Robert Louis Stevenson

by Claire Harman

  * * *

  *Writing to Tati Salmon, high chief of the Tahitian Tevas, in 1889, to prepare him for meeting Colvin, Stevenson advised, ‘if you find him at first sight anyway dry it is a question of manner and you will soon see how very noble and kind a nature lies behind’.13

  *Charles Durand, called Carolus-Duran, was a portrait artist and founder of the Société des Beaux Arts.

  5

  STENNIS FRÈRE

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1876 an American woman travelling in Europe with her children, Mrs Samuel Osbourne, wrote home to a friend in California that she was thinking of going on from Paris to Grez-sur-Loing near Barbizon to study ‘with one of two very fine painters of landscape. My only objection to them is that they are amateurs and rich Englishmen with titles,’ she told him. ‘One is Lord something that sounds like Simpson.’1 That was Willie Simpson, brother of Sir Walter Simpson, Bart. The other ‘rich Englishman’ was Bob Stevenson.

  Mrs Osbourne, born Fanny Vandegrift in 1840, was not a typical tourist. She had come to Europe the previous autumn to study art and get away from her husband, Sam, to whom she had been married for eighteen trouble-filled years. It was a bold move, but not well planned. When she and her three children, Belle (seventeen), Sam (seven) and four-year-old Hervey, arrived in Antwerp, with a view to Belle and her mother both studying at the Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts, they discovered that the school did not admit women. By this point, Fanny had rather burned her boats, not to mention spent a lot of her money. But rather than turn the party around to retrace their steps the six thousand miles or so back to Oakland, California, she went on to Paris and enrolled herself and her daughter at the Atelier des Dames in Montmartre. It was there that she heard about the informal colony of artists that gathered every summer at Barbizon and began the last part of her journey towards meeting her second husband.

  The extraordinary Fanny Vandegrift was originally from Indianapolis, the eldest child of the six surviving to a lumber merchant called Jacob Vandegrift and his wife Esther. She was a quick-witted, self-contained girl with a fiery temperament kept so closely under control that she often appeared ‘cold and undemonstrative’, according to her sister-in-law Cynthia.2 Tiny in stature and not conventionally pretty by the standards of the day, with a dark complexion, arresting black eyes and dark curly hair, Fanny exuded a sexual aura that many men found irresistible. She was married young, at seventeen, to a handsome and charming twenty-year-old clerk called Samuel Osbourne, then private secretary to the State Governor of Indiana. The couple settled in Indianapolis, where, a speedy thirty-eight weeks after the wedding, their daughter Belle was born.

  Sam joined the Yankee 46th Indiana Regiment when the Civil War broke out in 1861, but left after six months without having seen action and enlisted instead with the local guard, the Indiana Legion. He never stuck at anything for long. In 1863 he volunteered to accompany his tubercular brother-in-law George Marshall to California in search of a healthier climate, but when poor Marshall (a friend and former admirer of Fanny) died en route in Panama, Osbourne didn’t return home but went on alone to the west coast. From there he wrote back to his bemused and anxious young wife that he was hearing such things about the fortunes to be made from silver prospecting that he intended to go on to a mining camp at Austin, Nevada, to try his luck.

  The wildest days of the Gold Rush had been and gone by 1864, but the west was still buzzing with rumours about undiscovered hoards of precious metal, and ‘silver fever’ was well under way. The Nevada veins, Osbourne reported back to Fanny, were producing millions of dollars’ worth of silver and gold and secretly funding, among other things, the Union Army’s campaign against the Confederates. Prospectors who came down to San Francisco sported diamond buttons in their waistcoats, built houses of white marble and bathed in champagne. It seemed that money was there for the picking, as this contemporary news report implies:

  The other day an assay of mere croppings yielded exceeding four thousand dollars to the ton. A week or so ago an assay of just such surface developments made returns of seven thousand dollars to the ton. Our mountains are full of rambling prospectors. Each day and almost every hour reveals new and more startling evidences of the profuse and intensified wealth of our favored county. The metal is not silver alone. There are distinct ledges of auriferous ore.3

  Convinced that he too could make a killing, Osbourne urged Fanny to follow him out to Austin, and she, young and greedy and longing for adventure, promptly agreed.

