The Silverado Squatters
1883
In the summer of 1880, newlyweds Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Vandegrift arrived in Napa Valley with dreams of becoming squatters on the slopes of Mount Saint Helena. This is the account of their two-month honeymoon in the California hills - part pastoral experiment, part romantic adventure, and entirely presided over by Stevenson's distinctive voice. The author of Treasure Island emerges here as something more intimate: a young man with a new wife, a rented donkey, and absolutely no experience farming. The landscape blazes through these pages with an almost hallucinatory clarity - the white hot days, the crickets at dusk, the mountain looming over the valley like a grumpy god. But what makes the book endure is the gentle comedy of the Squatters themselves, bumbling into agricultural disaster, befriending eccentric neighbors, and discovering that the simple life is anything but simple. Stevenson's notes from Silverado would later feed into Treasure Island, but this book stands alone as a portrait of youthful hope meeting its cheerful match in hard reality.
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“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“Sightseeing is the art of disappointment.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
“The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman. You must pay for it in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth. You have to learn the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you generally take to drink; your youth is a time of louder war against society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been born, for instance, in England. But somehow life is warmer and closer; the hearth burns more redly; the lights of home shine softer on the rainy street; the very names, endeared in verse and music, cling nearer round our hearts.””
— Robert Louis Stevenson
