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Reading - Robert Louis Stevenson in California

Channel History Treasure Island Study Unit

Stevenson's First View of the Sierras

The Love Story

The Petrified Forest

First Impressions of Silverado

Biography

Short Story Contest

It was not the call of the gold rush, or the threats of a civil war that drew famous writer Robert Louis Stevenson to California. He came solely to find and marry a woman he loved deeply. Stevenson was 29 years old when he left his native Scotland, against the wishes of family and friends, and made the 6,000-mile trip to be re-united with the American woman, Fannie Van de Grift Osbourne, who was to become his wife. Stevenson's time in California, his marriage, and his honeymoon, took place between 1879 and 1880.

During this short but very eventful period, Stevenson gathered materials for 'The Amateur Emigrant' that recounted his passage across the Atlantic and travel across the North American continent; The Silverado Squatters', which told of his honeymoon in a rustic cabin in the California mountains, and four smaller essays on California.