  Fanny’s decision to make the long and difficult journey from Indianapolis to Austin on her own with a small child followed the most frequently recurring pattern of behaviour in her life, which was to make quick, dramatic choices and deal with the consequences later. The journey was a daunting one in 1864; with no Union Pacific railroad yet built, the only way to travel the two thousand or so miles west from Indianapolis to Austin was either by overland coach (which was rough and perilous and considered very dangerous for a lone female) or to go east to New York, take a steamer to Panama, cross the isthmus by rail, catch another steamer to San Francisco and then go on by stagecoach to Nevada, a round trip of approximately six thousand miles. Fanny’s parents were naturally concerned about their daughter’s plunge into the unknown. Neighbouring Illinois was at that date the furthest frontier west of the ‘National Road’, and the ‘wildness’ of the far west was legendary. Among the things Jacob Vandegrift gave his daughter before she left (along with a shareholder’s rail pass that turned out to be invalid) was a pocket derringer pistol.

  Evidence of what exactly happened on their journey is sparse, though Fanny’s latest biographer, Alexandra Lapierre, believes that she and Belle were stuck for several days in Aspinwall, the fetid Panamanian port where the New York steamer landed, famed for its malarial climate, discomforts and diseases. Some delay to the train which was to take hundreds of passengers across to Panama City meant that Fanny was in danger of running out of money (and missing the next boat to San Francisco), hence – it is said – she persuaded a fellow traveller from Indiana to help her acquire some mules. According to Lapierre, she and this man, a Mr Hill, then crossed the isthmus on foot, following the course of the railroad, caught the steamer Moses Taylor in Panama City and sailed through the Golden Gate on 20 June 1864. The narrative is enhanced by a secret rendezvous at a cemetery and a steamy episode in which Fanny holds off at gunpoint a railroad official who thinks she will sell her body for a seat on the delayed train. If true in these details,4 the story of Fanny’s journey would rival any sensational novel, but they do sound like elaborations, or at the very least, tales made crisper in the retelling. Belle Osbourne’s hazy memories of crossing Panama with her mother were of a train journey through ‘a strange hot jungle’,5 no mules or epic trekking (though she might have been remembering the return in 1868), and Fanny herself was almost completely silent on the subject. She did not publicise the fact that her journey on the New York steamer was conducted first class (courtesy of the captain, who found her lone predicament too great a challenge to chivalry), nor that the railroad journey from Indianapolis was paid for by a collection got up among the other passengers when Jacob Vandegrift’s pass failed to work any magic with the guard. This is not to suggest that Fanny did not display enormous bravery and resourcefulness in her attempts to rejoin Sam in California – bravery and resourcefulness were her trademarks – but that she liked to cultivate mystery and drama around herself. She had a history of doing genuinely extraordinary things and feeling the need to exaggerate them.

  Sam Osbourne was not at the dock in San Francisco to meet his wife and daughter, having been called back to Austin to deal with a threat to his claim. Unknown to Fanny, he had borrowed money to buy a third share in a mine, a nugget from which was shown to her by the friend Sam had commissioned to guide her and Belle out to Austin. ‘It looks like the most ordinary stone,’ Fanny wrote home to her parents, ‘and you would never suspect that with this bit of quartz Sam is going to settle us in Paradise!�
��6 It was with high expectations that they set out by road on the Pony Express route into the Sierras, which Belle recalled years later: ‘I remember being in a huge, rocking, bouncing, crowded stagecoach, wedged in between my mother and the window. From there I caught startling glimpses of high mountains and deep precipices.’7

