The Silverado Squatters

In 1880 Stevenson, newly married to Fanny Vandegrift and broke, spent two months of what amounted to a honeymoon camped in a derelict bunkhouse at an abandoned silver mine above Calistoga in the Napa Valley. This short travel memoir is what came of it: the squatting itself, the neighbours who came with the place, and — in the chapter that is still quoted — the young California wine industry, which he judged to be still prospecting for its best ground.

It is minor Stevenson and is on the list as observation rather than argument: a sharp outsider’s account of a raw American place in the year it was becoming something else.

Context: The slightest of the Autobiography entries, and the only one set in the American West.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Robert Louis Stevenson — the author.