AMATEUR EMIGRANT
"Hope went before them
And the world was wide."
In the summer of 1879 R.L.S. was once more seized with the desire to
roam and to roam farther than ever before. California had been beckoning
to him for some time, and in August he suddenly made up his mind, and
with scarcely a word of farewell to his family and friends he embarked
on the steamship _Devonia_, bound for New York.
Partly for the sake of economy, for he determined to pay his own way on
this venture, and partly because he was anxious to experience emigrant
life, he engaged passage in the second cabin, which in those days
differed very little from the steerage. The main advantages were a
trifle better food and a cabin to himself with a table where he could
write.
In his usual way he soon made acquaintance with his fellow passengers
and did them many a friendly turn. They took him for one of themselves
and showed little curiosity as to where he came from, who he was, or
where he was going. He says: "The sailors called me 'mate,' the officers
addressed me as 'my man,' my comrades accepted me without hesitation for
a person of their own character and experience. One, a mason himself,
believed I was a mason, several, among these at least one of the seamen,
judged me to be a petty officer in the American navy; and I was so often
set down for a practical engineer that at last I had not the heart to
deny it."
The emigrants were from many countries, though the majority were Scotch
and Irish bound for the new world with the hope of meeting with better
fortune than they had had in the old, and they whiled away the days at
sea in their several ways, making the best of their discomforts and
cheering one another when they grew lonely or homesick for those they
had left behind.
When the weather was good their spirits rose and there were many rounds
of singing and story-telling as they sat clustered together like bees
under the lee of the deck-house, and in all of these Stevenson joined
heartily.
"We were indeed a musical ship's company," he says, "and cheered our way
into exile with the fiddle, the accordion, and the songs of all nations,
good, bad or indifferent--Scottish, English, Irish, Russian or
Norse--the songs were received with generous applause. Once or twice, a
recitation, very spiritedly rendered in a powerful Scotch accent, varied
the proceedings; and once we sought in vain to dance a quadrille, eight
men of us together, to the music of the violin. The performers were
humorous, frisky fellows, who loved to cut capers in private life; but
as soon as they were arranged for the dance, they conducted themselves
like so many mutes at a funeral. I have never seen decorum pushed so
far; and as this was not expected, the quadrille was soon whistled off,
and the dancers departed.
"But the impulse to sing was strong, and triumphed over modesty and even
the inclemencies of the sea and sky. On one rough Saturday night, we got
together by the main deck-house, in a place sheltered from the wind and
rain. Some clinging to the ladder which led to the hurricane-deck and
the rest knitting arms or taking hands, we made a ring to support the
women in the violent lurching of the ship, and when we were thus
disposed, sang to our hearts' content.
"There was a single chess-board and a single pack of cards. Sometimes as
many as twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love. There were
feats of dexterity, puzzles for the intelligence and a regular daily
competition to guess the vessel's progress; at twelve o'clock when the
result was published in the wheel house, came to be a moment of
considerable interest.... We had beside, romps in plenty. Puss in the
Corner, which we rebaptized, in more manly style, Devil and Four
Corners, was my favorite game; but there were many who preferred
another, the humor of which was to box a person's ears until he found
out who cuffed him."
The voyage, which lasted ten days, was uneventful except for some rough
weather when Stevenson found his cabin most stuffy and uncomfortable. He
was not really ill, however, and spent much of the time finishing a tale
called "The Story of a Lie," while his table played "Bob Jerry with the
ink bottle." On his arrival in New York the story was sent back to
London with the following letter to Sidney Colvin:
"On Board S.S. Devonia an hour or two out of New York, Aug., 1879.
"MY DEAR COLVIN:
"I have finished my story. The handwriting is not good because of the
ship's misconduct; thirty-one pages in ten days at sea is not bad. I am
not very well; bad food, bad air and hard work have brought me down.
But the spirits keep good. The voyage has been most interesting and will
make, if not a series of Pall Mall articles, at least the first part of
a new book. The last weight on me has been trying to keep notes for this
purpose. Indeed I have worked like a horse and am tired as a donkey. If
I should have to push on far by rail, I shall bring nothing but my fine
bones to port.