  What they met with at the scruffy encampment above the Reese River was an astonishingly primitive and ugly collection of shacks, cabins, piles of mining equipment, gravel and rubble, and a chaotic assemblage of drifters, ruffians and desperados. Austin’s supposedly exceptional silver vein had only been discovered two years before, and the town had grown up rapidly around it. However, after a year, cannier investors began to suspect that they had been deceived, and the town emptied out again, from a high-point population of four thousand to a few hundreds by the time Sam Osbourne arrived, in the last wave of hopeful prospectors. But Osbourne was a gambler and an optimist; though he was borrowing money all over the place (even from his newly-widowed sister-in-law Josephine Marshall) he was personally convinced of an imminent huge find. Fanny must have been convinced of it too, for she put up uncomplainingly with the most rough and ready living conditions and expended enormous energy and ingenuity on making their cabin as habitable as possible. She made furniture from scrap, turned old dresses into curtains, tried to grow herbs and vegetables in the dry, alkaline dust patch she grandly called her kitchen garden and cooked as well as she could on a sagebrush fire with the very limited supplies that were available. Without yeast for bread, she used soda, and had to improvise a hot drink with bran that went under the name ‘coffee’. Soap was also home-made, from lard, and clothes were washed with it in the yellow trickle that passed along the bed of Reese River in high summer. Austin was no place for the fastidious.

  It was also no place for women, except perhaps the dozen or so prostitutes at the brothel. Fanny was one of only fifty-seven females in the camp, Belle one of the few children. Such society as they saw was mostly men like Sam who had had some education but had not been successful in life, perhaps never would be. They congregated at the Osbournes’ cabin, playing cards, talking, drinking, picking fights: there was nothing else to do. Breaking into the monotony of these long, boozy evenings were heart-stopping alarms when it seemed that the local Piute natives might be about to attack. Stories abounded of their brutality, though Fanny’s experience indicates that they were more guarded than aggressive towards the marauding white miners. The Indians used to come into the camp and watch her through the cabin window, and Fanny, to her credit, tried to carry on with her chores unperturbed, only stopping to pass cups of bran ‘coffee’ to the silent, tattooed visitors.

  It was at Austin that Fanny began smoking roll-ups, a habit that she kept for life, and practising her shooting skills on a home-made rifle range. Belle enjoyed the freedom of almost constant play, and had a picturesque memory of being lowered down the shaft of her father’s mine in a bucket: ‘on the brim of my little cap, stuck into a lump of clay, was a lighted candle. [ … ] The bucket was held by a rope over a windlass, and my father lowered me by turning a crank.’8 But the unhappy fact was that Sam’s venture was not ‘panning out’ as hoped, despite the numbers of men working on it. As Alexandra Lapierre has pointed out, the prospectors had failed to understand the economics of mining:

  If they ever did reach the rock containing the mineral, they would need to extract it and convey thousands of tons of rock to the refining equipment in order to obtain a few grams of silver. If you consider that simply separating mineral from dross was costing the miners a hundred dollars per ton, their ingots were certainly light-years away.9

  Sam shared his claim with his best friend in Austin, a young Welshman called John Lloyd, and by March 1865 both men had tired of the drudgery of digging holes in the ground. It began to look as if nothing that glittered was auriferous ore. Leaving their debts and most of their makeshift possessions behind, they decided to move on to Virginia City on the slopes of Mount Davidson, 120 miles due west over the Shoshone and Stillwater Mountains. Virginia City had sprung up a few years before on the ground above the fabled Comstock Lode, and was already known as ‘the “livest” town, for its age and population, that America had ever produced’.10 Samuel Clemens, who under his pseudonym Mark Twain was to write the classic account of the mining boom of the 1860s, Roughing It, was at the time city editor for the Virginia Daily Territorial Enterprise, and described the atmosphere thus:

  Money was as plenty as dust; every individual considered himself wealthy, and a melancholy countenance was nowhere to be seen. There were military companies, fire companies, brass bands, banks, hotels, theatres, ‘hurdy-gurdy houses’, wide-open gambling palaces, political pow-wows, civic processions, street fights, murders, inquests, riots, a whisky mill every fifteen steps, a Board of Aldermen [ … ] and some talk of building a church.11

  Sam bought shares in a mine (with yet more borrowed cash) and, in an access of sense, also got a job as a court clerk. Fanny must have been nagging him about their bills, for their situation was so tight that she too had to work, doing bits of dressmaking and babysitting. This was far from the paradisal dream that she had entertained a year or two before; Sam was still borrowing from Jacob Vandegrift, and teetering on the verge of admitting the scale of his failures: ‘Most people in your fix would have blown a youngster up sky high who had filched a thousand dollars of their money into the sea,’ he wrote to his father-in-law. ‘You can bet high, however, that I will see this money refunded, or I will remain here till Doomsday, trying to get it back.’12

