- Related: Magnus Derrick, Quien Sabe, Presley
- Lyman Derrick
- Magnus Derrick's other son, a lawyer who wins election to the Railroad Commission with the ranchers' backing and is expected to cut freight rates in their favor. He instead colludes with the railroad, betraying his father and the League for personal advancement — the novel's clearest portrait of a rancher's son absorbed by the very monopoly his family opposes.
- Related: Magnus Derrick, Railroad Commission, The League, S. Behrman
M
- Magnus Derrick
- The proud, principled owner of Los Muertos ranch, known locally as "the Governor," and a leader of the wheat growers' resistance to the railroad. His arc traces what that fight costs a man who still believes in fair dealing — including his complicity in bribing the Railroad Commission, a compromise that unravels him and his family.
- Related: Los Muertos, Harran Derrick, Lyman Derrick, Railroad Commission, The League
- Minna Hooven
- Hooven's daughter, whose descent into destitution and prostitution in San Francisco after her family's eviction from Los Muertos forms one of the novel's bleakest subplots, contrasted directly with the wheat's continuing abundance.
- Related: Hooven, The Wheat, Presley
- Mussel Slough Tragedy
- The real 1880 armed conflict between San Joaquin Valley wheat ranchers and Southern Pacific Railroad agents over disputed land titles, which left several men dead and which Norris fictionalizes closely as the novel's climactic fight at the irrigating ditch.
- Related: The Ditch Fight, The Octopus, The League
N
- Naturalism
- The literary movement Norris helped found in America, which treats characters as shaped by forces — economic systems, heredity, the land itself — closer to weather than to individual choice or villainy. The novel's insistence that the Wheat and the Railroad are natural forces indifferent to human suffering, voiced most directly by Shelgrim near the end, is the clearest statement of this naturalist argument.
- Related: The Wheat, The Octopus, Shelgrim
O
- Osterman
- One of the wheat ranchers allied with Magnus Derrick, Annixter, and Broderson against the railroad, known for his showmanship — he hosts a lavish barn-dance and a jack-rabbit drive that draw the whole county together in the novel's more festive chapters.
- Related: The League, Magnus Derrick, Annixter, Broderson
P
- P. and S. W. Railroad
- The Pacific and Southwestern Railroad's formal name, the corporate entity behind "the octopus." It controls freight rates on grain shipments and, through disputed land grading, the title to the very ranches its rails cross — the twin grievances that drive the ranchers toward armed resistance.
- Related: The Octopus, Shelgrim, Railroad Commission, S. Behrman
- Presley
- A poet living at the Derrick ranch house at Los Muertos, searching for an epic subject worthy of the American West. His growing outrage at the ranchers' treatment produces the Socialistic poem "The Toilers," and by the novel's end he has sailed for India on the wheat ship Swanhilda, still wrestling with what art owes to the suffering he has witnessed.
- Related: The Toilers, Los Muertos, Vanamee, Cedarquist
Q
- Quien Sabe
- Annixter's ranch, bordering the Osterman holding, where much of the courtship of Hilma Tree and the ticker-driven business of wheat farming plays out. Like Los Muertos, its title is contested by the railroad's regrading scheme, and it ultimately passes into railroad hands after Annixter's death.
- Related: Annixter, Hilma Tree, Los Muertos
R
- Railroad Commission
- The elected state body nominally empowered to set fair freight rates for the railroad, which the ranchers' League works to fill with sympathetic commissioners like Lyman Derrick. Its capture by railroad money and influence — including Lyman's betrayal — demonstrates how thoroughly the Octopus controls the very institutions meant to check it.
- Related: The League, Lyman Derrick, The Octopus
S
- S. Behrman
- A Bonneville real-estate and mortgage broker who serves as the railroad's local agent and the ranchers' most immediate enemy, orchestrating the land grading scheme and the evictions that follow it. Norris gives him one of the novel's most famous scenes of poetic justice: he suffocates, buried alive under a torrent of grain pouring into the hold of the wheat ship Swanhilda.
- Related: The Octopus, The Ditch Fight, Swanhilda, The Wheat
- Shelgrim
- The railroad's president, spoken of throughout as a remote, almost mythic power whose word overrules the courts and the Railroad Commission alike — "the first you hear from Mr. Shelgrim is an injunction." When Presley finally meets him in person late in the novel, Shelgrim argues that he is no more responsible for the wheat's movement to market than the forces of nature themselves, the clearest statement of the book's naturalist thesis.
- Related: The Octopus, P. and S. W. Railroad, The Wheat, Naturalism
- Swanhilda
- The wheat ship that Cedarquist loads with grain for direct shipment to famine-stricken India, and aboard which Presley finally sails at the novel's end. Its hold is also the site of S. Behrman's death, buried under an avalanche of pouring wheat.
- Related: Cedarquist, S. Behrman, Presley, The Wheat
T
- The Ditch Fight
- The novel's climactic gun battle at an irrigating ditch on Los Muertos, where railroad-appointed marshals and dummy land buyers move to physically evict the ranchers. Annixter, Harran Derrick, and the dummy buyers Delaney and Christian are killed, the violent culmination of the freight-rate and land-title disputes that run through the whole book.
- Related: Mussel Slough Tragedy, Annixter, Harran Derrick, S. Behrman
- The League
- The organization formed by Magnus Derrick, Annixter, Osterman, and Broderson to coordinate the wheat ranchers' legal and political resistance to the railroad's freight rates and disputed land grading. Its strategy of lobbying and bribing the Railroad Commission ultimately fails, and its members turn to armed resistance at the irrigating ditch.
- Related: Magnus Derrick, Railroad Commission, The Ditch Fight
- The Octopus
- The novel's title and its nickname for the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad, a monopoly whose freight rates and land claims reach into every corner of San Joaquin Valley life like tentacles. Norris treats it less as a villain with a face than as an impersonal, almost natural force, indifferent to any single rancher's ruin.
- Related: P. and S. W. Railroad, Shelgrim, The Wheat, Naturalism
- The Ticker
- The telegraph stock ticker installed in the ranch offices — Annixter's innovation, soon copied by Magnus Derrick, Broderson, and Osterman — that wires the San Joaquin ranches directly to San Francisco grain prices, tying the ranchers' daily fortunes to markets far beyond the valley.
- Related: Annixter, The Wheat, Los Muertos
- The Wheat
- The crop at the center of the novel, treated throughout as an impersonal, almost divine natural force — vast, fertile, and utterly indifferent to which men profit from it or die because of it. Norris closes the book on the image of the wheat still growing and still feeding the world regardless of the human tragedy played out over its ownership.
- Related: The Octopus, Naturalism, S. Behrman, Shelgrim
V
- Vanamee
- A solitary, mystical shepherd-turned-plowman haunted by the death, years earlier, of Angele Varian, the great love of his youth. His storyline runs alongside the railroad plot as a study in grief, memory, and a near-supernatural return of the past through Angele's daughter.
- Related: Angele Varian, Father Sarria, Quien Sabe