The Silverado Squatters

The Silverado Squatters

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Silverado Squatters, by Robert
Louis Stevenson (#23 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson)
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Title: The Silverado Squatters
Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
Release Date: May, 1996 [EBook #516] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on March 12, 1996]
[Most recently updated: August 27, 2002]
Edition: 10

Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE
SILVERADO SQUATTERS ***

Transcribed from the 1906 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
email [email protected]

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