THE AUTHOR

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 centre of interest. It is the
Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range, none of its
near neighbours 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 cornlands 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. Three counties, Napa County, Lake
County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy shoulders. Its naked
peak stands nearly four thousand five hundred feet above the sea; its
sides are fringed with forest; and the soil, where it is bare, glows
warm with cinnabar.

Life in its shadow goes rustically forward. Bucks, and bears, and
rattlesnakes, and former mining operations, are the staple of men's
talk. Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley. And though
in a few years from now the whole district may be smiling with farms,
passing trains shaking the mountain to the heart, many-windowed hotels
lighting up the night like factories, and a prosperous city occupying
the site of sleepy Calistoga; yet in the meantime, around the foot of
that mountain the silence of nature reigns in a great measure unbroken,
and the people of hill and valley go sauntering about their business as
in the days before the flood.

To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller has twice
to cross the bay: once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again, after an
hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo Junction to Vallejo. Thence he
takes rail once more to mount the long green strath of Napa Valley.

In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea, the Bay of
San Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the Vallejo Ferry.
Bald shores and a low, bald islet enclose the sea; through the narrows
the tide bubb