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The Silverado Squatters ReviewIn 1879 Robert Louis Stevenson came to the United States - more specifically, to the San Francisco Bay area - to be with the woman he loved, Fanny Osbourne, who was ten years his senior, had two children, and was pursuing a divorce from her philandering husband. The divorce finally came through, and in May 1880 Louis (as RLS was called) and Fanny were married. For a honeymoon, they decided to go to Napa Valley, with the hope that the climate would be beneficial for RLS's bronchitis-ravaged lungs. They first stayed in a Calistoga hotel, but in order to save money they moved to an abandoned silver mine (the Silverado) high up Mount Saint Helena. They swept out debris, hung cloth over the gaping windows, converted the former assayer's office into their kitchen and dining room, and cleaned out the bunkhouse perched above the kitchen so it could serve as their bedroom. The "parlour" was an open-air platform wedged in between the canyon walls, they made daily treks to a spring for water, and they stored their wine in a mine tunnel. For nearly two months they were squatters in these rustic conditions, with occasional forays down to the Toll House, where excitement arrived twice daily in the form of a north- or south-bound stage coach.
Written back in England and published in 1883, THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS is Stevenson's account of that unconventional honeymoon. It is not top-shelf Robert Louis Stevenson, but it has its charms. Wine was already being made in Napa Valley, and RLS shows himself to be somewhat of a connoisseur ("the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have tasted [is] better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike"). Many of the people RLS encounters are on the rough and ready side. At the Toll House, he meets a "a burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese desperado", who swaggered into the bar "with the lowest assumption of the lowest European manners", "combining in one person the depravities of two races and two civilizations." A chapter is devoted to the Russian Jew who was the "village usurer" of Calistoga and over time had managed to make a good number of the area's farmers beholden to him. But just as the modern reader begins to feel uncomfortable over what appears to be a lamentable racial stereotype, Stevenson remarks: "The village usurer is not so sad a feature of humanity and human progress as the millionaire manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of thousands * * *."
I have seen several abridged versions of THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS that seem to have been tailored for the Napa Valley crowds. The book is not so long, so dated, or so dull that it cries for condensed presentation. If you are inclined to read it, I encourage you to track it down in unabridged form. I am posting this review under a listing for a Bibliobazaar edition, which purports to be "a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality." From what I can tell via Amazon's "Look Inside" feature, it appears to be a respectable edition. My copy is a first edition from 1883, which I acquired when RLS was one of the totems for my rare-book collecting obsession. Despite my bias towards RLS, I think THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS probably merits only three stars for today's general reader, though if you have a keen interest in either Stevenson or the history of Napa Valley I would tack on a fourth star.
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