A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  Near Main and San Luis streets, Steinbeck’s books were burned in the late 1930s—certainly The Grapes of Wrath, probably In Dubious Battle (1936) as well. Mr. Steinbeck’s feed store, purchased in 1911, was at 332-34 Main Street. The Masonic Temple was above.

  A couple of other sites show up in East of Eden. At 12 West Gabilan Street, between Main and Salinas streets, is the Old Post Office, where Adam Trask has a stroke. In the little alley at the side of the building, Cal Trask learns that his mother was a notorious brothel madam. The iron post office bars are still on the side windows. 14 East Gabilan Street, now an alley, was the site of Henry Fenchel’s tailor shop, mentioned in East of Eden, where Fenchel is taunted during World War I for being German.

  At 269 Main Street was the Hotel Jeffrey, headquarters of the self-appointed vigilante “General” during the 1936 lettuce packers’ strike: “He set armed guards over his suite and he put Salinas in a state of siege,” Steinbeck recalls in “Always Something to Do in Salinas.” 405 Main Street was the sit of the Salinas Public Library Carnegie Building, which stood here from 1909 to 1960. Steinbeck often went there.

  At 726 Main Street is Salinas High School, recently restored, its cornerstone still in place and scheduled to be opened in 2020, one hundred years after the stone was set down. In 1920, Mr. Steinbeck was on the committee to prepare a dedication ceremony for the new high school, and he asked John and his visiting college roommate, George Mors, to gather local products to place in the cornerstone. The two young men included a handful of dried beans, corn, and sugar—and a vial of red wine. Although Mr. Steinbeck protested—these were Prohibition years—John and George prevailed, arguing that there was no more fitting local product than “Dago Red.”

  The railway station for the first Granger railroad, a narrow gauge built with private funds, was one block east of Salinas High School on Willow and Pajaro streets. To save on the steep shipping costs of grain charged by the “octopus,” the Southern Pacific Railroad, the community built the line, which ended at a wharf in Monterey. Built using Chinese labor, the little railroad operated from 1874 to 1879 before being bought out by the powerful Southern Pacific Railroad. It is from this station that a little girl takes a “free train” to Monterey in “How Edith McGillicuddy Met RLS,” a true tale about Max Wagner’s mother’s meeting with Robert Louis Stevenson that was published in Harper’s Magazine in August 1941.

  Two blocks past the high school and left off Main, Romie Lane leads to the Garden of Memories Cemetery at 768 Abbott. In East of Eden, Adam Trask walks to town in the “cold wind” after the burial of Sam Hamilton. “The cemetery was deserted and the dark crooning of the wind bowed the heavy cypress trees. The rain droplets grew larger and drove stinging along,” Steinbeck writes in East of Eden. Sam Hamilton’s grave is in plot #2, while Steinbeck’s—which is well marked—is across a road in plot #1. When his ashes were placed here in 1969, Steinbeck’s grave was marked with calla lilies, his favorite flower. His third wife, Elaine, was buried here in 2004.

  Despite the lifelong tension between Steinbeck and his hometown, he asked to be buried in Salinas. This was his home, the place one always returns to in the end—the final act of westering. “It seems good to mark and to remember for a little while the place where a man died,” he writes in Sea of Cortez. “This is his one whole lonely act in all his life.”

  Chapter 3

  Beyond Salinas

  Salad Bowl of the World

  Sugar beet wagons, circa 1908.

  Young John Steinbeck broke out of Salinas whenever he could. Roaming the land awakened his senses as the town of Salinas most certainly did not. Sometimes his tomboy younger sister, Mary, was his companion on long rambles into the hills; sometimes he explored with friends; sometimes he went alone. He swam in the Salinas River; hunted rabbits; rode ponies to the ranch owned by Max Wagner’s uncle; took the little Spreckels train to Alisal Canyon, where wild azaleas bloomed; and visited Aunt Mollie’s farm in Corral de Tierra or his grandparents’ ranch near King City. The result of excursions away from Salinas was twofold: leaving him with an abiding love for the land and nurturing an equally compelling empathy for those who worked on that land.

  Red Pony Ranch.

