The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson for Boys and Girls

Back Forward Menu

Emigrant" and "Across the Plains."

Monterey in those days was a small Mexican town; "a place of two or
three streets economically paved with sea-sand, and two or three lanes,
which were the water courses in the rainy season.... The houses were,
for the most part, built of unbaked adobe brick....

"There was no activity but in and around the saloons, where the people
sat almost all day playing cards. The smallest excursion was made on
horseback. You would scarcely ever see the main street without a horse
or two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with their Mexican
housings. In a place so exclusively Mexican as Monterey, you saw not
only Mexican saddles, but true Vaquero riding--men always at a hand
gallop, up hill and down dale, and round the sharpest corners, urging
their horses with cries and gesticulations and cruel rotary spurs,
checking them dead, with a touch, or wheeling them right about face in a
square yard. Spanish was the language of the street."