Silverado Squatters Stevenson

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silverado_Squatters

"Broken financially, suffering from a lifelong fibrinous bronchitis condition, and with his writing career at a dead end, he was nursed back to health by his doctor, his nurse, and his future wife, while living briefly in Monterey, San Francisco, and Oakland.  

His father having provided money to help, on May 19, 1880, he married the Indianapolis native, whom he had first met in France in 1875, soon after the events of An Inland Voyage. .

Still too weak to undertake the journey back to Scotland, friends suggested Calistoga, in the upper Napa Valley, with its healthy mountain air. "

"The couple first went to the Hot Springs Hotel in Calistoga, but unable to afford the 10 dollars a week fee, they spent an unconventional honeymoon in an abandoned three-story bunkhouse at a derelict mining camp called "Silverado" on the shoulder of Mount Saint Helena in the Mayacamas Mountains.  

There they squatted for two months during summer, putting up makeshift cloth windows and hauling water in by hand from a nearby stream while dodging rattlesnakes and the occasional fog banks so detrimental to Stevenson's health. " 

"The Silverado Squatters provides some 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 deems "experimental",  

with growers sometimes even mislabeling 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 visits a petrified forest owned by an old Swedish ex-sailor who had stumbled upon it while clearing farmland—the precise nature of the petrified forest 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 to.

'His experiences at Silverado were recorded in a journal he called "Silverado Sketches", parts of which he incorporated into Silverado Squatters in 1883 while living in Bournemouth, England, with other tales appearing in "Essays of Travel" and "Across the Plains".  

Many of his notes on the scenery around him later provided much of the descriptive detail for  

Treasure Island 

The Robert Louis Stevenson State Park now encompasses the area where the Stevensons stayed.  

"Robert Louis Stevenson State Park is a California state park, located in Sonoma, Lake and Napa counties.  

The park offers a 5-mile (8 km) hike to the summit of Mount Saint Helena from which much of the Bay Area can be seen.  

On clear days it is possible to see the peak of Mount Shasta, 192 miles (310 km) distant. " 

Robert Louis Stevenson (born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson; 13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He is best known for works such as 

 Treasure Island,  

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 

 Kidnapped  

and  

A Child's Garden of Verses. 

"Stevenson was moving away from his upbringing. His dress became more Bohemian; he already wore his hair long, but he now took to wearing a velveteen jacket and rarely attended parties in conventional evening dress. Within the limits of a strict allowance, he visited cheap pubs and brothels. More significantly, he had come to reject Christianity and declared himself an atheist.  

In January 1873, when he was 22, his father came across the constitution of the LJR (Liberty, Justice, Reverence) Club, of which Stevenson and his cousin Bob were members, which began: "Disregard everything our parents have taught us".  

Justifying his rejection of an established profession, in 1877 Stevenson offered "An Apology for Idlers".  

"A happy man or woman", he reasoned, "is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill" and a practical demonstration of "the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life"..

'Underwoods is a collection of poems by Robert Louis Stevenson published in 1887.  

It comprises two books, Book I with 38 poems in English, Book II with 16 poems in Scots. " 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Louis_Stevenson

 

"Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, 

 in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality.  

I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got 

 some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts.  

I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann."   

"quotation from Lamb, "Lawyers, I suppose, were children once",' serves as the epigraph to Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird."