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Belle Part XII: A trip to Silverado

Mt. St. Helena, a painting by Thomas Hill and setting for Robert Louis Stevenson’s honeymoon, 1880, memorialized in The Silverado Squatters.

With her father’s blessings, Miss Isobel — ‘Belle’ — Osbourne became Mrs. Joe Strong by elopement at a facility called the Pacific Grove Retreat in the fall of 1879. That made Belle the first of her family to leave their rented wing of Senora Bonafascio’s home in Monterey, where the recuperating Robert Louis Stevenson was a frequent guest. That meant more room for her younger brother Lloyd to play in while their mother, still Mrs. Fanny Osbourne, remained along with Fanny’s younger sister, Miss Nellie Vandegrift, but soon to marry the handsomest bartender in town, Adolpho Sanchez.

As seems typical of human nature, people reading Stevenson biographies can easily classify Sam Osbourne as a low-life because his philandering ways are front and center as the primary causal event in the chain of events that led to the unlikely marriage of Robert Louis Stevenson to Sam’s first wife, Francesca — ‘Fanny’ — Vandegrift Osbourne. But to his contemporaries, Sam was a popular, good-looking, fun loving, intelligent and generous fellow and one of the founders of the Bohemian Club, in which Joe Strong was a member, too, and remember that Belle was closer to her father and more loyal to him than to her mother. “My dear father!” Belle says in her book, This Life I’ve Loved, “When I remember him, it is always with his arms open wide to love and comfort me.”

Sam had even “found an apartment for us in San Francisco at No.7 New Montgomery Avenue; two enormous rooms with high ceilings connected by folding doors. … Here we lived, no responsibility whatever. … Joe hung his sketches and paintings on the walls in the big front room. … Here he arranged his easel and model’s stand and painted portraits. I had a big table in the corner by a window where I made my drawings. My work was interesting and I never knew what the next commission would be for,” for example, “The college boys from Berkeley wanted illustrations and caricatures for their yearly publication.”

Soon after settling Belle and his new son-in-law in their rooms in the Latin Quarter of old San Francisco, surrounded by the studios of other artists, Sam went down to Monterey where according to Belle, “he and my mother held agitated conferences. I know now they were discussing a divorce.” Soon after that, Fanny, Nellie and Lloyd quit Monterey and moved back to the cottage in East Oakland while Robert Louis Stevenson stayed respectfully distant from the proceedings by remaining in Monterey in the cheap boarding house that today bears his name. In mid-December, Louis moved to San Francisco, into the cheapest room he could find at No. 608 Bush St. He lived on 70 cents a day, eating one meal a day in a restaurant, and he continued to write. Now he was doing an essay on Henry David Thoreau called Thoreau. When he was in Saranac Lake, RLS said that among American writers he placed Thoreau above Emerson but that he “possibly had read Emerson too late.”

It was at No. 608 Bush St. that “Bloody Jack” made his debut, meaning the life-threatening lung hemorrhaging condition that would stalk Stevenson to the grave. That was the price the invalid paid for the excessive demands he had made on his frail physique during his journey to the New World as The Amateur Emigrant, on a mission his father called “this mad sinful business,” the same one his friends said was “an enterprise of madness.” It was at Bush Street, when he felt like he might be carried out of the place in a pine box, that Louis got his epitaph ready, his poem Requiem, the first line of which is the title of a best-selling novel by Nancy Horan, Under the Wide and Starry Sky.

With actual divorce proceedings underway, RLS began to get vindication for his extreme behavior as The Amateur Emigrant plus the prospect of success which to him couldn’t be declared until Fanny’s name was legally changed to Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson. All he had to do now was stay alive. For what’s left it’s best for Belle to tell:

“I remember going to see Louis at his rooming house on Bush Street. RLS was not famous then, he was at the lowest ebb of health and fortune.” Mr. and Mrs. Strong routinely entertained their fellow members of the Bohemian Club in their studio apartment and Stevenson was invited to attend. “It was there Louis met Charley Stoddard and heard him talk about the South Seas. The poet lent him Melville’s Typee and Omoo, the books that first turned his thoughts towards the islands …”

“Fanny Osbourne married Louis (May 18, 1880) not expecting that he would live, but hoping by her devotion to prolong this life so dear to her. Though she admired his work she had no idea he would ever become famous. The cold fogs of San Francisco had already done him much harm. As soon as her divorce was granted she defied conventions, the protests of her family (except Nellie) and married Louis immediately. It was the only thing to do for what he needed was a hot dry climate, careful diet and good nursing. They went on their wedding trip to Silverado, a deserted mine on the top of a high mountain in Napa County taking Lloyd with them, and a big, foolish, friendly setter dog named ‘Chu-Chu.'”

“Nellie came over and stayed with us, and a few weeks later we went to Silverado together (Belle’s husband, Joe, was already there). It was a hot trip; the journey by stagecoach up the mountain frightfully dusty, but when we reached the top, the air was exhilarating. The change in Louis was amazing; he was like a different man. We found him happily at work writing in his journal and he was much cheered by letters from his father and mother who had written most affectionately, sending money and promising a cordial welcome to his wife and stepson if he would come home.”

“We had our meals out-of-doors and, as there never was a better cook than Fanny Stevenson, they were good ones. She used the mouth of the old Silverado mine for an ice chest and storeroom; here hung sides of venison, pigeons, wild ducks, and other game purchased from friendly neighbors and cans of fresh milk brought up the mountain each morning. Though my mother was an excellent nurse, she was not a fussy one. There was never any suggestion at all of Louis’ being an invalid, and everybody shared in the good things she prepared for him.”

“In the evenings we sat round the camp fire talking, but soon the chill that always came at night drove us to our beds. The cabins were full of cracks, and the broken doors barely served to keep out wild animals. Often we heard the hysterical yip-yipping of coyotes, the bark of a fox, and an occasional terrifying scream that Joe said might be a wildcat, or even a mountain lion. However with our valiant protector Chu-Chu on guard, we felt perfectly safe.”

“After several weeks of Silverado, we all returned to San Francisco, my mother and Louis taking rooms in our building. They were very busy making preparations to leave for Scotland, and full of plans for the future. Lloyd was going with them, and if a good home hadn’t been offered to Chu-Chu, they would have taken him too. We had some very pleasant times together before they left, and I remember coming through the hall, and stopping suddenly at a light joyous sound. With a catch at my heart, I realized it was the first time I had ever heard my mother laugh.”

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