The Scholar in the Kingdom of the Mouse, II: The Ben Sharpsteen Museum

You might think scholarship is boring.  Dull as dirt.  Best reserved for those in the monastery or the ivory tower.

You’d be wrong.

Scholarship is an adventure, a  treasure-hunt.  And the quest brings surprising and unexpected discoveries.   Researching the George R. Stewart biography, for example, I discovered that famous writers like Stephen King and Wallace Stegner and William Least Heat Moon, musician and composer Philip Aaberg, scientist Dr. James D. Burke of JPL, and Jimi Hendrix were influenced by Stewart’s works.

Walt Disney was also a great fan of Stewart.  He even hired Stewart to work at the studio as a consultant.  Stewart discussed ideas with various studio personnel; then submitted a report about the potential for American folklore films, and educational films.   Stewart’s recommendations went to Ben Sharpsteen, legendary Disney producer and director.

In preparing materials for donation to the George R. Stewart Collection at the University of Nevada, Reno, I happened upon a copy of Stewart’s report to Sharpsteen.  The copy came from the Walt Disney Archives (Stewart’s copy is in the George R. Stewart Papers at the Bancroft Library).  That discovery inspired a wander through Wikipedia and Google to find what was available online about Ben Sharpsteen.  Sites recorded his extensive contributions to Disney, where he began as an animator, became a Director (Pinocchio, Dumbo), and eventually produced True-Life Adventure documentaries – work which earned Sharpsteen and the studio multiple Oscars.

And there, among the Google listings, was a golden Sharpsteen nugget:  he and his wife, Bernice, had founded a museum, in Calistoga, California, at the base of Mt. St. Helena.

The Ben Sharpsteen Museum preserves and interprets several chapters of California history, with emphasis on the pioneer days and Sharpsteen’s work for Disney.  Trip Advisor gives it a 4.5 rating.

The museum includes the home of Sam Brannan, who started the Gold Rush when he rushed through the streets of San Francisco waving a bottle filled with gold, yelling, “Gold, boys, Gold!  From the American River!”  (Brannan was a businessman – he started the Gold Rush so he could profit from selling supplies to 49ers.)  The Brannan cottage contains exhibits and artifacts from the pioneer era in California, including some from the Donner Party, and a massive diorama of the Hot Springs Resort that Brannan founded in Calistoga.  (The resort was supposed to be named the “Saratoga of California,” they say, but Brannan’s consumption of the celebratory champagne at the resort’s dedication befuddled his tongue and he toasted “The Calistoga of Sarifonia!” and Calistoga it is.)

The Sharpsteen Museum includes a Robert Louis Stevenson exhibit.  Stevenson and his wife, Fanny, visited the area on their honeymoon; and Stevenson used local geography and history in the writing of Treasure Island.

And so we circle back to George R. Stewart, who explored the area in 1919-20  researching his Master’s Thesis on Stevenson and Treasure Island.  Stewart had been fascinated with Stevenson’s novel since he discovered it as a boy in the family attic in Indiana, Pennsylvania.  Stevenson’s use of maps in the book became a foundation of Stewart’s later work.

Stevenson  once wrote “It is my contention—my superstition, if you like—that he who is faithful to his map, and consults it, and draws from it his inspiration, daily and hourly, gains positive support…. The tale has a root there: it grows in that soil; it has a spine of its own behind the words….As he studies [the map], relations will appear that he had not thought upon.”  Stewart’s ecological novels and histories, like Stevenson’s Treasure Island, would be based on maps.

Stevenson once admitted the scenery in Treasure Island was based partly on California locations.  Inspired by that comment, Stewart set out to discover what areas or history were foundational to the novel. He explored the area around Mt. St. Helena, including Calistoga (and with his passionate interest in the Westward Movement, which led to books like Ordeal By Hunger, it is certain he visited the Sam Brannan Cottage.)

Stewart’s field research in the Calistoga and Mt. St. Helens area, his interviews with pioneers who remembered the Stevensons, and his geographic explorations gave him the answer:  Flat-topped Spyglass Hill was based on flat-topped Mt. St. Helena.  The Stevensons’  honeymoon spot, an abandoned mine on St. Helena – the Old Juan Silverado Mine – gave readers the name of one of the great characters in literature, “Long John Silver.”  There is a collection of photographs in the George R. Stewart Papers related to his Stevenson research; some may be from his 1919 reseach trip.  (Stewart also met and interviewed Stevenson relatives during his 1921 bicycle trip through Europe – three elderly cousins in Edinburgh who remembered RLS as a boy; and Lord Balfour in England.  Davey Balfour, the hero of Kidnapped, was based on a real RLS relative.)

Later, Stewart would write his discovery about Treasure Island into Storm – the first ecological novel and the book from which we get the practice of naming storms.  Each chapter ends with a “litany” of landforms or places.  Here is the beginning of the litany of the coastal peaks:

“This is the roll-call of those chief summits rising against the first in-sweep of the storm from the ocean.  Mt. Sanhedrin.  Mt. Kinocti that watches above the lake.  Sulphur Peak on whose slopes the geysers fume and spout.  Then flat-topped St. Helena, named for a Russian princess, transmuted in romance to Spy-Glass Hill.  …”  [emphasis added]

Disney, who produced what is perhaps the best film version of Treasure Island, would also film Stewart’s Storm for the Disney TV show.

