Robert Louis Stevenson's The Silverado Squatters (1884), an account of the summer in 1880 that Stevenson spent in Silverado, on Mount St. Helena with his new bride Fanny Osbourne Stevenson. RLS talks about his hotel in Vallejo, where "the stove would not burn, though it would smoke; and while one window would not open, the other would not shut" (222). Sometimes the description might be of any small town in the U.S.; in describing Calistoga, RLS says,

The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel to one another. The street of Calistoga joins them, perpendicular to both--a wide street, with bright, clean, lowhouses, here and there a verandah over the sidewalk, here and there a horsepost, here and there lounging townsfolk. Other streets are marked out, and most likely named; for these towns in the New World begin with a firm resolve to grow larger, Washington and Broadway, and then First and Second, and so forth, being boldly plotted out as soon as the sommunity indulges in a plan. But, in the meanwhile, all the life and most of the houses of Calistoga are concentrated upon that street between the railway station and the road. I never heard it called by any name, but I will hazard a guess that it is either Washington or Broadway. (225)

At other times, the flavor is distinctly of the frontier:

The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest where there are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed, and the stage is not only a link between country and city, and the vehicle of news, but has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who should be brother to a soldier. California boasts her famous stage-drivers, and among the famous Foss is not forgotten. Along the unfenced, abominable mountain roads, he launches his team with small regard to human life or the doctrine of probabilities. Flinching travellers, who behold themselves coasting eternity at every corner, look with admiration at their driver’s huge, impassive, fleshy countenance. He has the very face for the driver in Sam Weller’s anecdote, who upset the election party at the required point. Wonderful tales are current of his readiness and skill. One in particular, of how one of his horses fell at a ticklish passage of the road, and how Foss let slip the reins, and, driving over the fallen animal arrived at the next stage with only three. This I relate as I heard it, without guarantee. (p. 226)

Here and often he sounds very much like Twain.
What first amazed me was the way he described the infant wine-making in the Napa Valley.

Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved. The beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the precious metals: the wine-grower also ‘prospects.’ One corner after another of land is tried with one kind of grape after another. This is a failure; that is better; a third best. So, bit by bit, they grope after their Clos Vougeot and Lafite. Those lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry: these still lie undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses undisturbed. But there they bide their hour, awaiting their Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them. The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson. (p. 232)

He notices early in the book the peculiarly American proprietary approach to the land: they visit "The Petrified Forest. Proprietor: C. Evans." And indeed, on our visit to Calistoga we went to see a geyser that goes off every twenty minutes or so and which is enclosed and charged for as if it were a circus act.
He has a notable description of "Poor Whites or Low-downers"

There is quite a large race or class of people in America, for whom we scarcely seem to have a parallel in England. Of pure white blood, they are unknown or unrecognisable in towns; inhabit the fringe of settlements and the deep, quiet places of the country; rebellious to all labour, and pettily thievish, lke the English gypsies; rustically ignorant, but with a touch of wood-lore and the dexterity of the savage. Whence they came is a moot point. At the time of the war, they poured north in crowds to escape the conscription; lived during summer on fruits, wild animals, and petty theft; and at the approach of winter, when these supplies failed, built great fires in the forest, and there died stoically by starvation. They are widely scattered, however, and easily recognised. Loutish, but not ill-looking, they will sit all day, swinging their legs on a field fence, the mind seemingly as devoid of all reflection as a Suffolk peasant’s, careless of politics, for the most part incapable of reading, but with a rebellious vanityand a strong sense of independence. Hunting is their most congenial business, or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur detection. In tracking a criminal, following a particular horse along a beaten highway, and drawing inductions from a hair or a footprint, one of those somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly display activity of body and finesse of mind. By their names ye may know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first. Whether they are indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy common to all backwoodsmen, they are at least known by a generic byword, as Poor Whites or Low-downers. (p. 260) ( )

7.7

Paul Therox called this "One of the ten essential travel books.". It details the first leg of Stevensons journey from Scotland to meet and marry Fanny in CA, it recounts his time on board a ship in the steerage compartment (lower-class). Stevenson described the crowded weeks in steerage with the poor and sick, as well as stowaways, and his initial reactions to New York City where he spent a few days. Filled with sharp-eyed observations, it brilliantly conveys Stevenson's perceptions of America and Americans. It also provides a very detailed and enjoyable account of what it was like to travel to America as an emigrant in the 19th century, during a time of mass migrations to the New World. Details such as the bedding arrangements, daily food rations, relationships with the crew, with other grade ticket holders, passengers of other nationalities, entertainment, children - all provide a rich and colorful tapestry of life on-board the ship. ( )

Stevenson's unconventional honeymoon with his new wife Fanny in a "love shack" in an abandoned mine in the mountains of Napa Valley CA, provides some interesting views of California during the late 19th century. Stevenson uses the first telephone of his life. He meets a number of wine growers in Napa Valley, an enterprise he deemed "experimental", with growers sometimes even mis-labeling the bottles as originating from Spain in order to sell their product to skeptical Americans. He visits the oldest wine grower in the valley Jacob Schram, who had been "experimenting" for 18 years at his Schramsberg Winery, and had recently expanded the wine cellar in his backyard. Stevenson also visited a petrified forest owned by an old Norwegian ex-sailor who had stumbled upon it while clearing farmland.what the petrified forest was remained for everyone a source of curiosity. Stevenson also details his encounters with a local Jewish merchant, whom he compares to a character in a Charles Dickens novel (probably Fagin from Oliver Twist), and portrays as happy-go-lucky but always scheming to earn a dollar. Like Dickens in American Notes (1842), Stevenson found the American habit of spitting on the floor hard to get used too.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silv... (Wikipedia) ( )

"Love launched the haphazard six-thousand-mile odyssey that the twenty-five-year-old Robert Louis Stevenson recounts in this memoir and travel book. For it was during a trip to France that Stevenson fell so totally in love with the vivacious Fanny Osbourne that he determined to follow her to America and make her his wife. No matter that an ocean and a continent, not to mention Fanny's difficult husband, stood between Stevenson and his amorous aim." "Sailing from Scotland in 1879 as a steerage passenger on a steamer of dubious seaworthiness, the sickly Stevenson first endured a turbulent Atlantic crossing and then, after a frenetic stopover in New York City, embarked on the two-week trip of three thousand miles across the continent the fastest and cheapest way possible - by emigrant train. He arrived finally in the frontier town of San Francisco, there to woo his future wife, and found himself enchanted by California as well." In his record of this journey Stevenson captures the spirit of the young country he traveled, relishes the antics of the rambunctious inhabitants he encountered, and renders in vivid and often hilarious detail his impressions of the awesome, still-untamed American continent he discovered.