In 1880, after a long and arduous journey halfway across the globe from his native Scotland to California, Robert Louis Stevenson married his longtime love Fanny Vandegrift in San Francisco. He later recalled the tale of their unconventional honeymoon in Silverado Squatters based on the meticulous "Silverado Journal" he kept that summer. Down and out financially, the couple couldn't afford the ten dollars a week needed to stay at the Hot Springs Hotel in Calistoga. Instead, the couple "squatted" in an abandoned bunkhouse in the old mining camp of Silverado on the shoulder of Mount St. Helena. While evading rattlesnakes, hauling water, chopping wood, and cleaning up a bunkhouse isn't most luxurious vacation, the Stevensons spent an enjoyable two months during a temperate California summer as the "King and Queen of Silverado" along with the "Crown Prince" Sam, Fanny's son, and the "Grand Duke" Chuchu, a spoiled dog quite unsuited for camp life who "though about the size of a sheep . . . loved to sit in ladies' laps."

During their Napa Valley adventures, Stevenson takes a tour of a nearby petrified forest, encounters a scheming merchant, and perhaps most significantly, learns all about the "experiment" that was California winemaking. The eager vintners are like miners, he writes, caring for their "lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry . . ." He discovers that wine merchants place fake labels from imaginary Spanish wineries to sell their goods to a skeptical American public. However, Stevenson could appreciate a good vintage when he found it, prophetically writing that that "The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson."

In addition to Stevenson's amusing anecdotes about roughing it in California, Silverado Squatters marks an evolution in Stevenson's writing from a whimsical and meandering style to more factual and realistic descriptions about an immigrant's struggle to survive. Says reviewer Richard A. Boyle, Stevenson "could not hide the physical adversities the couple endured nor the sense of isolation [he] felt" during his time in Silverado and America as a whole. Stevenson's new style reflects a sense of alienation and spiritual emptiness he later used in his Scottish and South Sea tales, reminding us that the complexity of Stevenson's voice makes him far more than a children's author.

—Emily Elrod

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