Doomed to know not winter, 
only spring, a being trod the 
flowery April; blithely for a 
while took his fill of music, joy, 
of thought and seeing, came and 
stayed and went, nor ever ceas- 
ed to smile. 
There are very few people in this 
country who know where the tablet 
is from which the above is copied, 
and it may make some of you scratch 
your heads to recall who wrote the 
lines. 
I'll tell you where to find it and 
how to get to it. 
Due north from San _ Francisco 
runs a branch line of the Southern 
Pacific. It runs 75 miles and stops, 
stops at Calistoga, the beautiful little 
palm-shaded village at the head of 
the Napa Valley. . 
A great range of mountains rises 
up like a wall and forbids the lines of 
steel to go farther. And there 1s 
nothing beyond a_ railroad would 
build for — just great wood-covered 
mountains. And there is little beyond 
a white man would care for — Just 
great hills of silence. 
Yet up in these mountains Robert 
Louis Stevenson found a home for 
many months. ‘There he fought the 
dread tuberculosis; there he wrote 
two of his many books; there he 
wrote the descriptive story of his 
mountain home, “The Silverado 
Squatters.” 
In Calistoga I found an old friend 
from New York, M .W. Hill, and to- 
gether we started for the mountains, 
to the old home of Stevenson. 
One horse and a buggy was the 
outfit. It was a case of walk up the 
mountains with any rig, and one 
horse could come down as easy as a 
four-in-hand. And then in case we 
should meet a team, it was so much 
easier to pass—and passing is a mat- 
ter to be seriously considered on 
those mountain roads. 
But first I must give you a little 
history of this mountain locality — 
of Mount St. Helena —and then, if 
you know Robert Louis Stevenson 
from his books, you will perhaps 
know why he went there. 
Many years ago hundreds of men, 
mostly Chinamen, lived on Mount 
Saint Helena. There were great mines 
there, silver on one side, quicksilver 
on the other. Now they are aban- 
doned and the mountain is deserted, 
The Lure of Dim Mountain Trails 
Former Mining Home of Robert Louis Stevenson 
By M. J. BROWN 
NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
The ore in the quicksilver mines ran 
out and the ledge in the once famous 
silver mine pinched out. 
For miles we climbed Saint Helena 
to its summit, 4,500 feet above sea 
level, the old mountain horse going 
ahead with the reins tied up, we fol- 
lowing on foot, and there were places 
where the buggy hub would project 
over an abyss a thousand feet straight 
down. 
And I thought back to the busy 
days, the money-mad days of Cali- 
fornia, when loaded  four-in-hand 
freighters went over these winding 
dangerous passes at’all hours of the 
day and night, 
At noon we reached the summit, 
two miles of practically level road, 
and then from a turn in the road we 
saw what was once a beehive of in- 
dustry—spread out before us was a 
deserted mining town. 
There stood the big mill, just as it 
stood years ago when the engineer 
shut off the steam for the night. 
There stood the big engine with the 
drive belt still on. ‘There were the 
mine dumps, the Chinese bunk houses, 
the company store, the officers’ quar- 
ters, the fire-proof vaults, the barns, 
forge shops, water works and the 
burner where the quicksilver ore was 
baked. 
And as we passed the silent shute 
where many a load of ore had been 
loaded, a deer jumped out of a brake 
and ran down the mountain side. 
A mountain of itself is lonesome 
and depressing. A deserted village is 
even more so.- Together they present 
a picture of lonesomeness one does 
not care to look at long, The awful 
silence and desolation get on your 
nerves and a loud:spoken word or a 
laugh sounds like false notes—a sort 
of harmony with the surroundings. 
Once seven hundred men worked in 
these big holes, worked night and day 
and over these mountain roads a 
string of freighters brought in the 
food and supphes, and guarded rigs 
carried out the quicksilver tubes. 
Now it is the home of great silence. 
3ut the mountain village was not 
entirely deserted as we found out an 
hour later. 
As we drove into the thickest of 
the village, we saw smoke arising 
from a chimney, and a woman stood 
in the door of what was once the 
main office of the mining company. 
We stopped. A man came up the 
road, a young man, walking lame. We 
put the horse in a barn and stayed t 
dinner. Here is the story, in shor 
form. ie 
He was a mining engineer. ‘They 
had been married two years. An ac- 
cident in a mine crushed his leg and 
it was amputated. Crippled, and un- 
fitted for a superintendent’s work, he 
with his wife, went up onto Saint 
Helena, where he purchased the long 
abandoned mine dumps on a small 
royalty contract, and began to experi- 
ment with and work out a process he 
had long studied on, a process to work 
over these mountains of refuse and 
take out the quicksilver, 
Details are tedious, I will not bore 
you. After weeks of solicitation he 
found enough men who would take a 
chance that his process would make 
good, and he raised $2,500, with 
which the bought two concentrators. 
and started his experiments. 
That he was making good, there 
was ample proof. He showed us filled 
tubes in the vaults and we took off 
our rings and forced our hands to 
the bottom of pails filled with quick- 
silver. And you have to force them. 
The liquid is so resisting and heavy 
that you can scarcely push your hand 
to the bottom. : 
The young engineer said he could 
take out at least $300 a day with one 
man to help him and that he had 
enough ore on the dumps to last one 
hundred years. ae 
To those unfamiliar with mining I 
would state that the ‘‘dumps” are ore 
that is considered too low grade to 
pay, and it is carted out of the mines 
and dumped into the ravines. q 
But I started to tell you of Robert 
Louis Stevenson’s old home. g 
We went up the opposite side of 
Saint Helena, and it takes a long time 
to get there, ; 
Leaving the young miner after din- 
ner we started down the other side of 
the mountain, and just before dark 
we came to the Toll Gate and historic: 
Mt, Saint Helena Inn, a long, one- 
story building with a saloon at one 
end, kitchen and dining rooms in the 
center and sleeping rooms at the — 
other. 
Here was where Stevenson came 
first, bringing his bride, and Hill and 
T slept in the room they occupied. 
There is the old toll gate, he de- 
scribes in his story, a long fir tree, 
swinging on a pivot and so evenly 
balanced a boy could open or shut it 
and there it stands today, a trib 
taker. It closes the one mount 
road to one and all who refuse to 
so much per mile for the privilege of 
a 
