The Silverado Squatters

The scene of this little book is on a high mountain. There are, indeed, many higher; there are many of a nobler outline. It is no place of pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who lives upon its sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a center of interest. It is the Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range, none of its near neighbors rising to one-half its altitude. It looks down on much green, intricate country. It feeds in the spring-time many splashing brooks. From its summit you must have an excellent lesson of geography: seeing, to the south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand and Monte Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the open ocean; eastward, across the corn-lands and thick tule swamps of Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins to climb the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the white head of Shasta looking down on Oregon. The author’s experiences at Silverado were recorded in a journal he called “Silverado Sketches”, parts of which he incorporated into Silverado Squatters in 1883 while living in Bournemouth, England, with other tales appearing in “Essays of Travel” and “Across the Plains”. Many of his notes on the scenery around him later provided much of the descriptive detail for Treasure Island (1883).