A Journey into Steinbeck's California

by Susan Shillinglaw

  View from railroad yard to wharf, circa 1908.

  In his fiction, Steinbeck mentions the little towns and attractions along this route: the amusement park in Santa Cruz; Watsonville, where his sister Esther lived; the inland Pajaro Valley (site of In Dubious Battle), where apples grew “crisp and full juiced”; Moss Landing, where the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) constructed the largest steam-generated plant in the west—and where a whaling station once stood. “Johnny Bear,” one of Steinbeck’s best stories, is set in the gritty little town of Castroville, now Artichoke Capitol of the World.

  One evening Steinbeck and a Stanford friend, Toby Street, “were coming back from Palo Alto on the way to Salinas and we stopped for a beer at a bar just outside Castroville,” reported Street in an interview. “We were sitting there talking, and suddenly we heard the bartender speaking to somebody wearing bib overalls”—a large, clumsy man, a mute, telling stories with his fingers. Steinbeck drew from that experience in writing “Johnny Bear.”

  Past Castroville, Highway 1 cuts through sand dunes, once training grounds for the U.S. army and before that for Presidio infantry, cavalry, and field artillery units. (It’s now known as Ford Ord Dunes State Park.) Soldiers from the 11th Calvary Unit, stationed at the Presidio in the 1930s, make cameo appearances in Cannery Row. In 1939, the lovely bay seemed vulnerable to enemy attack, and the U.S. government carved out additional acres of land for Fort Ord, a major army installation from 1940 to 1994. Fort Ord is now home to California State University, Monterey Bay. A bicycle/walking trail that starts in Castroville loops through the dunes and Seaside, and hugs the bay into New Monterey, Cannery Row, and Pacific Grove.

  Now booming with new homes and dotted with fine little Mexican cafés and Japanese sushi restaurants, Seaside was, in Steinbeck’s time, the underside of the bay, home to a post office, a dump, and a Southern Pacific Railroad depot. When Monterey houses of prostitution closed during World War II, a few moved to Seaside. Seaside was also where, in Cannery Row, excellent bargains could be struck. Mack and the boys were “some time acquiring a stove” in Seaside for the Palace flophouse. After World War II and President Truman’s order to integrate the armed services, Seaside and Fort Ord attracted a number of African American military personnel; by 1980, this area had the most concentrated black population between Los Angeles and Oakland.

  Marilyn Monroe as Castroville’s 1948 artichoke queen.

  Steinbeck’s View of a Simpler Time

  In July 1946, the Monterey Peninsula Herald asked John Steinbeck to write a piece on Monterey. The annual Feast of Lanterns, held in Pacific Grove each July, is his metaphor for the peninsula’s freewheeling spirit.

  The festival officially began in 1905 as a pageant reenacting an old Chinese legend about villagers searching in lighted boats for separated lovers. Some say that the festival grew out of citizens’ desire to replicate the lighted Chinese squid boats—squid drying having been banned on Point Alones in 1905. For the first Feast of Lanterns, the town rented several Chinese and Japanese fishing boats. Chinese lanterns and lights were—and still are—placed in windows and porches around town. Steinbeck wrote,

  There was the great Feast of Lanterns—a hundred decorated boats, said the posters. Actually seven boats turned up and four of them forgot to light their lanterns. On the first turn three of the boats wandered away; on the second three more got lost, but the remaining boat went around and around for two hours completely oblivious to the hysterical cheers of the spectators. It is to be hoped that this spirit will continue—that no city planning, no show business sense overturns this magnificent attitude. The pledge that it will be kept should be made on the graves of the Elks who were late for the parade and the Eagles who never got there at all, and the fishermen who went around and around.

  1913 drawing of Monterey Bay.

  Settlement: Spanish Monterey

  Centuries before Steinbeck, sailors and explorers first saw the bay from the west, from ships. The Chinese may have been the first lured to the peninsula, a legend Steinbeck knew: “I have been planting cypress trees to fill in some of the old ones that have died,” he wrote in 1948. “They seem to belong here. The Monterey cypress is unique in the world except for one part of China, and the myth is that the Chinese explorers long centuries before Columbus planted them here. It is known that the Chinese planted trees instead of flags as a token of discovery.” Later, the Spanish planted flags as symbols of possession. In 1542, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, who was seeking “cities rich with gold,” claimed the land for Spain. Sixty years later, Sebastián Vizcaíno wrote that “we found ourselves to be in the best port that could be desired, for besides being sheltered from the winds, it has many pines for masts and yards, and live oaks and white oaks, and water in great quantity, all near the shore.” He named the peninsula in honor of his sponsor, the Condé de Monterey.

