The great author Robert Louis Stevenson received a fateful telegram from his friend Fanny Osbourne in 1879, urging him to leave Edinburgh and join her in San Francisco. The penniless young writer packed his bags and boarded a ship for a long, difficult voyage across the Atlantic, taking detailed notes of the appalling conditions and struggles of his fellow emigrants. When Stevenson arrived in the United States, he immediately boarded a railroad to California, observing the vast country during his transcontinental journey. A marvelously well-written travelogue, The Amateur Emigrant is one of the best accounts of the increasingly popular 19th-century adventure of Europeans sailing to the New World and discovering America.