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.

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.

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.

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 center of interest. It is the Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range, none of its near neighbors 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. . . .

The Silverado Squatters: is Robert Louis Stevenson's travel memoir of his two-month honeymoon trip with Fanny Vandegrift 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.

The Silverado Squatters: is Robert Louis Stevenson's travel memoir of his two-month honeymoon trip with Fanny Vandegrift 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.

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.