"Goodbye to you all. I suppose it is now late afternoon with you all
across the seas. What shall I find over here? I dare not wonder.--Ever
yours R.L.S."
As California was the goal he aimed for, in spite of his fatigue after
ten days of poor living and the sea, he determined to push on
immediately in an emigrant train bound for the Pacific coast.
On reaching port he and a man named Jones, with whom he had had more in
common than with any of his other fellow passengers, landed together.
"Jones and I issued into West Street, sitting on some straw in the
bottom of an open baggage wagon. It rained miraculously, and from that
moment till on the following night I left New York, there was scarce a
lull, and no cessation of the downpour....
"It took but a few moments, though it cost a good deal of money, to be
rattled along West Street to our destination: Reunion House, No. 10 West
Street, 'kept by one Mitchell.'
"Here I was at last in America and was soon out upon the New York
streets, spying for things foreign....
"The following day I had a thousand and one things to do; only the day
to do them in and a journey across the continent before me in the
evening.... It rained with potent fury; every now and then I had to get
under cover for a while in order, so to speak, to give my mackintosh a
rest; for under this continued drenching it began to grow damp on the
inside. I went to banks, post-offices, railway offices, restaurants,
publishers, book sellers and money changers.
"I was so wet when I got back to Mitchell's toward evening, that I had
simply to divest myself of my shoes, socks and trousers, and leave them
behind for the benefit of New York City. No fire could have dried them
ere I had to start; and to pack them in their present condition was to
spread ruin among my other possessions. With a heavy heart I said
farewell to them as they lay a pulp in the middle of a pool upon the
floor of Mitchell's kitchen. I wonder if they are dry by now."
That night he joined a party of emigrants bound for the West, the weight
of his baggage much increased by the result of his day's
purchases--Bancroft's "History of the United States" in six fat volumes.
So in less than twenty-four hours after landing on one coast he was on
his way to the other.
If at times he had been uncomfortable on the steamer he was ten times
more so on the train. It is hard to realize in these days of easy
travelling what the discomforts of riding in the emigrant trains were;
crowded together in badly lighted, badly ventilated cars, with stiff
wooden benches on either side, which were most uncomfortable to sit on
and next to impossible to lie down upon. Meals were taken as best they
might when they stopped at way stations while some bought milk and eggs
and made a shift to cook themselves a meal or brew a cup of tea on the
stove at the end of the car.
Over a week of this sort of slow travelling through the heat of the
plains was enough to tax the strength and courage of the most robust
man, let alone one in as delicate health as Stevenson at that time, and
it is a wonder he ever lived through it. Indeed, he was ill but kept
cheerful in spite of all, and was interested in the country and the
sights along the way. His own discomforts seemed to dwindle when he
contrasted them with those the pioneers endured travelling that same
direction twenty years before; crawling along in ox-carts with their
cattle and family possessions; suffering hunger, thirst, and infinite
weariness, and living in daily terror of attack from the Indians.
He made note of all he saw and the doings of his fellow emigrants, to be
used later on. Letters to Henley and Colvin en route are interesting.
"In the Emigrant Train from New York to San Francisco, Aug., 1879.
DEAR COLVIN,--I am in the cars between Pittsburg and Chicago, just now
bowling through Ohio. I am taking charge of a kid, whose mother is
asleep, with one eye while I write you this with the other. I reached
N.Y. Sunday night, and by five o'clock Monday was underway for the
West.--It is now about ten on Wednesday morning, so I have already been
forty hours in the cars. It is impossible to lie down in them, which
must end by being very wearying....
"No man is any use until he has dared everything; I feel just now as if
I had, and so might become a man. 'If ye have faith like a grain of
mustard seed.' That is so true! Just now I have faith as big as a cigar
case, I will not say die, and I do not fear man nor fortune.--R.L.S."
"Crossing Nebraska, Saturday, Aug. 23, 1879.
