S

OF

CALIFORNIA

HORTLY after the silver wedding anniversary of Robert Louis Stevenson, we decided to make a literary pilgrimage to Mt. St. Helena, to visit the places so incomparably described in "The Silverado Squatters," and to see what changes time had wrought in the former realm of the "King and Queen of Silverado." In the summer of 1880, these royal lovers, attended only by "Sam, the Crown Prince" (Mr. Lloyd Osbourne), and "Chuchu, the Grand Duke," began their honeymoon of fifteen devoted years in this romantic retreat, half a mile skyward on the shoulder of this giant of the Napa mountains.

1880-1906. More than a quarter of a century has slipped away, yet the mild California climate has not apparently altered the gorge hallowed by the memory of Robert Louis Stevenson, although the vandal hand of man has greatly changed the region roundabout. Still, there much to be seen in these sequestered high places that will cause the vivid descriptions of that master word-painter to seem as though they were written at this day. Twenty-six years have flown since Stevenson trod its rock trails, and other people and other places, Davos, Hyeres, Saranac and Vailima have learned to love and later deeply to miss the genial Tusitala.

In the latter seventies, while making a unique tour along the rivers of France, in a Canadian canoe, gathering material for "The Inland Voyage," Stevenson met Mrs. Osbourne of Oakland, California, who had come to Paris with her son and daughter to study art. Their acquaintance ripened into unfaltering love, which grew stronger with the anxious, though successful, years that followed. Bound together by intellectual affinity, their romance may well be compared to the companionship of the Brownings.

In 1879 Mrs. Osbourne returned to California, followed soon after by Stevenson, who described his journey in

those charming books of travel, "The Amateur Emigrant," and "Across the Plains." He contracted a severe illness in San Francisco, which developed dangerous symptoms of quick consumption, but thanks to the tender nursing of his fiancee, he was restored sufficiently to health to enable him to marry Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne on the nineteenth of May, 1880. In the words of Sidney Colvin, his fidus Achates and biographer, "his friends rejoiced to find in Stevenson's wife a character as strong, interesting and romantic as his own." In a letter to Sidney Colvin, dated San Francisco, May, 1880, he says:

"I am now out of danger; but in a short while, F. and I marry and go up to the hills to look for a place. . . There, sir, in, I hope, a ranch among the pine trees and hard by a running brook we are to fish, hunt, sketch, study. . and if possible not quarrel. . . . Whenever I get into the mountains, I trust I shall pick up. Until I get away from these sea-fogs and my imprisonment in the house, I do not hope to do much more than keep from active harm. It is the change I want, and the blessed sun and the gentle air in which I can sit out and see the trees and running water."

Immediately after their marriage, the Stevensons journeyed some sixty miles to the northward of San Francisco to the little town of Calistoga, which backs about the base of Mt. St. Helena. For a few days they lingered among the pleasant environs of that popular watering place, reveling in the pristine freshness of the upper Napa Valley, whose vineyards were then, as he described, "in the experimental stage." Here he learned by proof that California wine is "bottled poetry," and also made the acquaintance of the Lipman family, whom he later immortalized under the cognomen Kelmar. In another letter to Sydney Colvin he writes:

"Here we are, Fanny and I and a cer

tain hound, in a lovely valley under Mt. St. Helena, looking around . . . for a house of our own. . . . We hope to get a house at Silverado, a deserted mining camp, eight miles up the mountain, now solely inhabited by a mighty hunter, answering to the name of Rufe Hanson, who slew last year a hundred and fifty deer."

They were taken one Sunday by the Lipmans (Kelmars) to the deserted mining camp of Silverado, where they decided to squat" in a dilapidated assay office planted under the overhanging, red mouth of a great rocky gorge. Undis

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turbed in this secluded spot, two months of their honeymoon slipped away, an endless round of "toils and pleasures," as the reader would believe from Stevenson's enchanting account. Yet their joys were marred by the dangerous illness of Mrs. Stevenson and her son, Lloyd Osbourne, who were afflicted with diphtheria.

Surveying sea-fogs from cliffy crags, listening to the tumultuous music of winds in the pine-tops, gazing upward to the clearness of "the starry nights," thus did they rest and recreate. So entrancing is this dreamy story of their honeymoon that the reader will seem delightfully refreshed as well.

Towards the end of July, 1880, the Stevensons left Silverado and returned to Scotland, where, during the following year, "Treasure Island" established his literary reputation. Still seeking health, he spent the winter of 1881-2 at Davos, Switzerland. Amid the inspiration of Alpine snow-peaks he commenced writing "The Silverado Squatters," finishing it at Hyeres in Southern France in the spring of 1883. The story of his honeymoon first appeared in the Century Magazine for November and December of that year. In length it exceeded some thirty-five thousand words, for which he gladly accepted the sum of two hundred dollars. The characteristic modesty of the man is evidenced by the following extracts from his letters. Writing from Hyeres in April, 1883, to Edmund Gosse, Stevenson said:

"Gilder, asking me for fiction, I have packed off to him my new work, The Silverado Squatters.' I do not for a moment suppose he will take it, but pray say all the good words you can for it. I shall be awfully glad to have it taken.

May 20, 1883-The forty pounds was a heavenly thing! The forty pounds has been such a piercing sun-ray as my whole grey life is gilt withal. If these good days of Longman and the Century only last, it will be a very green world."

