Robert Louis Stevenson was Napa Valley’s first tourist. The author of classic literature like Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde came to Calistoga in 1880. He was on his honeymoon, having just married Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne in San Francisco, and was also hoping the dry climate would help his chronic tuberculosis. He wrote about his trip in the book The Silverado Squatters, published in 1883.

While in Napa Valley, Stevenson saw many of the things you can still enjoy as a tourist there today, including the Petrified Forest, the hot springs, and Mt. St. Helena. But the most popular chapter of the book -- now, as well as then -- was his chapter on Napa Valley wine.

In 1880, Napa’s wine industry was still “experimental,” as Stevenson put it. A few wineries had popped up, including Charles Krug Winery (1861), Beringer (1876), and Inglenook (1879), all of which visitors can still taste at today. Even back then it was known that the climate and soil content were unusually good for grape growing. Since most of the wine was under five years old when Stevenson visited, it hadn’t had the time to produce the complicated texture of European wines. Even so, it was promising. “It was still raw,” Stevenson wrote upon tasting California wine.  “Yet the stirring sunlight, and the growing vines, and the vats and bottles in the cavern, made a pleasant music for the mind.”

He tasted at two neighboring wineries owned by Mr. M’Eckron and Mr. Schram, respectively. Like Stevenson, M’Ecrkon was Scottish. The two men tasted wine in his “bachelor establishment.” At that point, M’Ecrkon had just started his winery. “His vines were young, his business young also; but I thought he had the look of the man who succeeds,” Stevenson wrote. Unfortunately, he was wrong; M’Ecrkon’s wine did not survive. Mr. Schram’s winery, however, did. Established in 1862, Schramsberg Vineyards was the first hillside winery in the Napa Valley. German-born Jacob Schram came to the US. in 1852. He worked his way across the country as a barber and then bought a tract of land near Calistoga for wine growing. When Stevenson visited, Schram invited him to the cellar of his Victorian home and plied him with so much wine that Stevenson lost track and feared “to think how many” types of wine he sampled. After each taste, Schram anxiously awaited Stevenson’s reaction with a “serious gusto [that] warmed my heart.”
Today, Schramsberg Vineyards produces eight varietals of world-renown sparkling wines. A California Historic Landmark, the winery still owns the white Victorian house Stevenson visited and stores the wine in “Diamond Caves,” which were hand-dug by Chinese workers. The Schram family no longer owns the winery, but its historical past is carefully maintained.
After Stevenson published The Silverado Squatters, wine in Napa started to gain momentum. By 1889, one estimate indicates there were 150 wineries in the region. Wine began to look like the next big thing. However, a bout of bad luck halted the wine industry just as it was getting started. In the 1880s, a root louse named Phylloxera was accidentally imported throughout the world and devastated wine production everywhere, including California. Then, just as Napa Valley wine was recovering, prohibition hit in the 1920s, forcing the wine industry to shut down. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1960s that Napa’s wine began to gain reputation, becoming equal to some of the best wine in the world. After 80 years, the good soil Stevenson called a “masterpiece of nature” was finally producing the wine it was capable of.

Stevenson in Calistoga
Stevenson originally came to California on an impulse. He fell in love with Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne in an artist retreat in France. At 39, Fanny was 10 years his senior. She was also married with two children. In 1879, she went back to Oakland to get a divorce so she could be with Stevenson. Not long after she left, Stevenson jumped on a ship and followed her -- a daring move for someone who had delicate health since he childhood -- and then took a train from New York to California.
He ended up in an adobe hotel in Monterey, where he spent a few miserable months waiting for Fanny’s divorce. When it finally came through, he traveled to San Francisco, married Fanny, and along with her son Lloyd, left for Calistoga.
Then as now, Calistoga’s hot springs were famous for their health benefits. It was well known that the Indians had used the hot springs as health resorts, and in the 1870s and 1880s, resorts had begun popping up in the area. In the hope to benefit his tuberculosis, Stevenson visited one of the springs, which he said was “hot enough to scald a child seriously.” The springs kept the air “warm as toast,” so much so that even on foggy mornings, the temperature could be in the 90s. Overall, Calistoga seemed new and modern to Stevenson, despite the surrounding wilderness. He found it incongruous that such a wild place had modern conveniences like railroads, telegraph wires, and newspapers with “advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly bears.”

Of course, wine tasting and relaxing at hot springs were not all Stevenson did in Calistoga. He also visited the Petrified Forest. In the most humorous chapter of the book, Stevenson described Charles Evans, or “Petrified Charlie,” an old Scandinavian sailor bent over with a spinal disease, who charged people “two bits” a head to look at the scattered petrified trunks that lay around his property. The trees had been petrified during a volcanic explosion millions of years before. Evans claimed to have discovered the forest when he bought his land, “the handsomest spot in the California mountains.”
People can still visit the Petrified Forest. These days, it costs $6 a head instead of “two bits.” The place has undergone major improvements since Evans’s time. While the trees used to be scattered and covered with dirt, they have since been excavated so that people can see their enormity. Still, visitors today might find their reaction to the Petrified Forest to be much the same as Stevenson’s was way back in 1880. Simply put, he was unimpressed. “Doubtless, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at the sight; but, for my part, I was mightily unmoved,” he wrote. “Sightseeing is the art of disappointment.”

Squatting on Mt. St. Helena

Toward the end of his time in Calistoga, Stevenson and his bride “squatted” in an abandoned bunkhouse on the side of Mt. St. Helena. The cabin was part of the abandoned mining town of Silverado. Silver had been discovered on the mountain in 1858. In 1872, the town of Silverado sprung up and swelled to over 1,500 people. In three years, the vein of silver dried up, and the miners moved on, leaving the town behind.

Stevenson, Fanny, Lloyd, and their dog, Chuchu, were led to one of the remaining cabins. The house had a smashed door and was full of rubble and mining relics. A spray of poison oak had even worked its way up into the house through the floorboards. But the beauty of the mountain soon won them over and they stayed for two months “camping” in the house. Nowadays, tourists can visit the Robert Louis Stevenson State Park on the side of the mountain. Less than a mile from the parking lot, a plaque marks the place where Stevenson’s cabin once stood. Visitors who want to continue on the path can go the remaining five miles to the top of the mountain. Though it can be difficult on hot days, the view at the top is well worth it.

The Silverado Museum in downtown St. Helena also commemorates Stevenson’s adventures in Calistoga. This free museum is full of portraits, first edition books, and Stevenson’s personal possessions, including childhood toys, an original set of letters, and the novelist Henry James’s gloves. The great author accidentally left the gloves behind when visiting the Stevensons, and Fanny gleefully saved them as a souvenir. For more information about the museum, call 707.963.3757. Stevenson’s short time in Napa Valley left a lingering mark. After The Silverado Squatters, Stevenson’s career began to take off, and he went on to write many of his most famous novels. The book also helped shape the public image of Napa Valley and drew attention to it as a possible tourist destination. From then on, people began to go out of their way to visit this unique corner of the world.