Robert Louis Stevenson and The Silverado Squatters

In the summer of eighteen eighty, a frail young Scottish writer spent his honeymoon in these hills, and the book he wrote about it helped make the Napa Valley famous. His name was Robert Louis Stevenson, and he would later write Treasure Island and the strange tale of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. He had followed an American woman named Fanny across an ocean and a continent, nearly dying of illness on the way, and they married in San Francisco in May of eighteen eighty.

Too poor for a fine hotel, the couple, along with Fanny's young son Lloyd, took a train to Calistoga and then climbed to an abandoned mining camp high on Mount Saint Helena. There, in the empty bunkhouse of the derelict Silverado mine, they squatted from June into late July. Stevenson turned the adventure into a travel memoir called The Silverado Squatters, published in eighteen eighty three.

In its pages he described the local vintners as men still searching for the right hillsides, and he wrote a famous line calling wine bottled poetry. You can trace his stay at the Silverado Museum here in Saint Helena, which holds one of the world's great collections of his letters, manuscripts, and belongings.