Context
Early in his career, John Steinbeck declared his intention to put “my country,” Central California’s Salinas Valley, on the literary map of the world:
My country is different from the rest of the world. It seems to be one of those pregnant places from which come wonders. ... I was born to it and my father was. Our bodies came from this soil—our bones came ... from the limestone of our own mountains and our blood is distilled from the juices of this earth. I tell you now that my country—a hundred miles long and about fifty wide—is unique in the world.” (1933 to publisher)
In many ways, he was correct: the 90-mile Salinas Valley, which stretches inland nearly the length of Monterey County, is extraordinary—rich soils, mild climate for growing crops, and stunning natural beauty.
Grain crops brought the Steinbeck family to Salinas in 1900; Mr. Steinbeck moved from Paso Robles (100 miles south) to Salinas to manage Sperry Flour Mill, where “Drifted Snow” flour was produced from valley wheat. When Steinbeck was young, grains and sugar beets were dominant valley crops. In 1898, the Spreckels sugar factory, where both Steinbeck and his father briefly held jobs, opened, and many farmers switched from growing grains to the more profitable sugar beets.
Gradually throughout the first half of the twentieth century, fruits and vegetables replaced grains and sugar beets as the most lucrative cash crops. By 1925, Salinas boasted of the “largest strawberry farm in the world,” and, as he recounts In East of Eden, farmers were envisioning shipments of lettuce to the east coast.
Today, lettuce and strawberries, broccoli and cauliflower and, near the coast, artichokes are primary crops, with two or three plantings a year of berries and vegetables. Temperatures in the northern valley around Salinas are moderated by afternoon fog—the warm valley air drawing the marine layer inland. A temperate climate and some of the most fertile soil in the state have earned the region its nickname: “salad bowl of world,” where some 70% of the nation’s lettuce is grown.
Until reclaimed for farmland by dredging crews, sloughs and marches dotted the landscape—Salina is Spanish for salt marsh. As a teen, Steinbeck briefly worked on a dredging crew, probably side by side with Chinese workers. That experience marks the background of a story set in Castroville, near the coast, “Johnny Bear.”
The hundred-and-fifty-mile Salinas River winds through the valley, flowing south to north-west and emptying into Monterey Bay just south of Moss Landing. It’s the largest subterranean river west of the Mississippi, a “sometimes river” as Steinbeck described it. “Sometimes” during Steinbeck’s youth, it flowed languidly through the long valley, as waters receded in the dry summer heat. But “sometimes” in the winter, when rains soak California, it surged and flooded fields (before dams on the river itself and tributaries tamed the Salinas River in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s). The Salinas watershed could be both wondrous and terrifying, and Steinbeck knew those extremes. Drought and floods came in cycles.
Mountain ranges rise up on each side of the Valley. To the east the Gabilans rise in gentle folds of green or gold, be it summer or winter: “light gay mountains full of sun and loveliness,” as Steinbeck writes in East of Eden. Cattle ranged the hills—and still do--and ranches are tucked into hillside creases. Fremont Peak is one of the highest in the range—a peak that Steinbeck could see from the window of his childhood home—and a soaring prominence that tallied with his own dreamy nature, he thought. The peak is named after John C. Fremont, who erected a log fort on the hillside in 1846, claimed the land for the U.S. (California was still a Mexican possession), and fought a battle to establish U.S. territory. He lost.
To the west are the Santa Lucias, the coastal range of granitic rock—always forbidding, wild and mysterious mountains in Steinbeck’s fiction (To a God Unknown, The Red Pony, “Flight”) and, in fact, in life. The “Great Ones,” Jody calls them in The Red Pony, that resisted human imprint: “They went piling back, growing darker and more savage until they finished with one jagged ridge, high up in the west.” The coast range remains rugged and rocky. Hillsides are tangled with scrub brush—California sage, huckleberry, manzanita and madrone, cypress and pine, scrub oak and live oak.
John Steinbeck spent much of his childhood taking in the natural wonders of the Salinas Valley, geological and biological, gazing as attentively at sandstone cliffs as at swallows’ nests, mallow weeds, and the “sharp yellow leaves” of willows. “On the West Coast, in California’s Monterey County where I was born,” he writes, “I learned from childhood the grasses and flowers, the insects and the fishes, the animals from gopher and ground squirrel to bobcat and coyote, deer and mountain lion, and of course the birds, the common ones at least. These are things a child absorbs as he is growing up.” (“My War with Ospreys”) And never forgets.
