Mr. and Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson waved good-bye to their new friends Charles and Elizabeth Fairchild upon leaving the latter’s summer home in Newport, Rhode Island. There the Scottish invalid author and his family had been guests from Sept. 9-19, 1887. Louis and Fanny were returning to New York, whence the cargo steamer Ludgate Hill had delivered them all the way from London, England, only 12 days prior.

New York was supposed to be a stopover for the Stevenson expedition on their way to Colorado Springs, but as often happens with plans, things happen without warning that can affect them. The first thing that happened was a common cold caught by RLS aboard ship two days out from New York. Thanks to Stevenson’s delicate, diseased, hemorrhage-prone lungs, a simple cold could be a death sentence. Secondly, Louis discovered that he was suddenly famous and in great demand here in the US of A, primarily over the great success of his recent novelette, the “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” which had captured the popular imagination across the board throughout the English-speaking world and eventually everywhere else after a hundred or so translations.

Remaining behind in Newport for one more day were Stevenson’s mother Margaret, his stepson Lloyd Osbourne and their Swiss servant Valentine Roch. “Here we are in the meantime,” wrote Margaret to her sister Jane Balfour from Newport on Sept. 20. “It was indeed vexing that Louis got a cold just as we arrived; however, there has been no hemorrhage and he is now feeling better, so he and Fanny went off to New York last night to see the best lung doctor there, and to settle where we are to go for the winter. I shall be very anxious till it is finally decided, and indeed until we reach our destination and see how it suits him.”

Apparently, the nameless “best lung doctor there” is the person from whom Louis and Fanny first heard the word “Saranac” in connection with a Dr. Trudeau. In their conversation and letters, RLS and his fellow travelers often preferred to drop a syllable and just call Saranac Lake Saranac. Saranac had certain advantages over Colorado. It could promise the desired results, health-wise, at a more comfortable elevation of 1,600 feet above sea level compared to mile-high Colorado Springs. It was closer, too. Like Louis told his cousin Bob, “My cold was too rigorous; I could not risk the long railway voyage.” To be closer to the Big Apple also made sense in a business sense, and finally, it would be cheaper to live near this new so-called Adirondack Sanitorium, started up in 1884, than its Rocky Mountain counterpart. The logic of it all was overwhelming, so before Margaret could finish her letter to Jane, she received a telegram from her son in the city with news that went straight to Jane: “I have just heard that we are to go to the Adirondacks, a mountainous district not very far from New York.”

Having made the decision, plans for its execution came next along with taking care of business in the city before heading into the wilderness, things like interviews with competing literary agents and reporters, while sitting still so a notable sculptor can make preliminary drawings for a now-famous bas-relief. Will Low, Stevenson’s artist friend, had prearranged a place for all this to happen by getting them rooms at the Hotel St. Stephen, “a quiet hotel,” according to Low, “in Eleventh Street, near University Place.” Encouraging news from England awaited the author there. Louis had been one of nine individuals annually elected to London’s august Athenaeum Club “as being of distinguished eminence in Science, Literature, or for Public Services.” Stevenson didn’t brag, though he could have about this. One of his Athenaeum Club calling cards found a home at Baker’s on Stevenson Lane a long time ago.

By late September, the competition among American publishers to be the first to show off a contract with Stevenson’s signature on it had been narrowed down to Scribner’s magazine, which appeared monthly, and The World, a weekly paper, both New York based. Scribner’s had the advantage because Louis already knew Edward Burlingame, its editor, through their mutual friend Will Low. Samuel McClure represented The World. Joseph Pulitzer had commissioned McClure to offer RLS $10,000 a year for a short weekly article. This was a huge amount back then, and Stevenson surprised McClure by rejecting it on the grounds that he probably wasn’t worth it, for Stevenson was modest to the bone and he knew that such a large sum would make him uncomfortable inside his head. McClure lost this time, but he still had an important role to play in the life and times of Robert Louis Stevenson.

And so it was in Scribner’s magazine that RLS made his American literary debut as the celebrated author of the “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Charles Scribner, owner of the magazine, offered Stevenson $3,500 for a year’s worth of articles, which still seemed excessive to Louis but not as “immoral” as was McClure’s offer, in his way of thinking. RLS signed up with Scribner’s, his first ever contract, and while writing to his friend Bart Simpson in Scotland, he said, “I am sure it will do me harm to do it; but the sum was irresistible … each article, as long or as short as I please, and on any mortal subject.” Charles Scribner and Sam McClure were next in line to fall under the Stevenson spell, and many years later they would meet other victims when they joined the Stevenson Society of America in Saranac Lake.

Will Low came by every day to see Louis at the hotel. It was like they had picked up where they left off 10 years before in 1877, when Low left his bohemian crowd of young wanna-be artists in France to return to the States. When Low came by on Sept. 23, he brought another artist with him, Augustus St. Gaudens, a rising sculptor. Thus began a series of sittings for a medallion that would continue in the spring after Gaudens’ subject returned from the Adirondacks. Stevenson and his sculptor would strike up a friendship that Low thought was worth preserving in his book “A Chronicle of Friendships,” Chapter 32.

It was time for the Stevenson expedition to get migrating. It was late summer and winter would soon be closing in on their new destination. On Sept. 25, Fanny and Lloyd proceeded north first, an advance unit to scout out the scene and hopefully find a place to call home for the winter. In a letter to Mrs. Fairchild, Louis writes, “Fanny and Lloyd are away to Paul Smith’s, prospecting (house-hunting), and my mother and I and Valentine will follow in their tracks on Monday or Tuesday.” To Sidney Colvin he writes on the same day, “I hope we may manage to stay there all winter. I have a splendid appetite and have on the whole recovered after a mighty sharp attack.”