  In California, migrant laborers work the land, once harvesting sugar beets, now picking strawberries and lettuce. The valley’s agricultural history is a complex mix of growers, shippers, and workers, each with a notion of how the land should be used, how migrants should be housed, and what crops should go to market when. To be the world’s “salad bowl” is a demanding venture, one Steinbeck wrote about with a clear preference for those on the margins of profit.

  Agriculture

  The Salinas Valley is a fairly narrow 100-mile swath of rich land between the Santa Lucia Range and the Gabilan Mountains, running roughly from Paso Robles in the south to Castroville in the north. This region was settled, in succession, by peaceful Indians, hopeful Spanish padres building missions, bold Mexican ranchers claiming vast land grants, and energetic American ranchers and farmers, who grabbed land as eagerly as the Spaniards and Mexicans had before them.

  The road to Red Pony Ranch.

  Working beet fields, circa 1908.

  In the moderate climate and black soil of the Salinas Valley, many found the full measure of California’s promise. Because the northern end of the valley cuts through the coastal mountains and opens onto the sea, high summer fog, generated by cool ocean air meeting the sunny inland heat, streams into the valley around Salinas. This misty blanket protects crops from the desiccating power of the direct sun. In the winter, the temperature gradient reverses and the warmer coastal fog buffers the inland fields from wintry frost.

  Until World War I, grains and sugar beets were the dominant crops. Beginning in the 1920s, acres were planted with lettuce, strawberries, celery, and broccoli—and some sweet peas (as in Steinbeck’s 1934 story “The Harness”). Salinas soon named itself the “Salad Bowl of the World,” an epithet that boldly suggests the region’s agricultural wealth and assertiveness. Nearly a century later, the Salinas Valley remains the nation’s top producer of lettuce and yields large crops of strawberries, mushrooms, cauliflower, and wine grapes as well.

  The Salinas Valley before Agriculture

  Prior to 1848, native grasses covered the hills around the Salinas Valley: Oregon hair grass, Idaho fescue, and California oat grass—all bunchgrasses—grew two to three feet in height. Even before Spanish mission settlement in the 1770s, native grasses were being replaced by wild oat, brought in on ships by early Spanish explorers.

  One story has it that the padres brought wild mustard seed to California to mark the mission trail. By the mid-nineteenth century, mustard carpeted the valley in the spring. “When my grandfather came into the valley,” Steinbeck writes in East of Eden, “the mustard was so tall that a man on horseback showed only his head above the yellow flowers.”

  In fields and orchards, mustard roots helped break up the soil. By the 1870s, up to 400,000 pounds of mustard seed was harvested by Chinese workers each fall. Mr. Steinbeck brought mustard seed when he visited John at Tahoe in 1927, and the two made mustard in John’s tiny cabin.

  For early travelers, the Salinas Valley could be forbidding, a place of sloughs, cut through by an often-dry riverbed, whipped by wind. In 1872, one traveler, Stephen Powers, found it

  an execrable place at best. Everyday for seven months there rises, about ten o’clock, a wind which blows at a furious rate till nearly midnight. The dry bed of the river yields so much sand that it constitutes what is called “dry fog.” The live oaks… look like old men leaning on their hands, with their coat-tails blown over their heads. Such a blast I had to face for fifty miles.

  Migrant Labor

  The history of California field-workers is a rich and varied one, reflecting repeated attempts by landowners to encourage—and then contain and curtail—the influx of immigrant labor. Although men like George and Lennie often toiled in the fields, the vast maj
ority of workers in the Salinas Valley’s rapidly growing agribusiness were immigrants brought in to help plant and build California.

  After California attained statehood, Chinese immigrants came to California to work in the goldfields and to build railroads. In East of Eden, Lee tells Adam something about the sad history of Chinese workers:

  The herds of men went like animals into the black hold of a ship, there to stay until they reached San Francisco six weeks later… my people have learned through the ages to live close together, to keep clean and fed under intolerable conditions…. These human cattle were imported for one thing only—to work. When the work was done, those who were not dead were to be shipped back.

