The Silverado Squatters E-Book

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Herausgeber: Seltzer Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 160

Beschreibung

Travelogue/memoir of a stay in a ghost town in northern California on Mount Saint Helena in the 1870s. According to Wikipedia: "Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson ( 1850 - 1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins", as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov, and J. M. Barrie. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their definition of modernism. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the canon."

Leseprobe

THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

published by Samizdat Express, Orange, CT, USA

established in 1974, offering over 14,000 books

Books and Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Across the Plains

The Art of Writing

Ballads

Black Arrow

The Bottle Imp

Catriona or David Balfour (sequel to Kidnapped)

A Child's Garden of Verses

The Ebb-Tide

Edinburgh

Essays

Essays of Travel

Fables

Familiar Studies of Men and Books

Father Damien

Footnote to History

In the South Seas

An Inland Voyage

Island Nights' Entertainments

Kidnapped

Lay Morals

Letters

Lodging for the Night

Markheim

Master of Ballantrae

Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin

Memories and Portraits

Merry Men

Moral Emblems

New Arabian Nights

New Poems

The Pavilion on the Links

Four Plays

The Pocket R. L. S.

Prayers Written at Vailima

Prince Otto

Records of a Family of Engineers

The Sea Fogs

The Silverado Squatters

Songs of Travel

St. Ives

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Tales and Fantasies

Thrawn Janet

Travels with a Donkey

Treasure Island

Underwoods

Vailima Letters

Virginibus Puerisque

The Waif Woman

Weir of Hermiston

The Wrecker

The Wrong Box

feedback welcome: [email protected]

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INTRODUCTION

PART I - IN THE VALLEY

CHAPTER I - CALISTOGA

CHAPTER II - THE PETRIFIED FOREST

CHAPTER III - NAPA WINE

CHAPTER IV - THE SCOT ABROAD

PART II - WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL

CHAPTER I. - TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR

CHAPTER II - FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO

CHAPTER III. THE RETURN

THE ACT OF SQUATTING

THE HUNTER'S FAMILY

THE SEA FOGS

THE TOLL HOUSE

A STARRY DRIVE

EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE

INTRODUCTION

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 centre of interest.  It is the Mont Blanc of one  section of the Californian Coast Range, none of its near  neighbours 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.  Three counties, Napa County, Lake County,  and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy shoulders.  Its  naked peak stands nearly four thousand five hundred feet  above the sea; its sides are fringed with forest; and the  soil, where it is bare, glows warm with cinnabar.

Life in its shadow goes rustically forward.  Bucks, and  bears, and rattle-snakes, and former mining operations, are  the staple of men's talk.  Agriculture has only begun to  mount above the valley.  And though in a few years from now  the whole district may be smiling with farms, passing trains  shaking the mountain to the heart, many-windowed hotels  lighting up the night like factories, and a prosperous city  occupying the site of sleepy Calistoga; yet in the mean time,  around the foot of that mountain the silence of nature reigns  in a great measure unbroken, and the people of hill and  valley go sauntering about their business as in the days  before the flood.

To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller  has twice to cross the bay:  once by the busy Oakland Ferry,  and again, after an hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo  junction to Vallejo.  Thence he takes rail once more to mount  the long green strath of Napa Valley.

In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea,  the Bay of San Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes  than the Vallejo Ferry.  Bald shores and a low, bald islet  inclose the sea; through the narrows the tide bubbles, muddy  like a river.  When we made the passage (bound, although yet  we knew it not, for Silverado) the steamer jumped, and the  black buoys were dancing in the jabble; the ocean breeze blew  killing chill; and, although the upper sky was still  unflecked with vapour, the sea fogs were pouring in from  seaward, over the hilltops of Marin county, in one great,  shapeless, silver cloud.

South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns.  It was a  blunder; the site has proved untenable; and, although it is  still such a young place by the scale of Europe, it has  already begun to be deserted for its neighbour and namesake,

 North Vallejo.  A long pier, a number of drinking saloons, a  hotel of a great size, marshy pools where the frogs keep up  their croaking, and even at high noon the entire absence of  any human face or voice - these are the marks of South  Vallejo.  Yet there was a tall building beside the pier,  labelled the STAR FLOUR MILLS; and sea-going, full-rigged  ships lay close along shore, waiting for their cargo.  Soon  these would be plunging round the Horn, soon the flour from  the STAR FLOUR MILLS would be landed on the wharves of  Liverpool.  For that, too, is one of England's outposts;  thither, to this gaunt mill, across the Atlantic and Pacific  deeps and round about the icy Horn, this crowd of great,  three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, and  return with bread.

The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a  place of fallen fortunes, like the town.  It was now given up  to labourers, and partly ruinous.  At dinner there was the  ordinary display of what is called in the west a TWO-BIT  HOUSE:  the tablecloth checked red and white, the plague of  flies, the wire hencoops over the dishes, the great variety  and invariable vileness of the food and the rough coatless  men devoting it in silence.  In our bedroom, the stove would  not burn, though it would smoke; and while one window would  not open, the other would not shut.  There was a view on a  bit of empty road, a few dark houses, a donkey wandering with  its shadow on a slope, and a blink of sea, with a tall ship  lying anchored in the moonlight.  All about that dreary inn  frogs sang their ungainly chorus.

Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden  footway, bridging one marish spot after another.  Here and  there, as we ascended, we passed a house embowered in white  roses.  More of the bay became apparent, and soon the blue  peak of Tamalpais rose above the green level of the island  opposite.  It told us we were still but a little way from the  city of the Golden Gates, already, at that hour, beginning to  awake among the sand-hills.  It called to us over the waters  as with the voice of a bird.  Its stately head, blue as a  sapphire on the paler azure of the sky, spoke to us of wider  outlooks and the bright Pacific.  For Tamalpais stands  sentry, like a lighthouse, over the Golden Gates, between the  bay and the open ocean, and looks down indifferently on both.   Even as we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at  sea, were scanning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer  to the thought, one of the great ships below began silently  to clothe herself with white sails, homeward bound for  England.

For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald  green pastures.  On the west the rough highlands of Marin  shut off the ocean; in the midst, in long, straggling,  gleaming arms, the bay died out among the grass; there were  few trees and few enclosures; the sun shone wide over open  uplands, the displumed hills stood clear against the sky.   But by-and-by these hills began to draw nearer on either  hand, and first thicket and then wood began to clothe their  sides; and soon we were away from all signs of the sea's  neighbourhood, mounting an inland, irrigated valley.  A great  variety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming  grove, among the fields and vineyards.  The towns were  compact, in about equal proportions, of bright, new wooden  houses and great and growing forest trees; and the chapel  bell on the engine sounded most festally that sunny Sunday,  as we drew up at one green town after another, with the  townsfolk trooping in their Sunday's best to see the  strangers, with the sun sparkling on the clean houses, and  great domes of foliage humming overhead in the breeze.

This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by  our mountain.  There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and  the traveller who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or  to the springs in Lake County, must cross the spurs of the  mountain by stage.  Thus, Mount Saint Helena is not only a  summit, but a frontier; and, up to the time of writing, it  has stayed the progress of the iron horse.

 PART I - IN THE VALLEY

 CHAPTER I - CALISTOGA

IT is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the  whole place is so new, and of such an accidental pattern; the  very name, I hear, was invented at a supper-party by the man  who found the springs.

The railroad and the highway come up the valley about  parallel to one another.  The street of Calistoga joins the  perpendicular to both - a wide street, with bright, clean,  low houses, here and there a verandah over the sidewalk, here  and there a horse-post, here and there lounging townsfolk.   Other streets are marked out, and most likely named; for  these towns in the New World begin with a firm resolve to  grow larger, Washington and Broadway, and then First and  Second, and so forth, being boldly plotted out as soon as the  community indulges in a plan.  But, in the meanwhile, all the  life and most of the houses of Calistoga are concentrated  upon that street between the railway station and the road.  I  never heard it called by any name, but I will hazard a guess  that it is either Washington or Broadway.  Here are the  blacksmith's, the chemist's, the general merchant's, and Kong  Sam Kee, the Chinese laundryman's; here, probably, is the  office of the local paper (for the place has a paper - they  all have papers); and here certainly is one of the hotels,  Cheeseborough's, whence the daring Foss, a man dear to  legend, starts his horses for the Geysers.

It must be remembered that we are here in a land of stage- drivers and highwaymen:  a land, in that sense, like England  a hundred years ago.  The highway robber - road-agent, he is  quaintly called - is still busy in these parts.  The fame of  Vasquez is still young.  Only a few years go, the Lakeport  stage was robbed a mile or two from Calistoga.  In 1879, the  dentist of Mendocino City, fifty miles away upon the coast,  suddenly threw off the garments of his trade, like Grindoff,  in THE MILLER AND HIS MEN, and flamed forth in his second  dress as a captain of banditti.  A great robbery was followed  by a long chase, a chase of days if not of weeks, among the  intricate hill-country; and the chase was followed by much  desultory fighting, in which several - and the dentist, I  believe, amongst the number - bit the dust.  The grass was  springing for the first time, nourished upon their blood,  when I arrived in Calistoga.  I am reminded of another  highwayman of that same year.  "He had been unwell," so ran  his humorous defence, "and the doctor told him to take  something, so he took the express-box."

The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest  where there are thieves on the road, and where the guard  travels armed, and the stage is not only a link between  country and city, and the vehicle of news, but has a faint  warfaring aroma, like a man who should be brother to a  soldier.  California boasts her famous stage-drivers, and  among the famous Foss is not forgotten.  Along the unfenced,  abominable mountain roads, he launches his team with small  regard to human life or the doctrine of probabilities.   Flinching travellers, who behold themselves coasting eternity  at every corner, look with natural admiration at their  driver's huge, impassive, fleshy countenance.  He has the  very face for the driver in Sam Weller's anecdote, who upset  the election party at the required point.  Wonderful tales  are current of his readiness and skill.  One in particular,  of how one of his horses fell at a ticklish passage of the  road, and how Foss let slip the reins, and, driving over the  fallen animal, arrived at the next stage with only three.   This I relate as I heard it, without guarantee.

