Los ocupantes ilegales de Silverado

La pareja se dirigió primero al Hotel Hot Springs en Calistoga, pero al no poder costear los 10 dólares semanales, pasaron una luna de miel poco convencional en una barraca abandonada de tres pisos en un campamento minero en ruinas llamado "Silverado", en la ladera del Monte Santa Elena, en las montañas Mayacamas . Allí vivieron de okupa durante dos meses en verano, instalando ventanas improvisadas de tela y acarreando agua a mano desde un arroyo cercano, mientras esquivaban serpientes de cascabel y los ocasionales bancos de niebla tan perjudiciales para la salud de Stevenson.

The Silverado Squatters provides some 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 deems "experimental", with growers sometimes even mislabeling 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 visits a petrified forest owned by an old Swedish ex-sailor who had stumbled upon it while clearing farmland—the precise nature of the petrified forest 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 to.

His experiences at Silverado were recorded in a journal he called "Silverado Sketches", parts of which he incorporated into Silverado Squatters in 1883 while living in Bournemouth, England, with other tales appearing in "Essays of Travel" and "Across the Plains". Many of his notes on the scenery around him later provided much of the descriptive detail for Treasure Island (1883).