A noted marksman, Crow hit Harris in the chest, killing him instantly, before turning and opening on Iver Knutson, dropping him as well. Seeing his friend Hartt fall, Walter Crow raised his shotgun. Suddenly, two men - farmer James Harris and pro-railroad Mills Hartt - opened fire on each other. The marshal dismounted and stood heated words were exchanged. The two armed groups met by Henry Brewer’s farmstead. They grabbed their own guns and rode off. As an armed group coalesced around Poole, rumors of the evictions washed over the farmers. As the farmers picnicked, United States Marshal Alonzo Poole prepared for his day’s task, a land grab: serving eviction notices to farmers along a patch of land called Mussel Slough to make way for a railroad. Minutes prior, Crow had murdered four others in fifteen seconds with a brutally efficient double-barreled shotgun.Įarlier that day, farmers from around the countryside had gathered to hear Judge David Terry, who was scheduled to speak on the tangled mass of land and water rights that had piled up in California over the previous twenty years. Two tendrils of smoke wafting from a stand of oak and sycamore behind him gave away the location of his killer. On May 11, 1880, Walter Crow was shot in the back as he ran through a wheat field. This story is adapted from chapter one of Acquired Tastes: Stories about the Origins of Modern Food from the MIT Press “Food, Health, and the Environment” series.
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