Steinbeck Country [antikvár]

THE BEGINNINGS "First there were Indians, an inferior breed without energy, inventiveness, or culture, a people that lived on grubs and grasshoppers and shellfish, too lazy to hunt or Jish. They ate what they could pick up and planted nothing. They pounded bitter acorns for Jlour. Even their warfare was a weary pantomime. "Then the hard dry Spaniards came exploring through, greedy and realistic, and their greed was for gold or God. They collected souls as they collected jewels. They gathered mountains and valleys, rivers and whole horizons, the way a man might gain title to building lots. 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. . . . "Then the Americans came—more greedy because there were more of them. They took the lands, remade the laws to make their titles good. And farmholds spread over the land,frst in the valleys and then up the foothill slopes, small wooden houses roofed with redwood shakes, corrals of split poles.'' L ong ago in the dim mists of primordial time, sonic hundred thousand millennia or more, the land mass of what is now called Monterey County in California lay for rhe most part beneath the shallow waters of the sea. A few hilly island masses stood above the waters. As time slowly went by, the land was lifted, the sea retreated, the island hills became mountains. Volcanoes were here; the earth — East of Eden shook often as it was folded and crumpled. The land subsided and the sea came in again, until some violent cataclysmic upthrust raised the old hills up into massive mountains and the sea withdrew again for the last time. The rains of ten million years nibbled at the slopes of the mountains and erosion cut deep canyons and filled the valleys with fine, rich silt. Alotifi the share, it'herc lonq a^o mountains were lifted from the depths of the sea, waves tuai^e uiieiiditi^^ war a^^ainst the laud, the sea the constant i^ictor.