Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

drawn toward a mysterious light while working as a
vaquero far from his birthplace in Monterey. His
yearning toward this light started Tom on a journey
around California’s landscape that took most of his
life.
I have learned two important and seemingly
oppositional facts about that light.
One, the light my grandfather yearned toward
came from the top of Mt. Diablo, about three
hundred miles away. He said, “I’ll tell you what
made me leave there: I could see a light from the
Carrisa Plains every night, and I said, I wonder
where the hell that light is? You could see it from the
Carrisa Plains as soon as it got dark every single
night.” The geography Tom spoke of was significant:
he was being pulled homeward.
Mt. Diablo, at the upper end of the San Joaquin
Valley, and Big Sur’s Pico Blanco are both
considered places of emergence, places where the
world began after a great flood, by local Indian
peoples—including some of my ancestors, whose
community at the Carmel mission was artificially
created by the cramming together of Ohlone,
Costanoan, Salinan, and other tribes from that
general area.