The legacy of his Salinas childhood was a deep love of place; knowledge of weather, crops and land-use; and a keen awareness of how field workers, many of them Japanese, Chinese, Mexican and Filipino, toiled to harvest valley abundance.
Young John Steinbeck—sensitive, empathetic, imaginative—felt out of place in his prosperous hometown of Salinas, the county seat. When he was born in 1902, Salinas boasted 3300 residents: “It was the biggest town between San Jose and San Luis Obispo,” Steinbeck writes in East of Eden, “and everyone felt that a brilliant future was in store for it.” Steinbeck was never a Salinas booster, however. “Salinas was never a pretty town…The mountains on both sides of the valley were beautiful, but Salinas was not and we knew it,” he wrote in a 1955 essay about his hometown. After he left Salinas for college in 1919, he mostly stayed away from his conservative community.
It was a town where sharp lines divided the haves and the have nots, wealthy landowners and poorly paid field workers. Salinas Valley land was productive land, and landowners set out to turn as much profit from that land as possible. That was hardly Steinbeck’s personal ethos. And his own family were not ranchers or farmers, certainly not wealthy landowners. Young Steinbeck preferring roaming the fields and hills around Salinas, or fishing or swimming in the Salinas River to time spent, when he was a teenager, in his father’s feed and grain store in downtown Salinas.
Steinbeck’s parents, however, were engaged denizens of Salinas, both second generation Californians, community builders. Olive Steinbeck was a loyal member of Eastern Star—just as Mr. Steinbeck was a lifelong Mason. Olive founded a vigorous Salinas women’s club, “The Wanderers,” dedicated to educational uplift through armchair travel.
In East of Eden, Steinbeck describes the Salinas of his youth, its people and some of its dark corners.
The small town of Soledad is twenty-six miles south of Salinas on highway 101, a community whose roots go back to the 1860s. The origins of the name, however, go back further—to the nearby Spanish mission founded in 1791 as Mission Nuestra Senora Dolorosisima de la Soledad. Although the name means solitude, the mission, Our Lady of Solitude, is named after one of Mary’s sacred names.
Perhaps Steinbeck drew from both a sacred and a profane sense of place when he located Of Mice and Men on a ranch near Soledad. The novella is about the loneliness of drifting men of the 1920s who helped harvest crops throughout California. And yet an abiding faith keeps the land dream alive in George and Lennie’s minds, a vision of Edenic acres where they will “live off the fatta the lan’.” Land and home ownership is the dream of many of Steinbeck’s characters.
The productive land around Soledad produced grains and later vegetables—the pattern of development throughout the Salinas Valley. Today many vineyards are located in the region off what is known as the Monterey Wine Trail.
Forty-seven miles south of Salinas on highway 101 is King City, once a lively center of wheat production, now a thriving agricultural hub. The Southern Pacific Railroad was extended to King City in 1886, and John Steinbeck’s father was one of the town’s first residents, working for the Southern Pacific Milling Company. In the hills east of King City, Steinbeck’s maternal grandparents, Sam and Lisa Hamilton, owned a ranch, bone-dry acres where they pastured cattle. “Old Starvation Ranch,” Steinbeck called it. As Steinbeck suggests in East of Eden, his grandfather was a farmer, visionary, and inventor. An 1893 article in the Salinas paper described Sam as “the well-known threshing machine man.”
Fifteen miles northwest of Salinas, near the coast, is the small farming community of Castroville, founded in 1863 by Juan Bautista Castro. Steinbeck sometimes stopped at a small bar in the town, and that’s where he found the inspiration to write one of his best short stories, “Johnny Bear,” included in The Long Valley. His description of the town—Loma in the story--captures some the area’s geography—the “low round hill that rises like an island out of the flat mouth of the Salinas Valley in central California” is Mulligan Hill, visible from the town (although Castroville itself is not on the hill. Steinbeck often rearranges geography). The Salinas River mouth is south of the town; the region’s fog is described as “evil smelling… It seemed to cling to the buildings and to reach out with free arms into the air”—Steinbeck’s landscapes create tone and meaning.
The story also suggests some of the town’s rich ethnic history; Chinese contractors and workers came in 1860 to help clear the sloughs and marshes, creating farmland: “Rich vegetable land has been the result of the draining,” Steinbeck writes in the opening paragraph. A dredging machine pounds throughout the story: the narrator “could hear the cluttering of the Diesel engine off in the swamp and the clang of the big steel mouth that ate its way through the ground.”
In 1922, Andrew Molera brought artichoke plants to the region, and now Castroville proudly claims the title, “The Artichoke Center of the World.” Fried artichokes are readily available.