  Visitors gather at Lovers Point in Pacific Grove to watch Feast of Lanterns festivities in 1910.

  Nearly 150 years after Vizcaino’s expedition, Father Junipero Serra said mass on the same spot on June 3, 1770. Here Serra and commander Gaspar de Portolá dedicated themselves to building a Royal Presidio of Monterey and the Mission of San Carlos Borromeo. A year later, Serra moved his mission to Carmel, wanting both better land for crops and separation from a male enclave of soldiers. Both communities prospered. The Carmel Mission sheltered some 876 Indians at its peak in 1795. The presidio, housing soldiers and their families, servants and artisans, commanded the heights of Monterey and ensured the community’s stature as capital of Alta California. Today the Presidio Museum of Monterey is located on the lovely knoll where Vizcaíno, Portolá, and Serra once claimed the land for Spain. A cross marks the spot where Father Serra said his first mass.

  A view of the Pacific coast today.

  Carmel Mission, circa 1900.

  Spanish or Mexican California, with Monterey as its capital, has been highly romanticized—by generations of California fourth-graders building popsicle-stick missions; by lovers of Ramona, book and pageant, who read the novel as a eulogy for the elegant Spanish rancho; and by real estate developers, “minds inflamed by moving pictures,” as Steinbeck wrote about the Mission architectural style of Santa Barbara, imitating “mud houses, architecturally reminiscent of the poorer parts of Spain in the fifteenth century.” For Steinbeck, Spanish California was a rough-hewn sixty-year period to which he alludes occasionally, ironically, and critically—even empathetically—but never romantically.

  Lives were trampled in the land-grabbing fervor, Steinbeck suggests:

  Hard, dry Spaniards came exploring through, greedy and realistic, and their greed was for gold or God. These tough, dried-up men moved restlessly up the coast and down. Some of them stayed on grants as large as principalities, given to them by Spanish kings who had not the faintest idea of the gift. These first owners lived in poor feudal settlements, and their cattle ranged freely.

  Steinbeck’s texts are punctuated with references to a shadowed history of Spanish and Mexican acquisition, exploitation, and assimilation. (Most of the large land grants—up to sixty miles long—were made during the twenty-five years that Mexico held California, 1821-46.)

  Tortilla Flat may be Steinbeck’s ode to what was best in Spanish Monterey—its ephemeral beauty and stately pace and the Californios’ camaraderie. That book captures the sleepy appeal of Spanish Monterey—bypassed as the capital of California in 1848 and again by the gold rush in 1849—the peninsula town that seemed caught in a time warp for the second half of the nineteenth century, perhaps until World War II. “Clocks and watches were not used by the paisanos of Tortilla Flat,” Steinbeck writes. “For practical purposes, there was the great golden watch of the sun.” And the paisanos of Tortilla Flat, “a mixture of Spanish, Indian, Mexican, and assorted Caucasian bloods,” carefully negotiate conflicting cultural claims that were the legacy of Spanish and Mexican rule. The paisanos balance their own mongrel bloodlines, reverence for the Catholic Chur
ch, an acquisitive dominant culture (represented by an Italian merchant, Torelli), and women’s claims on domesticity and historicity (“Dolores Engracia Ramirez was a member of the ’Native Daughters of the Golden West’”). Balancing and subsequent blending of traditions and bloodlines is a significant part of the Monterey Peninsula’s history.

  Anglo Development: Hotel Del Monte

  Robert Louis Stevenson, a peninsula visitor in 1879-80, anticipated Steinbeck’s fictional terrain—stories about “quaint” survivors, jetsam of lavish development. “The Monterey of last year exists no longer,” Stevenson wrote in 1880. “A huge hotel has sprung up in the desert by the railway…. Alas for the little town. It is not strong enough to resist the influence of the flaunting caravanserai, and the poor, quaint, penniless native gentlemen of Monterey must perish, like a lower race, before the millionaires of the Big Bonanza.”