"My Dear Henley,--I am sitting on the top of the cars with a mill party
from Missouri going west for his health. Desolate flat prairie upon all
hands.... When we stop, which we do often, for emigrants and freight
travel together, the kine first, the man after, the whole plain is heard
singing with cicadae. This is a pause, as you may see from the writing.
What happened to the old pedestrian emigrants; what was the tedium
suffered by the Indians and trappers of our youth, the imagination
trembles to conceive. This is now Saturday, 23rd, and I have been
steadily travelling since I parted from you at St. Pancras. It is a
strange vicissitude from the Savile Club to this; I sleep with a man
from Pennsylvania who has been in the Navy Yard, and mess with him and
the Missouri bird already alluded to. We have a tin wash-bowl among
four, I wear nothing but a shirt and a pair of trousers and never button
my shirt. When I land for a meal, I pass my coat and feel dressed. This
life is to last until Friday, Saturday or Sunday next. It is a strange
affair to be an emigrant, as I hope you shall see in a future work. I
wonder if this will be legible; my present station on the wagon roof,
though airy, compared to the cars, is both dirty and insecure. I can see
the track straight before and straight behind me to either horizon....
"Our journey is through ghostly deserts, sage brush and alkali, and
rocks without form or color, a sad corner of the world. I confess I am
not jolly, but mighty calm, in my distresses. My illness is a subject of
great mirth to some of my fellow travellers, and I smile rather sickly
at their jests.
"We are going along Bitter Creek just now, a place infamous in the
history of emigration, a place I shall remember myself among the
blackest.--R.L.S."
When California was finally reached he decided to rest and recover
strength by camping out for a few days in the Coast Range Mountains
beyond Monterey, but the anxiety and strain of the long journey had been
greater than he realized, and he broke down and became very ill. For two
nights he lay out under the trees in a kind of stupor and at length was
rescued by two frontiersmen in charge of a goat-ranch, who took him to
their cabin and cared for him until he partly recovered.
"Here is another curious start in my life," he wrote to Sidney Colvin.
"I am living at an Angora goat-ranch, in the Coast Line Mountains,
eighteen miles from Monterey. I was camping out, but got so sick that
the two rancheros took me in and tended me. One is an old bear hunter,
seventy-two years old, and a captain from the Mexican War; the other a
pilgrim, and one who was out with the bear flag and under Fremont when
California was taken by the States. They are both true frontiersmen, and
most kind and pleasant. Captain Smith, the bear hunter, is my physician,
and I obey him like an oracle....
"I am now lying in an upper chamber, with the clinking of goat bells in
my ears, which proves to me that the goats are come home and it will
soon be time to eat. The old bear hunter is doubtless now infusing tea;
and Tom the Indian will come in with his gun in a few moments....
"The business of my life stands pretty nigh still. I work at my notes of
the voyage. It will not be very like a book of mine; but perhaps none
the less successful for that. I will not deny that I feel lonely
to-day.... I have not yet had a word from England, partly, I suppose,
because I have not yet written for my letters to New York; do not blame
me for this neglect, if you knew all I have been through, you would
wonder I had done as much as I have. I teach the ranch children reading
in the morning, for the mother is from home sick.
"Ever your affectionate friend.
"R.L.S."
As soon as Stevenson was well enough he returned to Monterey and fell to
working upon several short stories and the notes of his voyage, which he
brought together and published later under the titles "The Amateur
Emigrant" and "Across the Plains."
Monterey in those days was a small Mexican town; "a place of two or
three streets economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes,
which were the water courses in the rainy season.... The houses were,
for the most part, built of unbaked adobe brick....
"There was no activity but in and around the saloons, where the people
sat almost all day playing cards. The smallest excursion was made on
horseback. You would scarcely ever see the main street without a horse
or two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with their Mexican
housings. In a place so exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you saw not
only Mexican saddles, but true Vaquero riding--men always at a hand
gallop, up hill and down dale, and round the sharpest corners, urging
their horses with cries and gesticulations and cruel rotary spurs,
checking them dead, with a touch, or wheeling them right about face in a
square yard. Spanish was the language of the street."
