Robert Louis Stevenson's unconventional 1880 honeymoon in an abandoned silver mining camp on the shoulder of Mount St. Helena provides the backdrop for this wonderful narrative of late 19th century California. "Squatting" for two months during a California summer with his new wife, Fanny Vandegrift, The Silverado Squatters provides readers with insight into life in the Napa Valley--with descriptions of the "experiments" with local wine growing, his visit to a petrified forest, his first use of the telephone, and the characters of the local people. Stevenson used his memories of this California honeymoon to create much of the descriptive detail found in 1883's Treasure Island.

The Silverado Squatters (1883) is Robert Louis Stevenson's travel memoir of his two-month honeymoon trip with Fanny Vandegrift (and her son Lloyd Osbourne) to Napa Valley, California, in 1880. In July 1879, Stevenson received word that his future American wife's divorce was almost complete, but that she was seriously ill. He left Scotland right away and travelled to meet her in Monterey, California, (his trip detailed in The Amateur Emigrant (1894) and Across the Plains (1892)). Broken financially, suffering from a lifelong fibrinous bronchitis condition, and with his writing career at a dead end, he was nursed back to health by his doctor, his nurse, and his future wife, while living briefly in Monterey, San Francisco, and Oakland. His father having provided money to help, on May 19, 1880, he married the San Francisco native, whom he had first met in France in 1875, soon after the events of An Inland Voyage. Still too weak to undertake the journey back to Scotland, friends suggested Calistoga, in the upper Napa Valley, with its healthy mountain air.

The Silverado Squatters (1883) is a travel memoir by Robert Louis Stevenson of his two-month honeymoon trip with Fanny Vandegrift to Napa Valley, California, in 1880.

The Silverado Squatters is a travel memoir by Robert Louis Stevenson of his two-month honeymoon trip with Fanny Vandegrift to Napa Valley, California, in 1880.

The Silverado Squatters (1883) is Robert Louis Stevenson's travel memoir of his two-month honeymoon trip with Fanny Vandegrift (and her son Lloyd Osbourne) to Napa Valley, California, in 1880. In July 1879, Stevenson received word that his future American wife's divorce was almost complete, but that she was seriously ill. He left Scotland right away and travelled to meet her in Monterey, California, (his trip detailed in The Amateur Emigrant (1894) and Across the Plains (1892)).

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) traveled to California in 1879 in pursuit of Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, the Oakland woman with whom he had fallen in love in France. The two were married in the spring of 1880 and honeymooned in a cabin at Silverado, a mining ghost town on Mt. St. Helena. In the next fourteen years, Mrs. Stevenson nursed her husband while he produced the verses, stories, and books of travel and adventure that made him famous. Silverado (1888) tells the story of the newlywed Stevensons' trip to Silverado. Stevenson writes of their journey from San Francisco up the Napa Valley to Calistoga and then up the mountain to their goal. He describes their neighbors, and recounts tales of the town in its glory days as a silver mining camp.