W.E. Henley, circa 1900 (Image provided)

“Friday, Aug. 22, 1879–Union Pacific Transfer, Council Bluffs, Iowa, U.S.

“Dear boy (Charles Baxter), Have been on cars since Monday and have still a week before me. Tired but not so much as one would have feared. Am now quite the accomplished emigrant.”

Charles Baxter was among Robert Louis Stevenson’s innermost circle of friends to whom he sent letters throughout his risky journey from Scotland to California. As a certified invalid, RLS was tempting fate on a mission that his friends back in England called an “enterprise of madness.” All he had to do was get to the girlfriend he had found in France and get her to marry him. All she had to do was get a divorce. In 1879, it took a minimum of three weeks to span the divide separating the couple which included an ocean and a continent. So far, lovesick Louis had covered the land part by so-called “mixed trains,” but at Council Bluffs he transferred to a Union Pacific “emigrant train.” That evening, RLS and his emigrant peers crossed the Missouri bound for California, under more primitive conditions.

“It had thundered on the Friday night, but the sun rose on Saturday without a cloud. We were at sea–there is no other adequate expression — on the plains of Nebraska.”

That sentence was made for public consumption in Stevenson’s travel book “The Amateur Emigrant.” That same day Louis writes another letter to another friend, W.E. Henley: “My dear Henley, I am sitting on top of the cars. … Desolate flat prairie upon all hands. Here and there a herd of cattle, a yellow butterfly or two; a patch of wild sunflowers; a wooden house or two; then a wooden church alone in miles of waste. We have a tin wash-bowl among four. I wear nothing but a shirt and a pair of trousers, and never button my shirt. … It is a strange affair to be an emigrant, as I hope you shall see in a future work. I can see the track straight before me and straight behind me to either horizon. Peace of mind I enjoy with extreme serenity; I am doing right; I know no one will think so; and don’t care. My body, however, is all to whistles; I don’t eat, but, man, I can sleep. The car in front is chock full of Chinese.”

Crossing the plains of Nebraska takes about five pages in Stevenson’s book. “The train toiled over this infinity like a snail.” The monotonous surroundings made RLS thankful that he was just passing through. “To cross such a plain is to grow home-sick for the mountains.” He expected visual relief in the upcoming Black Hills of Wyoming but was disappointed to find that “Alas! It was a worse country than the other. All Sunday and Monday we travelled through these sad mountains. Hour after hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly world … how drearily … not a tree … over all the same weariful and gloomy colouring …”

He didn’t like it. But what an opportunity to think about things. With his historic bent and uncanny empathetic talents, Louis reflected upon his luck that he was at least on a train, a convenience provided by the people behind the party at Promontory Point, only 10 years past, in 1869.

“To one hurrying through by steam there was a certain exhilaration in this spacious vacancy. … Yet one could not but reflect upon the weariness of those who passed by there in old days, at the foot’s pace of oxen … with no landmark but that unattainable evening sun for which they steered, and which daily fled them by an equal stride. They had nothing, it would seem, to overtake … but stage after stage, only the dead green waste under foot, and the mocking, fugitive horizon …”

In San Francisco, RLS would obtain a letter he said was “by a boy of eleven and is dated less than twenty years ago.” It is a harrowing and absolutely true account of life and death for three brothers going west before the train came, e.g. “We went along very well till we got within six or seven hundred miles of California, when the Indians attacked us. We found places where they had killed the emigrants …”

Stevenson put the whole letter in his book for posterity. To find out which brother got killed and how the others survived, just get a copy and read the part called “The Desert of Wyoming.”