Octopus's Garden

As Southern California recovered from the collapse of the cattle industry in the 1860s, the arrival of railroads—attacked by newspapers as the greedy “octopus”—and the expansion of citrus agriculture transformed the struggling region into a vast, idealized, and prosperous garden. New groves of the latest citrus varieties and new towns like Riverside quickly grew directly along the tracks of transcontinental railroads. The influx of capital, industrial technology, and workers, especially people o