  Beginning in the late 1860s, Salinas landowners contracted Chinese workers to harvest wheat, the dominant crop; in the 1870s, Chinese workers cleared sloughs surrounding the new town, reclaiming land for agriculture. Well into the twentieth century, Chinese crews dug drainage ditches and slogged through waist-deep water to clear brush and trees. Their adaptability and resilience made them essential to Salinas Valley agriculture—but, throughout California, waves of anti-Chinese sentiment resulted in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, in force until 1943, which restricted immigration to merchants, scholars, and students.

  Although Chinese field-workers remained dominant until the late nineteenth century, Japanese workers gradually filled gaps created by the Chinese Exclusion Act. Until about 1910, Japanese workers thinned, topped, and harvested sugar beets in the Salinas fields. But hostility toward “Asiatics” ran high in California. A 1908 agreement between Japan and the United States curtailed immigration, and the Immigration Act of 1924 cut it off entirely.

  Single Filipino men, or “stoups,” filled the gap left by limiting Japanese immigration. A story Steinbeck wrote at Stanford, “Fingers of Cloud,” is set in a Filipino work camp, where “the howling wind came through the cracks” in the bunkhouse and the pockmarked men had only “a few boxes to sit on.” Mexican laborers started crossing the border early in the twentieth century to work the California fields. Greater numbers came during the Mexican Revolution and after, particularly from 1917 to 1920, when Congress waived immigration requirements for agricultural workers.

  During World War II, another wave of Mexican laborers filled the gap left when the Southwest migrants Steinbeck wrote about found jobs in the defense industry or fought overseas. Numbers of Mexican workers increased during the postwar period with the implementation of the Bracero Program, in force from 1942 to 1964, which brought workers temporarily into the United States.

  Harvesting broccoli rabe.

  Field-Workers

  If F. Scott Fitzgerald is the American novelist who best captures our fascination with money, John Steinbeck is our troubadour of work, the writer who best describes the value and dignity of laboring with one’s hands. Characters in Steinbeck’s fiction fiddle with Hudson Super-Six engines, dig ditches and graves, work in canneries, pump gas, and pick apples. Eliza Allen in “The Chrysanthemums” has “planting hands,” her fingers burrowing deep in the soil. Steinbeck could not have known what that meant without a love of gardening, passed on to him by his father, and without having spent hours working in the fields around Salinas, witnessing the toil of others.

  In the 1930s, a decade when most California field-workers came from the American Southwest, John Steinbeck became the voice for Okie despair. Although his fictional workers in Of Mice and Men, In Dubious Battle, and The Grapes of Wrath are largely white, he certainly knew of and wrote about other histories. Themes of immigrant isolation and social ostracism are threaded throughout Steinbeck’s novels and stories. He had long been aware that some people profited from the valley’s abundance while others lived “east of Eden,” exiles from paradise. The man who would tell the tales of the world’s dispossessed developed his commitment to those on the edges when he was very young.

  Beyond Salinas, the young John Steinbeck expanded his sensibilities. In the fields and valleys he discovered stories that intrigued him far more than those of wealthy growers and shippers in Salinas. The plight of Indians in the missions, the dignity of old paisanos, the toil of migrant workers, the isolation and loneliness of people living on little ranches and farms, these were the tales he would tell.

  “The surges of the new restless, needy, and strong—grudgingly brought in for the purposes of hard labor and cheap wages—were resisted, resented, and accepted only when a new and different wave came in. On the West Coast the Chinese ceased to be enemies only when the Japanese arrived, and they in the face of the invasion of Hindus, Filipinos, and Mexicans.”

  Northeast from Salinas: Fremont Peak

  Steinbeck loved Fremont Peak, a view of it caught from attic windows of his Salinas home. “The peak used to be the habitation of the shadow for me,” he wrote a friend in the 1920s. “When I had some fancy too light, and too delicate to trust to the guffaws of my own townsmen I put them up on that smooth peak.

  And all the helpless desires and thrusting hopes which rose in all parts of me were on the peak.”

  Fremont Peak (elevation 3,169 feet) remained in sight when Steinbeck rode his pony, Jill, north of town to his friend Max’s ranch, his trail roughly paralleling San Juan Grade Road. (Roads out of Salinas were named for destinations: Castroville Road, San Juan Grade Road, Monterey Highway.)