  Virginia City was the place for betting high; sprawling, lawless and dangerous, it was full of drunks, criminals and professional card-sharps: ‘Gambling went on night and day,’ Fanny’s sister said later, ‘and the killing of men over the games still happened often enough.’13 There were 18,000 people living in the city in the mid-18 60s, and an even larger shadow-town of mine tunnels and caverns underneath. The streets were packed with freight teams, buggies and wagons. The ones that were going out to the open pits and tunnels of the mines were full of blasting powder, picks, drills, gads and shovels; the ones coming back were loaded with rocks.

  It was in Virginia City that the Osbournes’ marriage began to come unstuck. Fanny’s loyalty had already been stretched by the hardships she and Belle had endured, and she was growing weary of seeing debts mount up and hearing the same promises endlessly repeated. She might have tolerated all this even longer, but for the discovery that Sam kept a mistress (his many casual infidelities before this, and his use of whores, she had probably guessed at too). They quarrelled violently and soon after, probably to get away from his angry wife, Sam set out on yet another prospecting adventure, this time to Montana with a friend called Samuel Orr. Months went by without a word from them, and when the winter set in, and along with it a sudden depression in the mineral market known as the ‘panic of December 1865’, Fanny felt too vulnerable in Virginia City and moved to San Francisco in company with John Lloyd.

  It is said that almost as soon as she arrived at her hotel in San Francisco, Fanny got news that Sam Osbourne’s party had been attacked on the road to Montana months before and all were presumed dead. This story seems like an obvious fabrication, a polite cover for the separation from Sam, which looked as if it was going to be permanent, one way or the other. John Lloyd was almost certainly in love with his friend’s wife, and promptly suggested that the new ‘widow’ and her daughter should come and live in the same boarding house as him near the old shot tower. Fanny was almost certainly in love with Lloyd too; she went into mourning for Sam, but didn’t go home to Indiana, as an unsupported female might have been expected to do, choosing instead to scrape a living as a seamstress in a dressmaker’s shop so that she could remain on the west coast. Since she loved her parents and hadn’t seen them for two years, her choice of staying in San Francisco indicates that she saw her sudden reversal of status as only temporary. Either she believed that Sam was not dead and would come
back, or she was having an affair with John Lloyd, or both.

  Belle’s memories of the winter in the boarding house are of being devotedly attended to by Lloyd, who took her on excursions and bought her a dolls’ tea set. He was studying in the evenings to be a lawyer’s clerk (and later became a very successful banker), and was her mother’s constant consort. So they were all in for a shock when, some time the following year, Sam Osbourne rolled into town and came to reclaim his family. Belle was delighted, for she adored her handsome father (she would later say, ‘I cannot remember ever hearing a cross word from my father’14), but the feelings of his ‘widow’ are not recorded. Osbourne re-established the little family in a rented house on 5th Street and things went back to something like normal for a while. Lloyd was relegated to the position of Sunday visitor, though Fanny’s letters home are notably fuller of affectionate remarks about him than about the errant husband who had so incontinently risen from the dead.

  In April 1868 Fanny gave birth to a son, christened Samuel Lloyd Osbourne. If this child hadn’t grown up to look very much like Sam, it might seem reasonable to question his paternity, for even before his birth his parents’ marriage was under intense strain again.* When the couple had another huge row just after the baby’s birth, Fanny decided to go back to her parents, taking the children with her on the tortuous route back via Panama. They stayed in Indiana for a year; then, at Sam’s request, made another attempt to mend the marriage, returning to the Bay Area in June 1869, on the brand-new transcontinental railroad. Sam moved them to a pretty prefabricated wooden cottage in East Oakland where they spent six apparently contented years. Fanny kept house for Sam, created a garden, sewed, painted, cooked. She became a super-efficient, unsmiling domestic goddess.