www.montereycountynow.com NOVEMBER 5-11, 2026 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 19 Shillinglaw’s new book, Steinbeck’s Landscapes, has a whole chapter devoted to East of Eden, including the landscape’s people, flora and fauna. In it, she attempts to address the question: How does place form a person? Trask Ranch Adam Trask and his reluctant wife, Cathy Ames, never came to California and never purchased land a few miles south of King City. They were fictional characters, but so many others did come and settle in Salinas Valley in those years. In the book, the Trask ranch is described as the former Bordoni ranch, which, as Steinbeck writes in the book, consisted of 900 acres left from a grant issued by the Spanish crown. Adam and Cathy settle in what is described as the old Sanchez house. Karen and John Jernigan run historical tours in King City; over the years they came up with their own impressive guide to places in East of Eden. According to them, Steinbeck could be inspired by the Trescony ranch he must have known, even if in the book the ranch is located almost equidistant between San Lucas and King City. Today, Trescony ranch is part of Rancho San Lucas, which is situated approximately eight miles southeast of King City, between San Lucas and San Ardo, and home to wine company KrushWerks, operated by J&L Farms Inc. (Shillinglaw is skeptical of this theory.) The TV series skips through the ordeals and agonies of Adam Trask before he eventually obtains the land. Before that happens, he relies heavily on the wisdom of Samuel Hamilton, who seems to foretell the in-depth hydrological knowledge of groundwater that is so much a part of life, business and governance today: “They say it was a strange valley…Something went on under it— maybe still is going on. There’s an ocean bed underneath, and below that another world.” That said, the land is good and has water, Samuel assures Adam, except for his own plot, since the Hamilton ranch is situated in dry mountain foothills. We never find out how successful Adam could be as a rancher if his wife and brand-new mother of their twins, Cal and Aron, didn’t leave him heartbroken and unable to thrive. Hamilton Ranch Samuel and Liza Hamilton, characters based on Steinbeck’s real maternal grandparents, settle in the foothills east of King City, on land described as rugged and marginal. “If the land had been any good the Hamiltons would have been rich people,” Steinbeck wrote in Chapter 2. “But the acres were harsh and dry. There were no springs and the crust of topsoil was so thin and flinty bones stuck through. Even the sagebrush struggled to exist, and the oaks were dwarfed from lack of moisture.” Nearby Hamilton Canyon and Peachtree Valley, in the foothills of the southern Salinas Valley, is the real-life setting of the Hamiltons, where they lived in the late 19th century. The ranch was bought from the Hamiltons by Robert Grabb and was known until 2016 as the Grabb Ranch, according to Shillinglaw. Now the area is covered partly in a solar array. The Hamiltons are more than neighbors to the Trasks in the Salinas Valley. They help give the novel its moral and emotional center. Samuel Hamilton is resourceful, curious and generous, even though his family has little money and the land is difficult to work. “He was a big man but delicate in a way,” according to the novel. “In the dusty business of ranching he seemed always immaculate. His hands were clever. He was a good blacksmith and carpenter and woodcarver, and he could improvise anything with bits of wood and metal.” Samuel’s kindness offers a contrast to the Trasks’ struggles with inheritance, resentment, and the question of whether people can choose who they become. CELIA JIMÉNEZ CELIA JIMÉNEZ KAREN VANDERWALL JERNIGAN Pozzi’s Stampede is a family-owned bar that’s been part of downtown King City since the 1930s. King City is working to bring back a passenger rail station for the Amtrak Coast Starlight. The Southern Pacific Station in King City closed in the 1940s and the Amtrak station closed in the ’70s. KIRSTY GRIFFIN/NETFLIX Ciarán Hinds as Samuel Hamilton (left) and Christopher Abbott as Adam Trask in the Netflix adaptation.
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