Although financially ruined by the discovery of gold on his property in California in 1848, John Augustus Sutter is popularly perceived in California and Western history as an ambitious but magnanimous entrepreneur who was sympathetic to American settlement in Mexican California and treated the overlanders of the early 1840s with hospitable compassion. However, this popular–and essentially factual–image fails to consider Sutter’s confrontational and explosive relations with the California Indians.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Wild West magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Having abandoned his wife, five children and debts in Bern, Switzerland in 1834, Sutter arrived in Mexican California in July 1839 posing as a Swiss Guard officer forced to flee the French Revolution of 1830. A contemporary compared Sutter’s uniform and grandiose manner to those of Hernan Cortes "in his palmist days." In 1841, by sheer force of personality and insightful awareness of political intrigue and conflict in California, Sutter persuaded Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado to grant him 11 square leagues or 48,400 acres (the maximum legal limit for a private rancho in Mexican California) at a site near the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers that he had previously selected in 1839.

Sutter also led Alvarado to believe that a large land grant in the Sacramento Valley would discourage Americans from infiltrating the Mexican colony. Upon becoming a Mexican citizen to qualify for the grant, he names it Nueva Helvetia or New Switzerland. Alvarado also bestowed on Sutter the authority "to represent in the Establishment of New Helvetia all the laws of the country, to function as political authority and dispenser of justice, in order to prevent the robberies committed by adventurers from the United States, to stop the invasion of savage Indians (who often raided the scattered coastal settlements), and the hunting and trading by companies from the Columbia (river)." The latter was an obvious reference primarily to England’s Hudson’s Bay Company. From Sutter’s Fort (in present-day Sacramento) the first white settle in California’s vast Central Valley built an economically productive empire that relied heavily on Indian labor.

Sutter, despite what he had told Alvarado, went on to play a prominent role in the early settlement of California by Americans. His strategically placed fort on the overland trails became a convenient place of refuge where travelers were treated very hospitably. This incurred the wrath of Mexican officials. Later, in his memoirs, Sutter explained: "I gave passports to those entering the country…and this (they) did not like, I was friendly with the emigrants of whom (they) were jealous. I encouraged immigration, while they discouraged it. I sympathized with the Americans while they hated them." Indeed, it was from John Sutter’s Fort that several relief and rescue parties were dispatched into the mountains to save what was left of the ill-fated Donner Party in early 1847. While Sutter undoubtedly saw the emigrants as employees, buyers of his land and customers for the products of his diverse enterprises, the Anglo overlanders regarded him as generous and obliging. According to historian Robert Cleland, "At Sutter’s, these immigrants, exhausted and half-starved…found shelter, food and clothing, and an opportunity to learn something of the new land and people to which they had come." John Bidwell, who led the initial organized party of settlers to California in 1841 and later was employed by Sutter, wrote that "he was one of the most liberal and hospitable of men."

As a result of James Marshall’s famous gold discovery at Sutter’s Mill on January 24, 1848, Sutter lost his landed wealth, and his early open-handed kindness to the Americans was soon forgotten. His workers deserted him for the lure of gold, and American squatters seized and riotously despoiled his vast properties. By 1852, litigation over title to contested land had led to bankruptcy. While the California legislature gave him a pension of $250 per month from 1862 until 1878, Sutter never recovered from financial disaster. Despite numerous petitions to the U.S. Congress and an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the grand old man of the Sacramento Valley and former friend of American pioneers died impoverished in 1880 in a Washington, D.C., hotel room, far from the site of his famous old fort.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to