He lodged with a doctor and his wife, and took his meals at the little
restaurant kept by Jules Simoneau, "a most pleasant old boy," with whom
he played chess and discussed the universe daily.
About the middle of December he pushed on to San Francisco, and prepared
to settle down and work for an indefinite time. Though he had known but
few people in Monterey, nevertheless it was a social little place in
comparison to a great city like San Francisco, where Stevenson found
himself indeed a stranger and friendless and learned for the first time
in his life what it really meant to be lonely.
Funds were running low; so he secured the cheapest possible lodging and
took his meals at various small restaurants, living at the rate of
seventy cents a day.
On December 26 he wrote: "For four days I have spoken to no one but my
landlady or landlord or the restaurant waiters. This is not a gay way to
pass Christmas, is it?" But some days later, nothing daunted, he added:
"I lead a pretty happy life, though you might not think it. I have great
fun trying to be economical, which I find as good a game of play as any
other. I have no want of occupation and though I rarely see any one to
speak to, have little time to worry."
To make matters worse, letters containing money went astray and word
came that some articles submitted to his publishers in England, on which
he had depended for funds, were not satisfactory, and this forced him to
reduce his living expenses to forty-five cents a day. The letters from
home were most unsatisfactory and lacked the kind of news he longed for.
"Not one soul ever gives me any _news_," he complained to Sidney Colvin,
"about people or things, everybody writes me sermons; it is good for me,
but hardly the food necessary for a man who lives all alone on
forty-five cents a day, and sometimes less, with quantities of hard work
and many heavy thoughts. If one of you could write me a letter with a
jest in it, a letter like what is written to real people in the world--I
am still flesh and blood--I should enjoy it. Simpson did the other day,
and it did me as much good as a bottle of wine--man alive I want
gossip."
Day in and day out he worked doggedly, fighting discouragement, with
little strength or inspiration to write anything very worth while.
To cap all, his landlady's little boy fell ill, and Stevenson, who had a
great love and sympathy for all children, helped to nurse him, and this
proved too much in the nervous and exhausted state he was in. The boy
recovered, but Stevenson fell ill again, and for six weeks hovered
between life and death.
This seems to have been the turning-point in his ill luck. Toward the
middle of February, as he slowly began to mend, he was cheered on by
long letters from home, full of anxiety for his health and advances of
money from his father, with strict instructions that from now on he was
no longer to stint and deny himself the bare necessities of life, as he
had been doing. Later, in April, came a telegram from Thomas Stevenson
saying that in future Louis was to count on an income of two hundred and
fifty pounds a year.
Cheered with the prospect of an easier road ahead of him, he struggled
back to life once more with a strong resolve to work harder and make
those at home proud of him.
"It was a considerable shock to my pride to break down," he wrote to a
friend, "but there it's done and can not be helped. Had my health held
out another month, I should have made a year's income, but breaking
down when I did, I am surrounded by unfinished works. It is a good thing
my father was on the spot, or I should have had to work and die."
Early in the spring he and Mrs. Osbourne met again, and on May 19, 1880,
they were married in San Francisco.
For the rest of his life Stevenson had no cause to complain of
loneliness, for in his wife he had an "inseparable sharer of all his
adventures; the most open-hearted of friends to all those who loved him;
the most shrewd and stimulating critic of his work; and in sickness,
despite her own precarious health, the most devoted and most efficient
of nurses."
Immediately after their marriage Stevenson and his wife and stepson--and
the dog--went to the Coast Range Mountains and, taking possession of an
old deserted miner's camp, practically lived out-of-doors for the next
few months, with no neighbors aside from a hunter and his family.
This was healthy, but the life of a squatter has its limitations, and
their trials and tribulations during these weeks Stevenson told most
amusingly in "The Silverado Squatters."
Gradually a longing began to come to R.L.S. to see those at home once
more and have them know his wife. This desire grew so from day to day
that July found them bidding good-by to California, and on the 7th of
August they sailed from New York for Liverpool.