So the circle continues:  Stewart discovers where Spyglass Hill is located, explores Calistoga along the way (and certainly the Brannan Cottage).  Later, Walt Disney hires Stewart as a consultant, and he sends his recommendations to Ben Sharpsteen – who eventually turns the Sam Brannan Cottage into a museum, interpreting some of the same history as Stewart – that of the Donner Party, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Disney.

(It’s a personal circle, too.  Our family friends, the Broughtons, had a Disney connection.  Bob Broughton was in charge of the multiplane camera, the camera department, special effects.  The multiplane camera crew included the first employees in the new Burbank studio, working on Pinocchio.  Bob worked closely with Ben Sharpsteen on the complicated 6-level shots. Eventually, Bob, like Ben Sharpsteen,  became a Disney Legend.)

Inspired, I called the Ben Sharpsteen Museum.  Two members of the Board of the Directors, Kathy Bazzoli and Pat Larsen, answered by speakerphone.  It was a pleasure to talk with them – they’re knowledgeable and enthusiastic.  Kathy followed up with an email that referenced a book for sale in their bookstore, Dutton’s “They Left Their Mark,” which mentions Stewart’s research.

If you’re a Disney fan (and who isn’t?) or a Robert Louis Stevenson fan (and who isn’t?) or a George R. Stewart fan (and there are millions of those), I encourage a visit to the Sharpsteen Museum…and to Robert Louis Stevenson State Park, on the slopes of Mt. St. Helena.  The Sharpsteen Museum is certainly at the top of my travel list.

 

 

George R. Stewart Finds Treasure Island

When I was a boy, the folks bought a record player and a recorded version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.  Dad said I wore the record out, especially the beginning with its stirring lines:  “If ever a boy loved adventure, Jim Hawkins was his name.”

When George R. Stewart was a boy, wandering through the treasures in the family attic in Indiana, Pennsylvania, he found a copy of the book, Treasure Island.  He took it downstairs, opened it and began to read. It changed his life.

He became fascinated with maps and mapping, inspired by the map to pirate’s treasure.  Years later, he may have learned that Stevenson was similarly in love with maps; and he often mapped a story out first and then let the tale unfold as the map directed. Like Stevenson, Stewart would become an author of place, of geography, and of maps.

Stevenson’s book stayed with Stewart.  When he was at UC Berkeley, working on his Master’s Degree, two fine professors helped him discover his style of writing and his subject – the geography and history of the west.  He decided to write a Master’s Thesis which would combine the two.  Treasure Island came to mind.

There was some evidence that “Treasure Island” was, in fact, located in the landscapes and history of the greater Bay Area.  (One giveaway was the presence of rattlesnakes among Coast Live Oaks in the novel.)  Stewart decided to use the internal evidence from the novel, research into Stevenson’s writings, and field research to see if he could discover where the Island was located.

Stewart found Treasure Island.  The wave-swept beaches were the shores of Monterey Bay.  The Coast Live Oak forests backed the Bay.   The flat-topped mountain, Spyglass Hill, was Mount St. Helena, where Stevenson and his bride Fanny spent their honeymoon.

And the abandoned mine where the Stevensons spent their honeymoon gave Robert Louis Stevenson the name for one of his characters – one of the great characters of English literature.

Robert and Fanny stayed at the “old Juan Silverado mine.”

In English, roughly translated, that’s “old John of the Silver.”

“Long John Silver.”

Stewart had discovered not only the landscapes; he’d found Long John Silver himself.

If you visit the Napa wine country of California, it’s a short but winding drive north from Calistoga to “Robert Louis Stevenson State Park.”  Hike the short Memorial Trail to find a plaque memorializing the Stevensons’ honeymoon – placed where the mine cabin, the Old Juan Silverado mine cabin, stood.

Or you can choose longer hikes which wind around and up and down Mount Saint Helena.

Afterward, visit one of those fine Napa Valley wineries and raise a glass of  the wine Stevenson described as “bottled poetry” to celebrate your discovery of Treasure Island, and your meeting with Long John Silver himself.

For more information about Stevenson’s time in California, visit the pages of the Robert Louis Stevenson Organization.

Before you visit the park, review this page from the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum.   And read The Silverado Squatters, Stevenson’s record of the California years.  If you read the version edited by James Hart, From Scotland to Silverado, you’ll find George R. Stewart honored in the “Introduction” for his re-discovery of Treasure Island .  As at Donner Lake, Stewart’s research and writing were the foundation for a California state park.

After Robert Louis Stevenson died, his widow, Fanny Stevenson, built a beautiful home on Hyde Street, near winding Lombard Street, on that long stretch of hill made famous by the Powell-Hyde Cable Car.  The house eventually went to Noel Sullivan, a member of the family of Mayor James D. Phelan.  Sullivan turned the place into a center of learning and the arts, holding frequent gatherings that included many members of what Ansel Adams once called “The Northern California Enlightenment” [or words to that effect].  Robert Louis Stevenson would have found that use most satisfying.