Calistoga, a town in California, is at the north end of Napa Valley, 68 miles by train from San Francisco. Calistoga, the word, was invented by Samuel Brannan, the town’s founder.

Brannan was a wealthy entrepreneur of the pioneer sort, a down-easter from Maine who made his way west via the Mexican War and the ’49 gold rush. By 1859 he had grown a fortune and decided to use it at the foot of Mount St. Helena, where there happened to be hot springs and geysers and a perfect place, he thought, for his magnum opus. There he put up a half million dollars to build a health spa to rival the best in Europe. The Hot Springs Hotel, he called it, and he induced other settlers to settle around him with taverns and stores, etc., and pretty soon he had a town.

What to call it would take some thinking and drinking. At one of his dinner parties, Brannan had been doing both simultaneously when he rose to make a toast to his great project, which he compared to the famous Saratoga hot springs in New York state. He tried to say that his resort would be “the Saratoga of California,” but what his guests heard was “the Calistoga of Sarafornia,” and that’s how the search for the town’s name came to an end.

Calistoga, the town, was only 21 years in the making when Mr. and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, newlyweds, arrived. When RLS was living in Saranac Lake, he wrote in an essay, “A Chapter on Dreams,” that the Georgian period of English history, the 18th century, was his favorite setting for fiction writing, admitting that he had “a taste for the Georgian costume and for stories laid in that period of English history.” In his essay “Calistoga,” the author succumbs to a déjà-vu-like sensation, as though his Georgian period had transferred to the current American West in the environs of Mount St. Helena. “It must be remembered that we are here in a land of stagecoach 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 cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest where there are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed.”

Having nothing worth stealing, the amateur emigrant and his wife were emboldened to take in the sights of upper Napa Valley. Having recruited a local with a carriage, “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 Mt. St. Helena and the blue hilly distance, and crowned by many streams, through which we splashed up to the carriage steps. … (W)e had a fine sense of woods, and spring-time, and the open air.”

“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.'” In a letter Sidney Colvin from Bush Street, RLS had told his literary mentor that “My sympathies and interests are changed. There shall be no more books of travel for me. I care for nothing but the moral and the dramatic, not a jot for the picturesque or the beautiful, other than about people.” C. Evans must have been one of those people and the real star of yet another essay, “The Petrified Forest.”

This Evans was “a brave old white-faced Swede. … Long, useless years of seafaring had discharged him at the end, penniless and sick. … It seemed he had learned his English and done nearly all his sailing in Scottish ships. … 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 petrification.”

Evans 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 the salt sea.” Evans believed the homestead he built to be on “the handsomest spot in the Californy mountains” he liked it even better when he discovered thereon a petrified forest of redwoods, kicking one of them as he told Louis and Fanny, “I was cleaning up the pasture for my beasts, when I found this.” That’s how at least one petrified forest became a tourist trap, after Evans learned that there were people willing to pay half a dollar to walk around his property looking at rocks.

There was something about C. Evans’ character and history that appealed to RLS and made him eligible for literary inclusion, according to his new rule.

“Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Scot, and an American acknowledging some kind of allegiance to three lands. … And the forest itself? … 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.”