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Segment Title: Miller | Wildflowers

From First the Blade, 1938
May Merrill Miller ( 1894 - 1965 )

On May 11, 1880, one of the deadliest gunfights in the history of the west erupted in the southern San Joaquin Valley. The Mussel Slough gun battle grew out of a contentious land dispute between local pioneer settlers and the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Though the gunfight lasted only a few moments, seven lives were lost, a tragedy that San Joaquin residents remembered for decades. May Merrill Miller grew up in region, and told the story of the pioneers who settled Mussel Slough in her 1938 novel, First the Blade, which not only includes the story of the gunfight, but—through the perspective of its main character—paints a vivid picture of the men and women who settled the region and the qualities of the landscape that drew them there.

For the first time since Amelie had come to the valley, all the wild flowers blossomed. Not one feeble tint laid upon the drying grass by Indian paintbrushes, but orange poppies, lavender wild hyacinths, cream and yellow marguerites, rose, blue, and purple larkspur, and the ethereal white sand lilies that bloomed only in good years, sometimes withholding any sign for seven seasons. Pale ponds of bluebells mirrored the sky. Great gray bushes speared with blue lupines tangled in green-needled alfilaria and button mallow. Black-spotted mauve bird's-eyes, sweet white four-o'clocks, deep yellow buttercups, and lighter creamcups circled in great separate swirls, white-foamed with daisies. But the poppies were the ground swell of it all—when she looked far off the other hues became pastel foaming eddies caught in that great molten sea. For poppies flowed upon the valley to the dikes of the mountains—the brown earthworks of the Coast Range to the west, the blue white-painted Sierras halting the flux to the east. And the sun rose and the sun set and the miracle continues.

Four other writers penned full-length fictional versions of the Mussel Slough gunfight, including Frank Norris, author of the 1901 novel The Octopus. But May Merrill Miller's First the Blade gives the reader the most intimate glimpse of the domestic life and the natural landscape of the southern San Joaquin region of the late nineteenth century.

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