“There is something singularly enticing in the idea of going, rent-free, into a ready-made house.”

— RLS

Mount St. Helena dominates the northern limit of California’s Napa Valley, just north of San Francisco. On May 19, 1880, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson had been married in the city by the bay without much planning for the next step. In the case of Mr. Stevenson, a confirmed invalid suffering from fragile lungs, a healthy locale was the primary consideration when considering travel destinations.

Mountains were on his mind when he wrote to Sidney Colvin from East Oakland shortly before the marriage: “I am, beyond doubt, greatly stronger, and yet still useless for any work. … When ever I get into the mountains, I trust I shall rapidly pick up. Until I get away from these sea fogs and my imprisonment in the house, I do not hope to do much more than keep from active harm.”

Virgil and Dora Williams were members of the Bohemian Club and good friends with the newlyweds. They owned a country home in Calistoga in the shadow of Mount St. Helena. “Why not go there in search of a honeymoon suite?” thought Louis and Fanny, but it must be at sufficient elevation to keep the lungs of Louis above the dreaded sea fogs. Ruins called ghost towns surrounding the mountain had been thriving centers of silver redistribution only five years past. In his first book after “The Amateur Emigrant,” RLS observed that “there are, in no country in the world, so many deserted towns as here in California. … It was an eye on one of these deserted places, Pine Flat, on the Geysers road, that we had come first to Calistoga.”

To move into a ready-made structure owned by someone else, and without their knowledge or consent, was their game plan, and squatting was the name of the game. The Stevensons were not the first to scavenge the old mining towns, and Pine Flat turned out to be too flat. Every abandoned structure had already been cannibalized for use elsewhere. A successful storekeeper in Calistoga who immigrated from Russia, a man RLS called Kelmar, became his principal adviser when it came to finding a place to squat. As the author himself described it: “He had found the very place for me — Silverado, another old mining town, right up the mountain … close to the Toll House, where the Lakeport stage called daily; it was the best place for my health, besides … In short, the place and all its accompaniments seemed made for us on purpose.”

Kelmar took Louis behind his store where Mount St. Helena could be seen blocking the view to the north and pointed up. “There,” he said, “in the nick, just where the eastern foothills joined the mountain, and she herself began to rise above the tree line — there was Silverado.” He thought the name kind of euphoric while “the high station pleased me still more.” The search for a mountain retreat was over. Now they just had to get there.

Kelmar offered his assistance in a way that aroused suspicion in RLS: “I could not help perceiving at the time that there was something underneath; that no unmixed desire to have us comfortably settled had inspired Kelmar with his flow of words.” And so began the first of many adventures for the two Stevensons, Louis and Fanny. With Kelmar as their guide and chauffeur, a scouting expedition set out from Calistoga the next morning. “For some two miles we rattled through the valley, skirting the eastern foothills … and presently, crossing a dry water-course, entered the Toll Road. … (T)he road crosses the ridge, just in the nick that Kelmar showed me from below, and then, without pause, plunges down a deep, thickly-wooded glen on the farther side.”

Soon they arrived in front of the Toll House, a familiar place to people who have read “The Silverado Squatters” by RLS.

After meeting the regulars at the Toll House, who seemed to live just to witness the daily arrival and departure of the stagecoach, Louis wrote that, “At last we set forth for Silverado on foot.” A difficult walk it was, in a setting fit for a Hollywood western in Technicolor, where “A canyon, woody below, red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here walled across by a dump of rolling stones dangerously deep.” After negotiating a number of obstacles, including “A rusty iron chute on wooden legs flying like a monstrous gargoyle, across the parapet … we still persevered over loose rubble and wading deep in poison-oak.”

The payoff finally came when “we struck a triangular platform, filling up the whole glen, and shut in on either hand by bold projections of the mountain. Only in front the place was open like the proscenium of a theatre, and we looked forth into a great realm of air, and down upon tree-tops and hill-tops, and far and near on wild and varied country. The place still stood as on the day it was deserted.”

This was the place alright. Louis and Fanny staked their claim to squat at the Silverado mine, but they would need help to do it. Kelmar knew whom to get.