Writing from Hyeres in October, 1883. he tells Sidney Colvin that "Silverado was not written in America, but Switzerland's icy mountains. What you read is the bleeding and disemboweled remains of what I wrote. The good stuff is all to come-so I think. The Sea-Fogs, "The Hunter Family,' Toils and Pleasures--belles pages . . ."

Again he underestimates his writing when in a letter to his friend, W. H. Low, he says:

"Silverado is an example of stuff worried and pawed about, God knows how often in poor health, and you can see for yourself the result-good pages, an imperfect fusion, a certain languor of the whole, not, in short, art."

Calistoga-bound, at last, our train glided over the traffic-warmed rails to Vallejo Junction, one golden, September afternoon. A yellow land-haze softened the contours of the Contra Costa hills, blending with fleecy fog-fleets blockading the Golden Gate. Though our eyes were intent upon seeing scenes as Stevenson saw them, many different details winking past the car-windows suggested materially the new order of of things. Masses of expanding industries, miles of manufactories, smelters, powder-works and oil refineries stretched along the elongated water-front of what may soon be known as Greater San Francisco. At Vallejo Junction we transferred to the time-honored ferry-boat, El Capitan, a craft coeval with the shallop of Charon. In this old-timer we tremblingly stemmed the muddy tides of Carquinez Strait to South Vallejo. In the immediate foreground the same antiquated pier sprawled its ungainly, teredoed length. Above it towered the masts of cargo-waiting ships. and over-topping these loomed the scaly whitewashed walls of Starr's Mill, decrepit with age and more dingy than ever. The identical row of povertystricken saloons offended our eyes as they

did Stevenson's a quarter of a century before. Seated in the train bound for Napa Valley, we looked out of a westward window upon the year 1905. Close at hand stood a monstrous oil-tank, whose ebon cylinder bore the legend, "S. P. Co.-30,000 barrels' capacity. Across "a blink of sea" lay Mare Island, bristling with its busy navy-yard and anchored warships. There the twentieth century obtruded. On the right, where my fancy preferred to linger, I looked back upon the year 1880. Among the same dreary marshes, an old man, barelegged, delved in the ooze for clams." "Just one thing there was wanting in the picture." In vain I looked for a lineal descendant of the donkey Stevenson saw, wandering with its shadow on a slope."

Beyond the manufacturing, tide-water town of Napa, the valley gradually narrowed. Reluctantly the afterglow forsook its lingering haunts among jagged ridge-tops to the eastward. Live oaks waltzed by in the darkening night, growing less distinct as orchards and vineyards merged into likeness. Flitting through the pleasant towns of Yountville. and St. Helena, we arrived at Calistog, where Fate led us up Lincoln Avenue to a "two-bit house." There we dined from a pink table cloth that was probably of a brilliant redness when Stevenson sojourned here.

At five the next morning, the crunching of the wheels of freighting wagons over gravel aroused me to the fact that Calistoga was a frontier of railroad communication. A sleepy locomotive grated into a string of freight cars with an apologetic grunt. Stepping out into the gray dawn, I inhaled deep lungfuls of fogdrenched air, for the mists of the Pacific overhung the tree-shaded streets of this picturesque little town. I rejoiced in being beneath this fog-blanket, for it recalled to me that Stevenson had said, "at Calistoga I had arisen and gone abroad in the early morning coughing and sneezing under fathoms and fathoms of gray sea-vapor."

We breakfasted again from the pink table-cloth, then shouldered our haversacks and struck out along the dusty highway over which the Stevensons rode with the Children of Israel." On the

outskirts of Calistoga we rounded a semicircle of dilapidated white cottages, fronted by a row of withered palm trees that told a piteous tale of drought and neglect. Quite different a quarter of a century ago were these buildings, one of which sheltered the bride and groom bound for Silverado that balmy May of lang syne. This deserted resort was in its prime fully forty years ago, when the noted pioneer, Samuel Brannan, had invested a fortune in the erection of his hotel and cottages, and the beautifying of the grounds surrounding the noted medicinal springs of Calistoga.

The foggy air reeked with odors from the marshes, out of which rose white vapors from the numerous hot springs. For two miles we marched through a forest of fruit trees alternating with prosperous vineyards, until we reached a massive stone bridge spanning a dry arroyo, whose water-worn cobbles glistening with quartz and stained with iron, told of the mineralized mountain ribs looming above us. Our road turned up this arid watercourse and plunged into a vine-rowed valley narrowing into a canyon, walled with pine-crested cliffs. The warm September sun had put to rout the sea-fog, which we beheld above us scudding past shaggy scarps. As our winding way ascended a spiny "hog's back," we caught glimpse at intervals of secluded mountain ranches set in clearings among the forest. At times its rim poised over the brink of a steep canyon, whose depths disclosed red ore-dumps, half-concealed by new vegetation. Here and there quartzose rocks cropped out, bearing the scars of prospectors. Slowly we neared "the nick, just where the eastern foothills join the mountain," where lay our Mecca, Silverado. Wide-spreading Douglass spruces and spiry pines fringed the gap in the hills where the road reached its height of land. Ever seeming more lofty as we ascended, St. Helena's massive dome towered above us, gray as a friar in its shaggy hood of chaparral.

At length our road, emerging from a madrona thicket, crossed a flat dotted with great yellow pines. Several hundred feet above the bushy uplift we beheld at jagged pinnacle of reddish rock, which we knew to be the monument of the Silverado mine. In the sizzling heat of a

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