  Fremont Peak.

  Old Stage Road.

  He undoubtedly rode by a little one-room school like the one Jody attends in The Red Pony, located at the junction of San Juan Grade and Crazy Horse Canyon roads. Across from the school is a historical marker recounting Lt. Col. John Frémont’s Battle of Natividad, a skirmish Steinbeck mentions in The Red Pony. On March 6, 1846, Fremont marched up the peak that now bears his name with his band of irregulars, mostly backwoodsmen from Tennessee and Missouri, erected a log fort and raised the U.S. flag. For three days Frémont claimed for the United States what was then Mexican territory.

  Nearby, Old Stage Road winds over the steep hills north to San Juan Bautista. The Steinbeck family bounced over this narrow track when they visited the Steinbeck grandparents in Hollister, and Steinbeck traveled it on his 1948 trip to gather material for East of Eden, writing to his wife, Gwyn:

  [I] found the old stage road which I haven’t been over since I was about ten years old and we went to Hollister that way in the surrey. Went over it to San Juan and do you know there were hundreds of places that I remembered. Kids do retain all right. Stopped in San Juan a while and then drove back over the old San Juan Grade which in the memory of most people is the only one. They have completely forgotten that which was once called the Royal Road and it is now just a country dirt road, which is what it always was, of course.

  San Juan Grade Road remains the loveliest auto route between Salinas and San Juan Bautista, and Old Stage Road, now closed to cars after three miles, is a splendid and accessible dirt track, a four-mile hilly walk past the road’s terminus.

  Worker Unrest and the Short-Handled Hoe

  The July 4, 1969, cover of Time magazine features Cesar Chavez with a banner stating, “The Grapes of Wrath, 1969: Mexican-Americans on the March.” Like the agricultural strikes of the 1930s, the movement called la causa protested inhumane working conditions for 384,100 agricultural workers in California: inadequate housing, long hours, and low wages (and, later, indiscriminate use of pesticides). More broadly, Chavez and the United Farmworkers Union (UFW) wanted to better the lot of Mexican Americans. By 1969, Chavez’s call for a nationwide boycott of table grapes was embraced by Edward Kennedy; folksingers Peter, Paul, and Mary; and Chicago mayor Richard Daley, along with other prominent Democrats. In California, Governor Ronald Reagan called the table grape boycott “immoral” and “attempted blackmail.”

  A short-handled hoe.

  Largely fueled by Chavez’s crusade, in September 1972 the California Rural Legal Assistance presented a petition to the Safety Board regarding use of the short-handled hoe to weed and thin crops. Public hearings
were held in March and May 1973 to determine whether the short-handled hoe was an “unsafe hand tool” that caused damage to workers’ backs. Growers argued that use of the longer hoe would cause “inefficiency.” According to court documents, “Some workers testified that the short hoe really wasn’t much faster, but that the field bosses favored them as a means of knowing at a glance if the crew was working (the assumption being that an upright person might be resting whereas a bent-over person was working).” The short-handled hoe was banned from use in the fields shortly thereafter.

  Chavez led the 1960s grape boycott, working tirelessly for workers’ rights.

  The summit of Fremont Peak is accessed by a well-marked road near San Juan Bautista. The view from the top is, as Steinbeck promises in Travels with Charley, panoramic.

  South from Salinas: Spreckels and Sugar Beets

  In 1896, Claus Spreckels, who had operated sugar plants in Hawaii and in nearby Watsonville, gave a rousing speech to Salinas farmers and businessmen, urging them to switch from growing wheat to growing sugar beets:

  Now if you farmers will guarantee to grow the beets, I’ll guarantee to turn ‘em into sugar. I propose to build here at your door the greatest sugar factory and refinery in the world…. It will eat up 3,000 tons of beets every day and turn out every day 450 tons of refined sugar…. That means the distribution among the farmers of $12,000 every day and $5,000 more paid to workmen and for other materials in the manufacturing…. I shall buy and pay for the site and put up the factory myself.