Transcribed from the 1906 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Picture of the squatters by Joseph D. Strong. The title page
incorrectly claims it was by Joseph A. Strong]
THE
SILVERADO SQUATTERS
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
A NEW IMPRESSION
WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY JOSEPH D. STRONG
* * * * *
LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS
1906
* * * * *
“Vixerunt nonnulli in agris, delectati re sua familiari. His idem
propositum fuit quod regibus, ut ne qua re agerent, ne cui parerent,
libertate uterentur: cujus proprium est sic vivere ut velis.”
—CIC., _De Off._, I. xx.
CONTENTS
IN THE VALLEY:
I. Calistoga 13
II. The Petrified Forest 24
III. Napa Wine 34
IV. The Scot Abroad 48
WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL:
I. To Introduce Mr. Kelmar 59
II. First Impressions of Silverado 68
III. The Return 92
THE ACT OF SQUATTING 103
THE HUNTER’S FAMILY 127
THE SEA FOGS 153
THE TOLL HOUSE 171
A STARRY DRIVE 185
EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE 197
TOILS AND PLEASURES 223
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
THE scene of this little book is on a high mountain. There are, indeed,
many higher; there are many of a nobler outline. It is no place of
pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who lives upon its
sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of interest. It is the
Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range, none of its
near neighbours rising to one-half its altitude. It looks down on much
green, intricate country. It feeds in the spring-time many splashing
brooks. From its summit you must have an excellent lesson of geography:
seeing, to the south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand
and Monte Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the
open ocean; eastward, across the corn-lands and thick tule swamps of
Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins to climb
the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the white head
of Shasta looking down on Oregon. Three counties, Napa County, Lake
County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy shoulders. Its naked
peak stands nearly four thousand five hundred feet above the sea; its
sides are fringed with forest; and the soil, where it is bare, glows warm
with cinnabar.
Life in its shadow goes rustically forward. Bucks, and bears, and
rattlesnakes, and former mining operations, are the staple of men’s talk.
Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley. And though in a
few years from now the whole district may be smiling with farms, passing
trains shaking the mountain to the heart, many-windowed hotels lighting
up the night like factories, and a prosperous city occupying the site of
sleepy Calistoga; yet in the mean time, around the foot of that mountain
the silence of nature reigns in a great measure unbroken, and the people
of hill and valley go sauntering about their business as in the days
before the flood.
To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller has twice
to cross the bay: once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again, after an
hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo junction to Vallejo. Thence he
takes rail once more to mount the long green strath of Napa Valley.
In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea, the Bay of San
Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the Vallejo Ferry. Bald
shores and a low, bald islet inclose the sea; through the narrows the
tide bubbles, muddy like a river. When we made the passage (bound,
although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) the steamer jumped, and the
black buoys were dancing in the jabble; the ocean breeze blew killing
chill; and, although the upper sky was still unflecked with vapour, the
sea fogs were pouring in from seaward, over the hilltops of Marin county,
in one great, shapeless, silver cloud.
South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns. It was a blunder;
the site has proved untenable; and, although it is still such a young
place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to be deserted for its
neighbour and namesake, North Vallejo. A long pier, a number of drinking
saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy pools where the frogs keep up
their croaking, and even at high noon the entire absence of any human
face or voice—these are the marks of South Vallejo. Yet there was a tall
building beside the pier, labelled the _Star Flour Mills_; and sea-going,
full-rigged ships lay close along shore, waiting for their cargo. Soon
these would be plunging round the Horn, soon the flour from the _Star
Flour Mills_ would be landed on the wharves of Liverpool. For that, too,
is one of England’s outposts; thither, to this gaunt mill, across the
Atlantic and Pacific deeps and round about the icy Horn, this crowd of
great, three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, and return
with bread.
The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a place of
fallen fortunes, like the town. It was now given up to labourers, and
partly ruinous. At dinner there was the ordinary display of what is
called in the west a _two-bit house_: the tablecloth checked red and
white, the plague of flies, the wire hencoops over the dishes, the great
variety and invariable vileness of the food and the rough coatless men
devoting it in silence. In our bedroom, the stove would not burn, though
it would smoke; and while one window would not open, the other would not
shut. There was a view on a bit of empty road, a few dark houses, a
donkey wandering with its shadow on a slope, and a blink of sea, with a
tall ship lying anchored in the moonlight. All about that dreary inn
frogs sang their ungainly chorus.
Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden footway,
bridging one marish spot after another. Here and there, as we ascended,
we passed a house embowered in white roses. More of the bay became
apparent, and soon the blue peak of Tamalpais rose above the green level
of the island opposite. It told us we were still but a little way from
the city of the Golden Gates, already, at that hour, beginning to awake
among the sand-hills. It called to us over the waters as with the voice
of a bird. Its stately head, blue as a sapphire on the paler azure of
the sky, spoke to us of wider outlooks and the bright Pacific. For
Tamalpais stands sentry, like a lighthouse, over the Golden Gates,
between the bay and the open ocean, and looks down indifferently on both.
Even as we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at sea, were
scanning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer to the thought, one of
the great ships below began silently to clothe herself with white sails,
homeward bound for England.
