NOTES TO "THE OUTCASTS OF POKER FLAT" This story was first published in _The Overland Monthly_ of San Francisco in 1869. PAGE 134. POKER FLAT: an actual place in Sierra County, California. The name is typical of a large class of western geographic names bestowed by rough uneducated men when the West was new. MORAL ATMOSPHERE: these western mining towns in 1850 in a region which had just become a part of the United States as a result of the War with Mexico, were largely unorganized and without regularly constituted government. The bad element did as it pleased until the better people got tired. Then a "vigilance committee" would be organized, which would either drive out the undesirables, as in this story, or would execute the entire lot. 135. SLUICE ROBBER: one way of separating gold from the gravel and sand in which it is found is to put the mixture into a slanting trough, called a sluice, through which water is run. As these sluices were sometimes of considerable length, it was not a difficult matter for a man to rob one. 136. PARTHIAN: the Parthians inhabited a part of ancient Persia. It was their custom when retreating to continue to shoot arrows at their enemy. 142. COVENANTER: one of that body of Scotchmen who had bound themselves by a solemn covenant or agreement in the seventeenth century to uphold the Presbyterian faith. This act required force of character, since it was in defiance of King Charles I, and this force was shown in the vigor of their hymns. 144. ILIAD: the ancient Greek epic poem, ascribed to Homer, which tells the story of the war of the Greeks against Troy. ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744), an English poet, who rather freely translated the poem. 147. DERRINGER: a pistol, so called from the name of the inventor. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson, the son of a man of some means, was born in Edinburgh, November 30, 1850. The _Louis_ form of his second name was merely a caprice in spelling adopted by the boy, and never altered the pronunciation of the original by his family. An only child, afflicted with poor health, he was an object of solicitude, notably to his nurse, Alison Cunningham, to whose loving devotion the world owes an unpayable debt. Stevenson's appreciation of her faithful ministrations is beautifully voiced in the dedication of his "A Child's Garden of Verses" (1885). After some schooling, made more or less desultory by ill-health, he attended Edinburgh University. The family profession was lighthouse engineering, and though he gave it enough attention to receive a medal for a suggested improvement on a lighthouse lamp, his heart was not in engineering, so he compromised with his father on law. He was called to the Scottish bar and rode on circuit with the court, but, becoming master of his destiny, he abandoned law for literature.