“Augustus St. Gaudens (sculptor) once told me that when Stevenson was sitting for him for the well-known portrait medallion, he said that a man was not really alive who did not look death in the eye at least once a year. This seems to me to symbolize the quality in Stevenson which gives the most distinctive mark, both to his character and his work.”

Dr. W.A. Nielson, president of Smith College, said all of that while he was standing on the veranda of the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Cottage, also known as Baker’s, in Saranac Lake. It was on Aug. 29, 1925, and he was addressing the members and guests at the annual meeting of the Stevenson Society of America. The conversation to which the speaker refers between RLS and St. Gaudens was in New York City less than a week before the so-called Stevenson expedition checked into Baker’s for the winter of 1887-88. By then it had been eight years to the month since Stevenson had his close encounter with death on the banks of the San Clemente Creek in the hills behind Monterey, California.

The amenities or lack thereof at the Jonathan Wright ranch, where RLS convalesced for three weeks in September, 1879, were essentially the same as Baker’s had to offer the author for six and a half months in the Adirondacks except that Baker’s had no well. Both were pioneer homes and pretty rustic. The main difference was that the Wright ranch was also home to over a thousand angora goats which solved for RLS the mystery of “the bells ringing” that had driven him mad during two nights of delirium “under the wide and starry sky,” lying prone on the ground until he was found.

RLS to Charles Baxter from Wright’s ranch, September 24, 1879: “My dear Charles, I write you from an angora goat ranche, where I live with some frontiersmen, having fallen sick out camping. I am not yet recovered up to the point of being good for much; indeed I am pretty well dished in the meantime; but my fever has gone, and though I cannot yet walk about at all, I both eat and sleep, and if you come to that, work…” Regarding the situation with his hopeful wife to be, Mrs. Fanny Osbourne, he says, “Things are damned complicated, and I have had the art to complicate ’em more since my arrival. However, I hope for the best.”

“Why don’t I hear from you? ‘Tis too mean by God, when I give you my news so free. I am lying in an upper chamber nearly naked with flies crawling all over me, and a clinking of goat bells in my ears, which proves to me the goats are come home and it will soon be time to eat. The old bear hunter is doubtless now infusing tea; and Tom the Indian will come in with his gun in a few minutes. How’s that for Beadle’s American Library? Yet all true.” (Beadle’s English editions of sensational Wild West stories published as ‘dime novels’ by the New York firm of Beadle and Co. One of their authors, Captain Mayne Reid, was a childhood favorite of RLS.)

Stevenson’s friends in the Old World would have been horrified to have been subjected to the living conditions that their Louis endured during his American quest. His wife said as much many years later in a prefatory note to The Amateur Emigrant: “The privations he endured as an amateur emigrant caused him much less suffering than his friends, who could not imagine themselves in a similar position, supposed.” They seemed to always forget that RLS liked living on the edge, like characters in his stories, but for real.

By early October, Robert Louis Stevenson was back in circulation, thanks to Anson ‘Cap’ Smith and Jonathan Wright. From Monterey he writes again to Colvin: “I am in good health now; I have been pretty seedy, for I was exhausted by the journey and anxiety…I am still a little weak, but that is all; I begin to increase, it seems, already…Monterey is a place where there is no summer or winter, and pine and sand and distant hills and a bay all filled with real water from the Pacific…I now live with a little French doctor.”

Dr. J.P.E. Heintz was his name and RLS actually lodged at the ‘French House,’ a rough and cheap rooming-house run by the doctor’s mother-in-law. It survived and had already long been known as the Robert Louis Stevenson House when, in 1948, the California Department of Parks and Recreation took it over with guided tours available to this day. Stevenson roomed at the French House until late December and did what he always did when he wasn’t playing hide and seek with the Grim Reaper. He made friends and kept writing.