Sutter, JA
Sutter, John August (born Johann Augustus)
ACHIEVEMENTS: Established Fort Sutter, CA
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: 15 February 1803, Kandern, Grand Duchy of Baden, Germany
DATE AND PLACE OF DEATH AND AGE AT DEATH: 18 June 1880, Washington DC. Aged 77
DISCIPLINE: Adventurer and Colonist
FIELD: Business
LANGUAGE: German and English
EDUCATION: Village school, Baden
High school, Neuchatel, Switzerland
MAJOR WORK: None
LIFE AND TIMES:
Sutter was born into a family of Swiss origin and completed his education in Neuchatel, French Switzerland before being apprenticed to a booksellers in Basel. He married when he was twenty-three and moved to his wife's home town of Berne where he opened a dry goods store. He volunteered for service in the Berne militia and served as a part-time reservist, rising to the rank of first under-lieutenant. His shop did not prosper and in 1834 he abandoned his family and his debts. A warrant was issued for his arrest and he fled to France where he took ship for New York. He joined the German colony in St Louis and became involved in trading, gold mining and smuggling in the Santa Fe area. He moved to Westport, Missouri in 1837 and moved on again in April 1838.
Sutter was now calling himself Captain Sutter and claiming service in the French army under Charles X and in the elite Swiss Guard. He decided to go to California, then a province of Mexico, and start a colony. He travelled across the Rocky Mountains before joining a party from the Hudson Bay trading company on the journey to Fort Hall, from where he went to Fort Vancouver. He then took ship to Honolulu, where he chartered a ship to San Francisco via Sitka, Alaska. He made himself known at the various stopovers in Hawaii and Russian Alaska, setting up a network of possible trading partners and influential contacts. He also raised credit in Honolulu to fund his colony.
He arrived in California on 1 July 1838 and persuaded Juan Alvarado, the governor of Monterey, to give him permission to pick out land for his colony in the unsettled Sacramento Valley, on the American River. In August 1839, Sutter established the colony near the junction of the American and Sacramento Rivers. Three brass cannons, purchased in Honolulu, were set up immediately. His Hawaiian followers put up grass shacks and local Indians were employed to build a walled fortress with adobe bricks. A smithy, distillery, tannery and carpenter's shop were established.
In 1840 Sutter received his citizenship papers and was made a government representative and justice of peace on the Sacramento River frontier. One year later, Alvarado granted Sutter 48,400 acres of land. Sutter then enlarged his domain by buying Fort Ross on the Redwood Coast from the American Russian Company. The Russians abandoned their flintlock guns, originally left in Moscow in 1812 by Napoleon's retreating troops, and Sutter gave them to friendly Indians and enlisted them in the force which protected the Fort.
Anglo-American immigrants christened the fort New Helvetia. The settlers planted orchards, vineyards and wheat fields, and kept longhorn cattle. Sutter traded with Mexicans and Americans in beaver and otter skins, deer tallow, hides, wheat, peas and beans. He bought contraband arms from South America and Hawaii, and Fort Sutter became the largest and best fortified structure in California, recognised as an important centre for European settlement in northern California.
In 1846 John Fremont, a US government scout, took over the command of a group of Californian rebels against the Mexican government. After the fighting ended in 1847 Sutter agreed to employ an ex-worker of his, James Marshall*, whose property had been destroyed. The two men became partners in a sawmill and in January 1848 Marshall discovered gold at the mill site. The secret got out and Fort Sutter was ruined in the subsequent rush for gold. The longhorns were slaughtered, the crops were plundered and workshops abandoned. Sutter sold his stake in the sawmill, left the Fort and settled at Hock Farm on the Feather River.
In 1849 he was elected a delegate to the Californian Constitutional Convention. He stood for governor and lost in 1850 but was appointed as Indian subagent. In 1853 he was given the rank of major general by the state legislature and put in command of the Californian militia.
Sutter had been granted his land by Mexico, and during the land grant litigation in the 1850's he was deprived of much of his property. As with many other people, from America and abroad, he made money in the gold fields, but ended up broke. In 1865 Hock Farm was burned down by an arsonist and Sutter left California for Lititz, Pennsylvania and lived on a pension paid by the state of California. He attempted unsuccessfully to petition for a congressional pension and died in 1878 while in Washington.
ASSESSMENT: Sutter helped to prepare the way for a successful takeover of California by the US and for the discovery of the gold fields in California.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: Ferdinand Von Richthofen* reported on the Gold Rush.
Schliemann* made a fortune there.
One of the prospectors, Winters* went on to discover borax
ONELINER: Johann Sutter, founder of Sutter’s Fort, CA
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Zollinger,James P, Sutter, Oxford University Press, New York 1939