  1925 brochure for the Hotel Del Monte.

  A bonanza it most certainly was, something akin to the overnight transformation of the Sierra Nevada foothills into gold mining camps. In 1852, a wily Scottish clerk named David Jacks bought the former Pueblo of Monterey (just under 30,000 acres) at auction for $1,002.50 and over the years snagged most of the land on the peninsula, eventually owning 90,000 acres in Monterey County. On January 1, 1880, the Southern Pacific Railroad came steaming onto the peninsula from San Francisco. Three of the railroad’s “Big Four,” who earlier drove the Golden Spike on their way to fabulous wealth, bought land for a hotel and, later, acres of Jacks’s empire. The four men—Collis P. Huntington (railroad magnate, lobbyist in Washington, D.C.), Leland Stanford (governor of California, U.S. senator, founder of Stanford University), Charles Crocker (merchant and railroad builder), and Mark Hopkins (Crocker’s partner)—created the Pacific Improvement Company and set about to “improve” the peninsula. Competitive Crocker conceived of a resort to rival those on the French Riviera and had his vision constructed in 100 days. Beginning in June 1880, trains brought well-heeled tourists from San Francisco to what quickly became the premier resort on the Pacific Coast, the Hotel Del Monte.

  Who Were the Paisanos?

  In the 1890s, Lucy Morse, a student at Stanford University, came to the peninsula to study its history and interview old residents. She wrote a narrative that includes this description of “native Californians of Monterey” as

  peculiar people. Good natured, happy, courteous, genial; knowing and apparently caring little for the outside world, and totally oblivious of the wealth of their historic surroundings. However there is something of delight as well as a touch of pity, in meeting people who do not put commercial value upon a sight of their ancestral homes nor try to live off the tourist. Though Spanish by descent, many of them knowing no other language, few of them without a trace of Indian blood, they are patriotic American citizens. Pictures of Dewey and Sampson are hung on many an adobe wall.

  Steinbeck writes in a similar vein about “good people of laughter and kindness” who are “clean of commercialism, free of the complicated system of American business, and having nothing that can be stolen, exploited or mortgaged that system has not attacked them very vigorously.”

  Steinbeck knew about the paisanos of Monterey. Their exploits were the stuff of news stories. Pilon of Tortilla Flat was in life Eduardo Romero (called Pilon by friends), “a chronic thorn in the side of Monterey police … [who] inspired many of Steinbeck’s yarns,” reported the Monterey Peninsula Herald in 1957, the year Pilon died. He was “truly an institution in this community,” added Municipal Judge Ray Baugh, the man who was called to sentence him from time to time. Pilon and Eduardo Martin lived in Iris Canyon in Monterey, rows of wine bottles lined up outside their camp: “Absolutely, Pilon and me, we was just like brothers,” Martin said in 1957 at his proclaimed age of ninety-seven. “We were always together. When you see one, you wait a few seconds, and then you see the other one.” When Pilon got drunk with Eduardo one day in 1953, he stabbed his friend and was charged for the crime. Steinbeck wired a telegram to Judge Baugh: “I protest Pilon’s arrest. Are the times so degenerate? Since when is it a crime to knife your friend? Pilon’s motive was certainly pure, probably philanthropic and possibly noble. Judge Baugh, who is paisano himself, will surely gild justice with understanding.” And Baugh did.

  The Hotel Del Monte in 1880.

  Sal Colleto, a Monterey fisherman, said in his memoir that Pilon helped his father cut down the pine trees in back of the American Legion Hall:

  There was always available Pilon, and some of his Mexican and California Indian friends. They were always around because that’s where the center of activity was, and they liked my Dad’s wine, which was used customarily with the meals. The California Indians did not want money for their services. They wanted food and wine.

  Steinbeck’s intention was not to stereotype. When Tortilla Flat was being turned into a play by Jack Kirkland in 1937, Steinbeck wanted an all-Mexican cast for the play, as he told a local reporter. When he saw the script, he didn’t like it:

  There are so many little undertones that he has got wrong. I don’t want to maintain my book but I would like to maintain the people as I know them. Let me give you an example. Jack makes them want wine and need wine and suffer for wine whereas they want the thing wine does. They are not drunkards at all. They like the love and fights that come with wine rather than the wine itself.