I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have  twice talked with him.  He lives out of Calistoga, at a  ranche called Fossville.  One evening, after he was long gone  home, I dropped into Cheeseborough's, and was asked if I  should like to speak with Mr. Foss.  Supposing that the  interview was impossible, and that I was merely called upon  to subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly answered "Yes."   Next moment, I had one instrument at my ear, another at my  mouth and found myself, with nothing in the world to say,  conversing with a man several miles off among desolate hills.   Foss rapidly and somewhat plaintively brought the  conversation to an end; and he returned to his night's grog  at Fossville, while I strolled forth again on Calistoga high  street.  But it was an odd thing that here, on what we are  accustomed to consider the very skirts of civilization, I  should have used the telephone for the first time in my  civilized career.  So it goes in these young countries;  telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and  advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the  grizzly bears.

Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs  Hotel, with its attendant cottages.  The floor of the valley  is extremely level to the very roots of the hills; only here  and there a hillock, crowned with pines, rises like the  barrow of some chieftain famed in war; and right against one  of these hillocks is the Springs Hotel - is or was; for since  I was there the place has been destroyed by fire, and has  risen again from its ashes.  A lawn runs about the house, and  the lawn is in its turn surrounded by a system of little  five-roomed cottages, each with a verandah and a weedy palm  before the door.  Some of the cottages are let to residents,  and these are wreathed in flowers.  The rest are occupied by  ordinary visitors to the Hotel; and a very pleasant way this  is, by which you have a little country cottage of your own,  without domestic burthens, and by the day or week.

The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of  sulphur and of boiling springs.  The Geysers are famous; they

 were the great health resort of the Indians before the coming  of the whites.  Lake County is dotted with spas; Hot Springs  and White Sulphur Springs are the names of two stations on  the Napa Valley railroad; and Calistoga itself seems to  repose on a mere film above a boiling, subterranean lake.  At  one end of the hotel enclosure are the springs from which it  takes its name, hot enough to scald a child seriously while I  was there.  At the other end, the tenant of a cottage sank a  well, and there also the water came up boiling.  It keeps  this end of the valley as warm as a toast.  I have gone  across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when  a sea fog from the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and  dark and dirty overhead, and found the thermometer had been  up before me, and had already climbed among the nineties; and  in the stress of the day it was sometimes too hot to move  about.

But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on  both sides, Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in;  beautifully green, for it was then that favoured moment in  the Californian year, when the rains are over and the dusty  summer has not yet set in; often visited by fresh airs, now  from the mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea; very  quiet, very idle, very silent but for the breezes and the  cattle bells afield.  And there was something satisfactory in  the sight of that great mountain that enclosed us to the  north:  whether it stood, robed in sunshine, quaking to its  topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day; or  whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp  growing, trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue.

The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foot-hills that  enclose the valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west,  and from Yolo on the east - rough as they were in outline,  dug out by winter streams, crowned by cliffy bluffs and  nodding pine trees - wore dwarfed into satellites by the bulk  and bearing of Mount Saint Helena.  She over-towered them by  two-thirds of her own stature.  She excelled them by the  boldness of her profile.  Her great bald summit, clear of  trees and pasture, a cairn of quartz and cinnabar, rejected  kinship with the dark and shaggy wilderness of lesser hill- tops.

CHAPTER II - THE PETRIFIED FOREST

WE drove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the  afternoon.  The sun warmed me to the heart.  A broad, cool  wind streamed pauselessly down the valley, laden with  perfume.  Up at the top stood Mount Saint Helena, a bulk of  mountain, bare atop, with tree-fringed spurs, and radiating  warmth.  Once we saw it framed in a grove of tall and  exquisitely graceful white oaks, in line and colour a  finished composition.  We passed a cow stretched by the  roadside, her bell slowly beating time to the movement of her  ruminating jaws, her big red face crawled over by half a  dozen flies, a monument of content.

A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain  road, and for two hours threaded one valley after another,  green, tangled, full of noble timber, giving us every now and  again a sight of Mount Saint Helena and the blue hilly  distance, and crossed by many streams, through which we  splashed to the carriage-step.  To the right or the left,  there was scarce any trace of man but the road we followed; I  think we passed but one ranchero's house in the whole  distance, and that was closed and smokeless.  But we had the  society of these bright streams - dazzlingly clear, as is  their wont, splashing from the wheels in diamonds, and  striking a lively coolness through the sunshine.  And what  with the innumerable variety of greens, the masses of foliage  tossing in the breeze, the glimpses of distance, the descents  into seemingly impenetrable thickets, the continual dodging  of the road which made haste to plunge again into the covert,  we had a fine sense of woods, and spring-time, and the open  air.