The Silverado Squatters
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Robert Louis Stevenson >> The Silverado Squatters
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7 Transcribed from the 1906 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
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.
Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Californian trees--a
thing I was much in need of, having fallen among painters who know
the name of nothing, and Mexicans who know the name of nothing in
English. He taught me the madrona, the manzanita, the buck-eye,
the maple; he showed me the crested mountain quail; he showed me
where some young redwoods were already spiring heavenwards from the
ruins of the old; for in this district all had already perished:
redwoods and redskins, the two noblest indigenous living things,
alike condemned.
At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden gate with a
sign upon it like an inn. "The Petrified Forest. Proprietor: C.
Evans," ran the legend. Within, on a knoll of sward, was the house
of the proprietor, and another smaller house hard by to serve as a
museum, where photographs and petrifactions were retailed. It was
a pure little isle of touristry among these solitary hills.
The proprietor was a brave old white-faced Swede. He had wandered
this way, Heaven knows how, and taken up his acres--I forget how
many years ago--all alone, bent double with sciatica, and with six
bits in his pocket and an axe upon his shoulder. Long, useless
years of seafaring had thus discharged him at the end, penniless
and sick. Without doubt he had tried his luck at the diggings, and
got no good from that; without doubt he had loved the bottle, and
lived the life of Jack ashore. But at the end of these adventures,
here he came; and, the place hitting his fancy, down he sat to make
a new life of it, far from crimps and the salt sea. And the very
sight of his ranche had done him good. It was "the handsomest spot
in the Californy mountains." "Isn't it handsome, now?" he said.
Every penny he makes goes into that ranche to make it handsomer.
Then the climate, with the sea-breeze every afternoon in the
hottest summer weather, had gradually cured the sciatica; and his
sister and niece were now domesticated with him for company--or,
rather, the niece came only once in the two days, teaching music
the meanwhile in the valley. And then, for a last piece of luck,
"the handsomest spot in the Californy mountains" had produced a
petrified forest, which Mr. Evans now shows at the modest figure of
half a dollar a head, or two-thirds of his capital when he first
came there with an axe and a sciatica.
This tardy favourite of fortune--hobbling a little, I think, as if
in memory of the sciatica, but with not a trace that I can remember
of the sea--thoroughly ruralized from head to foot, proceeded to
escort us up the hill behind his house.
"Who first found the forest?" asked my wife.
"The first? I was that man," said he. "I was cleaning up the
pasture for my beasts, when I found THIS"--kicking a great redwood
seven feet in diameter, that lay there on its side, hollow heart,
clinging lumps of bark, all changed into gray stone, with veins of
quartz between what had been the layers of the wood.
"Were you surprised?"
"Surprised? No! What would I be surprised about? What did I know
about petrifactions--following the sea? Petrifaction! There was
no such word in my language! I knew about putrifaction, though! I
thought it was a stone; so would you, if you was cleaning up
pasture."
And now he had a theory of his own, which I did not quite grasp,
except that the trees had not "grewed" there. But he mentioned,
with evident pride, that he differed from all the scientific people
who had visited the spot; and he flung about such words as "tufa"
and "scilica" with careless freedom.
When I mentioned I was from Scotland, "My old country," he said;
"my old country"--with a smiling look and a tone of real affection
in his voice. I was mightily surprised, for he was obviously
Scandinavian, and begged him to explain. It seemed he had learned
his English and done nearly all his sailing in Scotch ships. "Out
of Glasgow," said he, "or Greenock; but that's all the same--they
all hail from Glasgow." And he was so pleased with me for being a
Scotsman, and his adopted compatriot, that he made me a present of
a very beautiful piece of petrifaction--I believe the most
beautiful and portable he had.
Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Scot, and an American,
acknowledging some kind allegiance to three lands. Mr. Wallace's
Scoto-Circassian will not fail to come before the reader. I have
myself met and spoken with a Fifeshire German, whose combination of
abominable accents struck me dumb. But, indeed, I think we all
belong to many countries. And perhaps this habit of much travel,
and the engendering of scattered friendships, may prepare the
euthanasia of ancient nations.
And the forest itself? Well, on a tangled, briery hillside--for
the pasture would bear a little further cleaning up, to my eyes--
there lie scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk,
such as the one already mentioned. It is very curious, of course,
and ancient enough, if that were all. Doubtless, the heart of the
geologist beats quicker at the sight; but, for my part, I was
mightily unmoved. Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.
"There's nothing under heaven so blue,
That's fairly worth the travelling to."
But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable prospects
and adventures by the way; and sometimes, when we go out to see a
petrified forest, prepares a far more delightful curiosity, in the
form of Mr. Evans, whom may all prosperity attend throughout a long
and green old age.
CHAPTER III--NAPA WINE
I was interested in Californian wine. Indeed, I am interested in
all wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a
schoolfellow kept secreted in his play-box up to my last discovery,
those notable Valtellines, that once shone upon the board of
Caesar.
Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falling
on the age: how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces
of France, and Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia
Petraea. Chateau Neuf is dead, and I have never tasted it;
Hermitage--a hermitage indeed from all life's sorrows--lies
expiring by the river. And in the place of these imperial elixirs,
beautiful to every sense, gem-hued, flower-scented, dream-
compellers:- behold upon the quays at Cette the chemicals arrayed;
behold the analyst at Marseilles, raising hands in obsecration,
attesting god Lyoeus, and the vats staved in, and the dishonest
wines poured forth among the sea. It is not Pan only; Bacchus,
too, is dead.
If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the
white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all
fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing
reminiscences--for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines
ever in the retrospect--if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old
Jack! Now we begin to have compunctions, and look back at the
brave bottles squandered upon dinner-parties, where the guests
drank grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the
schoolboy "took his whack," like liquorice water. And at the same
time, we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope, to where the
new lands, already weary of producing gold, begin to green with
vineyards. A nice point in human history falls to be decided by
Californian and Australian wines.
Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you
taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved. The
beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the
precious metals: the wine-grower also "Prospects." One corner of
land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another.
This is a failure; that is better; a third best. So, bit by bit,
they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite. Those 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: these still lie
undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner
chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses
undisturbed. But there they bide their hour, awaiting their
Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them. The smack of
Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.
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