Additional information
by Gary M. Koeppel (Introduction by), Lillian Bos Ross (Author)
The Big Sur Trilogy is the story about one of the last pioneer families in America who lived freely and self-sufficiently in a remote area of the central California known as Big Sur. The Trilogy spans over 100 years and depicts the hard but rewarding life of three generations of the Zande Allan family. The Big Sur Coast extends 100 miles from Carmel to San Simeon and is bordered by the Santa Lucia Mountains and Pacific Ocean. This remote wilderness contains some of the most rugged terrain in the American continent. From the beginning of time the south coast was accessible only by foot, mule or horseback. Although inhabited by three nomadic American Indian tribes, the Spaniards refused to travel along the coast because of the high mountains, steep canyons and dangerous water crossings.In the 1870s a partial wagon road was built from Mal Paso Crossing to Bixby Creek Ranch. The next 74 miles of the Big Sur Coast was not accessible by auto until 1937 with the opening of Highway One, which took eighteen years to build, mostly by convict labor using dynamite and steam shovels.When completed, it became the only road in the United States that went directly from a horse trail to an auto road, thus bypassing the traditional, interim wagon road. The road changed forever the lives of the Big Sur homesteaders as the mainstream modern American culture motored into their once-private coast.Before the road, few 'outlanders' visited the south coast because travel was strenuous, the trail precarious and the homesteads were few and far between, but those who ventured there were greeted with coast hospitality, lively conversation and ranch grown food.The Big Sur pioneer families worked long hours and full days with little time for frills or fancy things, and they had no patience for what was not plain spoken. A trip to Monterey to buy supplies or to Salinas to sell cattle took three hard days by horseback along narrow trails at the edge of granite cliffs often falling straight to the sea some 2000 feet below. Twice a year the ranchers would gather for a coast barbecue with neighbors on the beach while waiting for the cargo schooner to arrive and winch ashore their load of hard stock supplies too bulky for pack mule or horse.The second novel is named after Zande and Hannah's daughter Blaze Allan who took her headstrong ways from her father and her tender feelings from her mother. She was a beautiful young woman who could sit a saddle as good as any man on the coast. When her father demanded that she marry Joe Williams, whom she detested and rejected. One day she met a stranger on the trail and began to dream about him.A neighbor, Pete Garcia, teased Blaze into hunting Abalone on a remote beach, but once there, his interest quickly changed from Abalone to Amore. As a proper coast girl, reputation meant everything, and she rejected his advances. As the tide came in they were trapped in the cove and such an overnight stay was forbidden. Pete knew that folks would assume the worst and ruin her reputation so he decided to swim for help. Blaze tried to stop him but he drowned in the powerful surf.Pete's parents and even her own suspected she was now a ruined woman and blamed her for Pete's death. Joe Williams, her rejected suitor, spread the rumor that he had also been with Blaze. Devastated that her reputation was shattered simply by rumor, she fled Pete's funeral and rode to Monterey but, once again, she came upon the stranger, who arranged for her safe passage on his tanbark cargo schooner. In Monterey, alone and hungry, she struggled to survive by working for food and shelter, but the town folks suspected she was a fallen woman who had been cast from the coast by her kinfolks. After a shopkeeper tried to take advantage of her youth and beauty, she bolted from Monterey and headed back to the Coast on foot where, once more, the handsome man of her dreams appeared on the trail and rescued her from herself.
Author Biography
Lillian Bos Ross and her husband Harry Dicken Ross first backpacked into Big Sur in the summer of 1923 from Telegraph Hill in San Francisco where they were booksellers and part of a bohemian writers group. Inspired by the land's beauty and residents' lifestyle, they chose to free themselves from their regulated lifestyle and live a life of 'pioneer spirits' in an environment of their choice, and they choses Big Sur. After opening the first art gallery in Salinas, then spent a stint at the Hearst Castle where Dicken worked as a tile setter and wood carver, after which they hitched a 22-mile ride into the south coast of Big Sur with a man who earned $4.00 a day mining gold at Salmon Creek. The magnificent and rugged coastal land enchanted them and in 1939 they settled into Livermore Ledge, a Big Sur homestead house. They lived on salmon, Abalone, wild berries and bought coffee, eggs and honey for $1.00 from their friendly neighbors, the Big Sur homesteader families. Dicken sold a few carved sculptures and Lillian wrote stories for area publications. In 1942 The Stranger became a best seller and received the National Book Award. The New York Times exclaimed, "So long as America has a stock of Zande and Hannah Allans...it can face any tomorrow unafraid" and Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, "...it carries a thread of inspiration all thru it, which should be good news for us in these days". World War II was in full battle during the writing of The Stranger. Lillian wrote in her diary on December 11, 1941, that "a Japanese submarine fired 12 shots at a lumber schooner off Pfeiffer Point" and three days later "the tanker Larry Doheny was bombed a few miles south of us and another tanker was sunk at San Simeon". These were nervous times for all Americans. Lillian's second novel, Blaze Allan, named after Zande and Hannah's daughter, reveals the rugged individualism of the American Pioneers whose last survivors flourished on the remote Big Sur Coast long before the automobile road, which took eighteen years to carve from the Big Sur cliffs, and opened up this inaccessible and sparsely-populated land to the travelers of the world. When Lillian passed in 1959 she left behind the skeleton of the third book of the Big Sur Trilogy she titled The Road, an unfinished manuscript about the building of Highway One that was destined to be completed some fifty years later by Gary M. Koeppel.