For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald green
pastures. On the west the rough highlands of Marin shut off the ocean;
in the midst, in long, straggling, gleaming arms, the bay died out among
the grass; there were few trees and few enclosures; the sun shone wide
over open uplands, the displumed hills stood clear against the sky. But
by-and-by these hills began to draw nearer on either hand, and first
thicket and then wood began to clothe their sides; and soon we were away
from all signs of the sea’s neighbourhood, mounting an inland, irrigated
valley. A great variety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming
grove, among the fields and vineyards. The towns were compact, in about
equal proportions, of bright, new wooden houses and great and growing
forest trees; and the chapel bell on the engine sounded most festally
that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green town after another, with
the townsfolk trooping in their Sunday’s best to see the strangers, with
the sun sparkling on the clean houses, and great domes of foliage humming
overhead in the breeze.
This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by our
mountain. There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and the traveller
who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or to the springs in Lake
County, must cross the spurs of the mountain by stage. Thus, Mount Saint
Helena is not only a summit, but a frontier; and, up to the time of
writing, it has stayed the progress of the iron horse.
PART I—IN THE VALLEY
CHAPTER I—CALISTOGA
IT is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the whole place is
so new, and of such an accidental pattern; the very name, I hear, was
invented at a supper-party by the man who found the springs.
The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel to one
another. The street of Calistoga joins the perpendicular to both—a wide
street, with bright, clean, low houses, here and there a verandah over
the sidewalk, here and there a horse-post, 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 community 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. Here are the blacksmith’s, the chemist’s,
the general merchant’s, and Kong Sam Kee, the Chinese laundryman’s; here,
probably, is the office of the local paper (for the place has a
paper—they all have papers); and here certainly is one of the hotels,
Cheeseborough’s, whence the daring Foss, a man dear to legend, starts his
horses for the Geysers.
It must be remembered that we are here in a land of stage-drivers and
highwaymen: a land, in that sense, like England a hundred years ago. The
highway robber—road-agent, he is quaintly called—is still busy in these
parts. The fame of Vasquez is still young. Only a few years go, the
Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or two from Calistoga. In 1879, the
dentist of Mendocino City, fifty miles away upon the coast, suddenly
threw off the garments of his trade, like Grindoff, in _The Miller and
his Men_, and flamed forth in his second dress as a captain of banditti.
A great robbery was followed by a long chase, a chase of days if not of
weeks, among the intricate hill-country; and the chase was followed by
much desultory fighting, in which several—and the dentist, I believe,
amongst the number—bit the dust. The grass was springing for the first
time, nourished upon their blood, when I arrived in Calistoga. I am
reminded of another highwayman of that same year. “He had been unwell,”
so ran his humorous defence, “and the doctor told him to take something,
so he took the express-box.”
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 natural 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.
I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have twice
talked with him. He lives out of Calistoga, at a ranche called
Fossville. One evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped into
Cheeseborough’s, and was asked if I should like to speak with Mr. Foss.
Supposing that the interview was impossible, and that I was merely called
upon to subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly answered “Yes.” Next
moment, I had one instrument at my ear, another at my mouth and found
myself, with nothing in the world to say, conversing with a man several
miles off among desolate hills. Foss rapidly and somewhat plaintively
brought the conversation to an end; and he returned to his night’s grog
at Fossville, while I strolled forth again on Calistoga high street. But
it was an odd thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider the
very skirts of civilization, I should have used the telephone for the
first time in my civilized career. So it goes in these young countries;
telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and advertisements running
far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly bears.
Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs Hotel, with
its attendant cottages. The floor of the valley is extremely level to
the very roots of the hills; only here and there a hillock, crowned with
pines, rises like the barrow of some chieftain famed in war; and right
against one of these hillocks is the Springs Hotel—is or was; for since I
was there the place has been destroyed by fire, and has risen again from
its ashes. A lawn runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn
surrounded by a system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a
verandah and a weedy palm before the door. Some of the cottages are let
to residents, and these are wreathed in flowers. The rest are occupied
by ordinary visitors to the Hotel; and a very pleasant way this is, by
which you have a little country cottage of your own, without domestic
burthens, and by the day or week.
The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur and of
boiling springs. The Geysers are famous; they were the great health
resort of the Indians before the coming of the whites. Lake County is
dotted with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur Springs are the names of
two stations on the Napa Valley railroad; and Calistoga itself seems to
repose on a mere film above a boiling, subterranean lake. At one end of
the hotel enclosure are the springs from which it takes its name, hot
enough to scald a child seriously while I was there. At the other end,
the tenant of a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came up
boiling. It keeps this end of the valley as warm as a toast. I have
gone across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea
fog from the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and dark and dirty
overhead, and found the thermometer had been up before me, and had
already climbed among the nineties; and in the stress of the day it was
sometimes too hot to move about.
But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both sides,
Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully green, for it was
then that favoured moment in the Californian year, when the rains are
over and the dusty summer has not yet set in; often visited by fresh
airs, now from the mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea; very quiet,
very idle, very silent but for the breezes and the cattle bells afield.
And there was something satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain
that enclosed us to the north: whether it stood, robed in sunshine,
quaking to its topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day;
or whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing,
trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue.
The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foot-hills that enclose the
valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and from Yolo on the
east—rough as they were in outline, dug out by winter streams, crowned by
cliffy bluffs and nodding pine trees—wore dwarfed into satellites by the
bulk and bearing of Mount Saint Helena. She over-towered them by
two-thirds of her own stature. She excelled them by the boldness of her
profile. Her great bald summit, clear of trees and pasture, a cairn of
quartz and cinnabar, rejected kinship with the dark and shaggy wilderness
of lesser hill-tops.