Silverado Squatters

Stevenson Robert Louis

Description

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Silverado Squatters as the travel memoir of his honeymoon in California's Napa Valley in 1880. He and his new wife Fanny Vandegrift were unable to pay 10 dollars a week for a local hotel room, so they spent their unconventional honeymoon living in a bunkhouse in an abandoned mining camp named "Silverado". Squatting there for two months of a California summer, they installed makeshift cloth windows and hauled water from a close-by stream. The area they stayed in is now called The Robert Louis Stevenson State Park.

Sujets

• Travel writing

Informations

• Publié par: The Floating Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781775415220
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
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ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
 
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The Silverado Squatters From a 1906 edition.
ISBN 978-1-775415-22-0
© 2009 THE FLOATING PRESS.
While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike.
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Contents
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The Silverado Squatters PART I - IN THE VALLEY Chapter I - Calistoga Chapter II - The Petrified Forest Chapter III - Napa Wine Chapter IV - The Scot Abroad PART II - WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL Chapter I - To Introduce Mr. Kelmar Chapter II - First Impressions of Silverado Chapter III - The Return The Act of Squatting The Hunter's Family The Sea Fogs The Toll House A Starry Drive Episodes in the Story of a Mine Toils and Pleasures
The Silverado Squatters
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The scene of this little book is on a high mountain. There are,indeed, many higher; there are many of a nobler outline. It is noplace of pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one wholives upon its sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre ofinterest. It is the Mont Blanc of one section of the CalifornianCoast Range, none of its near neighbours rising to one-half itsaltitude. It looks down on much green, intricate country. Itfeeds in the spring-time many splashing brooks. From its summityou must have an excellent lesson of geography: seeing, to thesouth, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand and MonteDiablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the openocean; eastward, across the corn-lands and thick tule swamps ofSacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins toclimb the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, thewhite head of Shasta looking down on Oregon. Three counties, NapaCounty, Lake County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffyshoulders. Its naked peak stands nearly four thousand five hundredfeet above the sea; its sides are fringed with forest; and thesoil, where it is bare, glows warm with cinnabar.
Life in its shadow goes rustically forward. Bucks, and bears, andrattle-snakes, and former mining operations, are the staple ofmen's talk. Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley.And though in a few years from now the whole district may besmiling with farms, passing trains shaking the mountain to theheart, many-windowed hotels lighting up the night like factories,and a prosperous city occupying the site of sleepy Calistoga; yetin the mean time, around the foot of that mountain the silence ofnature reigns in a great measure unbroken, and the people of hilland valley go sauntering about their business as in the days beforethe flood.
To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller hastwice to cross the bay: once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again,after an hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo junction toVallejo. Thence he takes rail once more to mount the long greenstrath of Napa Valley.
In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea, the Bayof San Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the VallejoFerry. Bald shores and a low, bald islet inclose the sea; throughthe narrows the tide bubbles, muddy like a river. When we made thepassage (bound, although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) thesteamer jumped, and the black buoys were dancing in the jabble; theocean breeze blew killing chill; and, although the upper sky wasstill unflecked with vapour, the sea fogs were pouring in fromseaward, over the hilltops of Marin county, in one great,shapeless, silver cloud.
South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns. It was ablunder; the site has proved untenable; and, although it is stillsuch a young place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun tobe deserted for its neighbour and namesake, North Vallejo. A longpier, a number of drinking saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshypools where the frogs keep up their croaking, and even at high noonthe entire absence of any human face or voice—these are the marksof South Vallejo. Yet there was a tall building beside the pier,labelled the Star Flour Mills; and sea-going, full-rigged ships layclose along shore, waiting for their cargo. Soon these would beplunging round the Horn, soon the flour from the Star Flour Millswould be landed on the wharves of Liverpool. For that, too, is oneof England's outposts; thither, to this gaunt mill, across theAtlantic and Pacific deeps and round about the icy Horn, this crowdof great, three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, andreturn with bread.