  Eduardo “Pilon” Romero, Eduardo Martin, and Tomas Romero.

  From 1880 until its closing in 1943, the “Queen of American Watering Places” promised peninsula living at its best—and came to be the face that Monterey showed the world. In its first six weeks of operation, the hotel turned down three thousand requests for accommodation. Located near what advertisements bragged was the “Riviera of America,” the Del Monte was a place “where every day is a perfect day.” A 126-acre garden, “the most varied in the world,” was graced with plants from six continents and featured a multi-acre maze and an “Arizona garden” filled with cacti brought from the desert. The hotel housed four hundred guests in Victorian splendor. Each room had a telephone, an uncommon luxury in 1880; hot and cold running water, also innovative; and lovely fireplaces, many with ornamental tiling—”those in the office representing scenes portrayed by Scott in his Waverly novels,” reported one journalist. In addition to the hotel grounds, the operation at Del Monte included seven thousand acres of forest; in 1883, the Pacific Improvement Company purchased another eleven thousand acres in Carmel Valley, from which it created a water system.

  Spreckels family at the Hotel Del Monte, 1905.

  Choices of diversion for guests were many. On the bay, the hotel built the first glass-enclosed swimming pool in the nation, pumping seawater into large swimming tanks that were surrounded by a “wilderness of tropical plants.” Eventually the hotel had five polo fields, a one-mile racetrack, tennis courts, a game preserve, and a guest ranch at the headwaters of the Carmel River, an hour’s drive from the hotel by auto. In 1881, a scenic drive for guests was opened, renowned 17-Mile Drive. And, in the 1890s, the hotel opened a golf course, which came to be known as the “oldest course west of the Mississippi,” other smaller, earlier courses having closed. The famed Pebble Beach golf course (originally Del Monte’s second course at Pebble Beach), carved out of Pacific Improvement Company lands, opened officially for play on February 22, 1919. An art gallery devoted exclusively to California art opened in 1907. Hotel Del Monte offered luxury piled on top of luxury.

  For thirty-five years, the Hotel Del Monte was a monument to style, lavish accommodation, and incomparable beauty. When the hotel’s fortunes drooped prior to World War I, Samuel F. B. Morse—brought in to liquidate holdings of the Pacific Improvement Company in 1915—ended up revitalizing the hotel and, in fact, preserving the region’s appeal through expanded golf facilities, open spaces, and controlled housing development. Reorganizing the old Pacific Improvement Company as Del Monte Properties Company, he sold lots in Pebble Beach and Del Monte Forest. Spor
t, health, and beauty made an irresistible package. Peninsula developers marketed the perfectibility of life. In 1943, the hotel was leased to the U.S. Navy, which eventually purchased the hotel and 603 acres of surrounding land. In 1951, the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School moved in, where it still resides today.

  Where Is Tortilla Flat?

  Steinbeck claimed that many of his settings were composites. That is true of Tortilla Flat. In California, the term “tortilla flats” described Mexican enclaves. Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat might have been near Johnson Avenue in Monterey (up Madison to Monroe) by the American Legion Hall—the region photographed by Nelson Valjean, an early biographer who knew Steinbeck. A ravine runs behind, like the gulch described in the novel. Monterey high school Spanish teacher Sue Gregory lived in this area, at 889 Johnson Avenue. Her grandfather was William Hartnell, the patrón, and old paisanos came to her with problems as they had come to her grandfather. She advised the Spanish club at her house and told Steinbeck stories about paisano life. In a December 1936 article in the Monterey Peninsula Herald, Police Chief Monte Hallum said, “These were pretty good people. They were friendly and helped within their means…. Some of Tortilla Flat is fiction but a lot is true.”

  Some say Tortilla Flat was in New Monterey, up from the bay on Huckleberry Hill. A man named Pirate with scores of dogs lived there. Others claim it was west of Monterey Peninsula College (Jack Rabbit Hill), on the corner of Fremont and Abrego. Pilon and his friend Eduardo Martin lived there and often slept in an old bathtub.