Silverado Squatters is a short book, each chapter is really a story that could stand on it's own. This could be classed as a travel book. In 1880 Robert Louis Stevenson and his newly married wife along with his nearly grown stepson traveled to San Francisco and then on to the Napa Valley. The Stevenson family found free lodging in the abandoned Silverado Mine on the upper slopes of Mt. St. Helens. The chapters talk about the climate and the vegetation of the area as well as the people. Having grown up not far from there I enjoyed his description the part of the world I've known best. I have never read such a good description of the morning coastal fogs in my home state. Stevenson may have been one of the first published authors to write about California wines. Wine had been grown in California since the time of the Missions but it the second half of the Nineteenth Century growers were trying to grow better grapes and make good wine. Stevenson commented favorably on California wine but noted that it did not sell well even in San Francisco because so many insisted that only French wine was worthy.

Stevenson was a 19th Century man and he carried the prejudices of his time. His attitudes toward Jews, Chinese, Native American and poor white residents were off putting to me. But he was a product of his time. Perhaps I would have given The Silverado Squatters five stars if not for that.
( )

This is a recounting of the time Robert Louis Stevenson spent in the hills of Calistoga county trying to recover from his illness. He and his wife (and her two mostly grown sons) spent their honeymoon of three months in an old abandoned mining office/bunkhouse. I would call it camping, considering the condition the place was in, he called it squatting because they didn't have permission from the absentee owner, nor were they paying rent.

Much of the writing is picturesque, especially if you are familiar with the area. He pokes light fun at the situation, the difficulties, the people around him and himself. Be ready for some racial slurs and stereotyping as was sadly typical of the times. Still, his observations of natural history, human nature and life in general, along with his lovely turn of phrase, make this an interesting small episode in California history. ( )

Robert Louis Stevenson's The Silverado Squatters (1884), an account of the summer in 1880 that Stevenson spent in Silverado, on Mount St. Helena with his new bride Fanny Osbourne Stevenson. RLS talks about his hotel in Vallejo, where "the stove would not burn, though it would smoke; and while one window would not open, the other would not shut" (222). Sometimes the description might be of any small town in the U.S.; in describing Calistoga, RLS says,

The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel to one another. The street of Calistoga joins them, perpendicular to both--a wide street, with bright, clean, lowhouses, here and there a verandah over the sidewalk, here and there a horsepost, here and there lounging townsfolk. Other streets are marked out, and most likely named; for these towns in the New World begin with a firm resolve to grow larger, Washington and Broadway, and then First and Second, and so forth, being boldly plotted out as soon as the sommunity indulges in a plan. But, in the meanwhile, all the life and most of the houses of Calistoga are concentrated upon that street between the railway station and the road. I never heard it called by any name, but I will hazard a guess that it is either Washington or Broadway. (225)

At other times, the flavor is distinctly of the frontier:

The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest where there are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed, and the stage is not only a link between country and city, and the vehicle of news, but has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who should be brother to a soldier. California boasts her famous stage-drivers, and among the famous Foss is not forgotten. Along the unfenced, abominable mountain roads, he launches his team with small regard to human life or the doctrine of probabilities. Flinching travellers, who behold themselves coasting eternity at every corner, look with admiration at their driver’s huge, impassive, fleshy countenance. He has the very face for the driver in Sam Weller’s anecdote, who upset the election party at the required point. Wonderful tales are current of his readiness and skill. One in particular, of how one of his horses fell at a ticklish passage of the road, and how Foss let slip the reins, and, driving over the fallen animal arrived at the next stage with only three. This I relate as I heard it, without guarantee. (p. 226)

Here and often he sounds very much like Twain.
What first amazed me was the way he described the infant wine-making in the Napa Valley.

Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved. The beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the precious metals: the wine-grower also ‘prospects.’ One corner after another of land is tried with one kind of grape after another. This is a failure; that is better; a third best. So, bit by bit, they grope after their Clos Vougeot and Lafite. Those lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry: these still lie undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses undisturbed. But there they bide their hour, awaiting their Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them. The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson. (p. 232)

He notices early in the book the peculiarly American proprietary approach to the land: they visit "The Petrified Forest. Proprietor: C. Evans." And indeed, on our visit to Calistoga we went to see a geyser that goes off every twenty minutes or so and which is enclosed and charged for as if it were a circus act.
He has a notable description of "Poor Whites or Low-downers"

There is quite a large race or class of people in America, for whom we scarcely seem to have a parallel in England. Of pure white blood, they are unknown or unrecognisable in towns; inhabit the fringe of settlements and the deep, quiet places of the country; rebellious to all labour, and pettily thievish, lke the English gypsies; rustically ignorant, but with a touch of wood-lore and the dexterity of the savage. Whence they came is a moot point. At the time of the war, they poured north in crowds to escape the conscription; lived during summer on fruits, wild animals, and petty theft; and at the approach of winter, when these supplies failed, built great fires in the forest, and there died stoically by starvation. They are widely scattered, however, and easily recognised. Loutish, but not ill-looking, they will sit all day, swinging their legs on a field fence, the mind seemingly as devoid of all reflection as a Suffolk peasant’s, careless of politics, for the most part incapable of reading, but with a rebellious vanityand a strong sense of independence. Hunting is their most congenial business, or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur detection. In tracking a criminal, following a particular horse along a beaten highway, and drawing inductions from a hair or a footprint, one of those somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly display activity of body and finesse of mind. By their names ye may know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first. Whether they are indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy common to all backwoodsmen, they are at least known by a generic byword, as Poor Whites or Low-downers. (p. 260) ( )

Stevenson's unconventional honeymoon with his new wife Fanny in a "love shack" in an abandoned mine in the mountains of Napa Valley CA, provides some interesting views of California during the late 19th century. Stevenson uses the first telephone of his life. He meets a number of wine growers in Napa Valley, an enterprise he deemed "experimental", with growers sometimes even mis-labeling the bottles as originating from Spain in order to sell their product to skeptical Americans. He visits the oldest wine grower in the valley Jacob Schram, who had been "experimenting" for 18 years at his Schramsberg Winery, and had recently expanded the wine cellar in his backyard. Stevenson also visited a petrified forest owned by an old Norwegian ex-sailor who had stumbled upon it while clearing farmland.what the petrified forest was remained for everyone a source of curiosity. Stevenson also details his encounters with a local Jewish merchant, whom he compares to a character in a Charles Dickens novel (probably Fagin from Oliver Twist), and portrays as happy-go-lucky but always scheming to earn a dollar. Like Dickens in American Notes (1842), Stevenson found the American habit of spitting on the floor hard to get used too.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silverado_Squatters (Wikipedia) ( )

This slim volume was really only of interest to me because it detailed Stevenson's wanderings in Northern California, including a Petrified forest and early Napa Valley wineries.

Quotes:
On travel:
"It is very curious, of course, and ancient enough, if that were all. Doubtless, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at the sight; but, for my part, I was mightily unmoved. Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment."

On wine (CA wine has come a long way since 1883):
"A nice point in human history falls to be decided by Californian and Australian wines. Wine in California is still in the experimental stage. ... The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson."

On Jews and the power of money to make one free:
"Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more good; they seemed so throroughly entitled to happines, and to enjoy it in so large a measure and so free from after-thought; almost they persuaded me to be a Jew. There was, indeeed, a chink of money in their talk. They particularly commended people who were well to do. 'He don't care - ain't it?' was their highest word of commendation to an individual fate; and here I seemed to grasp the root of their philosophy - it was to be free from care, free to make these Sunday wanderings, that they so eagerly pursued after wealth; and all this carefulness was to be careless."

On capitalism:
"The village usurer is not so sad a feature of humanity and human progress as the millionaire manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of thousands..." ( )