The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a placeof fallen fortunes, like the town. It was now given up tolabourers, and partly ruinous. At dinner there was the ordinarydisplay of what is called in the west a TWO-BIT HOUSE: thetablecloth checked red and white, the plague of flies, the wirehencoops over the dishes, the great variety and invariable vilenessof the food and the rough coatless men devoting it in silence. Inour bedroom, the stove would not burn, though it would smoke; andwhile one window would not open, the other would not shut. Therewas a view on a bit of empty road, a few dark houses, a donkeywandering with its shadow on a slope, and a blink of sea, with atall ship lying anchored in the moonlight. All about that drearyinn frogs sang their ungainly chorus.
Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden footway,bridging one marish spot after another. Here and there, as weascended, we passed a house embowered in white roses. More of thebay became apparent, and soon the blue peak of Tamalpais rose abovethe green level of the island opposite. It told us we were stillbut a little way from the city of the Golden Gates, already, atthat hour, beginning to awake among the sand-hills. It called tous over the waters as with the voice of a bird. Its stately head,blue as a sapphire on the paler azure of the sky, spoke to us ofwider outlooks and the bright Pacific. For Tamalpais standssentry, like a lighthouse, over the Golden Gates, between the bayand the open ocean, and looks down indifferently on both. Even aswe saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at sea, werescanning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer to the thought,one of the great ships below began silently to clothe herself withwhite sails, homeward bound for England.
For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald greenpastures. On the west the rough highlands of Marin shut off theocean; in the midst, in long, straggling, gleaming arms, the baydied out among the grass; there were few trees and few enclosures;the sun shone wide over open uplands, the displumed hills stoodclear against the sky. But by-and-by these hills began to drawnearer on either hand, and first thicket and then wood began toclothe their sides; and soon we were away from all signs of thesea's neighbourhood, mounting an inland, irrigated valley. A greatvariety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming grove,among the fields and vineyards. The towns were compact, in aboutequal proportions, of bright, new wooden houses and great andgrowing forest trees; and the chapel bell on the engine soundedmost festally that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green townafter another, with the townsfolk trooping in their Sunday's bestto see the strangers, with the sun sparkling on the clean houses,and great domes of foliage humming overhead in the breeze.
This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by ourmountain. There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and thetraveller who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or to thesprings in Lake County, must cross the spurs of the mountain bystage. Thus, Mount Saint Helena is not only a summit, but afrontier; and, up to the time of writing, it has stayed theprogress of the iron horse.
PART I - IN THE VALLEY
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Chapter I - Calistoga
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It is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the wholeplace is so new, and of such an accidental pattern; the very name,I hear, was invented at a supper-party by the man who found thesprings.
The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel toone another. The street of Calistoga joins the perpendicular toboth—a wide street, with bright, clean, low houses, here and therea verandah over the sidewalk, here and there a horse-post, here andthere lounging townsfolk. Other streets are marked out, and mostlikely named; for these towns in the New World begin with a firmresolve to grow larger, Washington and Broadway, and then First andSecond, and so forth, being boldly plotted out as soon as thecommunity indulges in a plan. But, in the meanwhile, all the lifeand most of the houses of Calistoga are concentrated upon thatstreet between the railway station and the road. I never heard itcalled by any name, but I will hazard a guess that it is eitherWashington or Broadway. Here are the blacksmith's, the chemist's,the general merchant's, and Kong Sam Kee, the Chinese laundryman's;here, probably, is the office of the local paper (for the place hasa paper—they all have papers); and here certainly is one of thehotels, Cheeseborough's, whence the daring Foss, a man dear tolegend, starts his horses for the Geysers.
It must be remembered that we are here in a land of stage-driversand highwaymen: a land, in that sense, like England a hundredyears ago. The highway robber—road-agent, he is quaintly called—is still busy in these parts. The fame of Vasquez is still young.Only a few years go, the Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or twofrom Calistoga. In 1879, the dentist of Mendocino City, fiftymiles away upon the coast, suddenly threw off th