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Coming Out Swiss

Page 16

by Anne Herrmann


  For my mother, Basel was like a foreign country. When she was at a total loss, she would say I had inherited my grandmother’s artistic temperament; this provided her the only explanation for my tearfulness that she considered shameful, like her own.

  I know about the city’s illustrious inhabitants: Erasmus, Burckhardt, Nietzsche. But even my father left Basel for Zürich to be trained in a subject too modern for a place so steeped in tradition.

  Swiss Colonies

  in America

  Nueva Helvetia, California (1839)

  * * *

  “An Area as Vast as the Little Canton of Basle”

  Land. Far removed from the City of Mexico, the inhabitants of the northwest corner of the Republic of Mexico cling to a ribbon of land along the Pacific Coast, consider themselves Spanish, with Castilian blood purer than other Mexicans have, and dream of independence. Indians, mostly Nisenan and Miwok, inhabit the vast interior of the Department of Alta California. The governor, Juan Batista Alvarado, is stationed in the capital, Monterey. Alvarado’s uncle, Commandante Generale Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, has been ordered to establish a military post at Sonoma to check the Russian-American Company at Bodega, twenty miles north of the bay of San Francisco. Although outlawed by the Mexican government, fur trappers make their yearly forays into the interior, where they catch up to thirty-nine beavers a night. Beaver hats are in high demand, and beaver skins, along with cowhides, are principle mediums of exchange. The californios are cattle ranchers whose hides twice circle Cape Horn so they can buy shoes made in Boston. Unlike Alvarado, a native of California, Vallejo prides himself on having come directly from Spain. Without a single newspaper, news can be as much as a year old.

  Johann Augustus Sutter arrives in California hoping to become an empresario de colonización. Alvarado advises him to travel into the interior, select any suitable tract of land, except what is under the jurisdiction of Sonoma, and at the end of a year he will receive his naturalization papers and a land grant from the Mexican government. He must settle twelve families, and after ten years the land belongs to them. Alvarado hopes inland settlement will serve to check his uncle. In 1839 Alvarado grants Sutter eleven square leagues of land, the equivalent of 48,418 acres, or “an area as vast as the little canton of Basle, his homeland” (Cendrars, Gold). Johann Augustus Sutter becomes Don Juan Augusto Sutter, naturilizado de México. He becomes Católico Apostólico y Romano, since Protestants are not tolerated. He is named representante del gobierno y encargado de la justicia en las terrenas del río Sacramento. He calls his land Nueva Helvetia, or New Switzerland.

  Mexican land grants have no exact surveys. Does the land grant exclude land inundated by water?

  Homeland. Johann Augustus Sutter’s father manages the paper mill for the Häussler family of Basel in Kandern, in the Margravate of Baden, thirteen miles north of the city. Johann’s father, who has inherited the position from his father, is a citizen of Rünenberg, Basel, in the northwest corner of Switzerland. His ancestors, peasants and ribbon-weavers, can be traced to the sixteenth century. His name—“sutor,” or cobbler—refers to one of the oldest crafts brought north by the conquering Romans and one of the oldest names to indicate a person’s trade. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the first Suters immigrate to Basel, where all prosperous trades are closed to those who are not native born.

  In 1803 Johann is born at the mill, a Swiss enclave, which even during the Thirty Years’ War had been respected as neutral territory. He is a citizen of Rünenberg.

  In 1803 Napoleon sells Louisiana to the United States to finance his military campaigns and Jefferson sends Lewis and Clark with a Corps of Discovery to explore the Louisiana Purchase in search of a waterway to the Pacific. In 1814 Czar Alexander I of Russia, Emperor Joseph II of Austria, and King August Wilhelm of Prussia establish their headquarters in Basel to prepare their campaign against Napoleon. Kandern is a few miles from one of the only bridges Napoleon can use to cross the Rhine.

  At fifteen, Sutter is sent to a school in Neuchâtel to learn French, where he reimagines himself as Souter. After a failed apprenticeship with the firm that acquires his father’s paper mill, he works as a clerk in a draper’s shop in Aarburg. There he meets Anna Dübeld and follows her to Burgdorf in the canton of Bern, thirty miles from Rünenberg, where political rights and commercial opportunities are reserved for the native born. Anna’s mother operates the bakery and restaurant of her late husband, and her house occupies the most prominent corner of the town square. In 1826 Rünenberg and Anna’s mother grant Johann permission to marry Anna. Their son, named after his father, is born the following day. Two years later, Johann Sr. embarks on his own venture, Johann August Sutter and Company, a draper’s and dry goods store. He lives beyond his means. He acquires debts. He buys not less but more, including the complete works of Walter Scott. He pays off only those creditors willing to extend him further credit. His coworker, who has been caught embezzling, dies of consumption, leaving Sutter to assume his debts. He sells his house to his mother-in-law, who runs Sutter and Company. She sells the house he is living in, for which he can no longer pay rent.

  In 1834 Sutter liquidates his assets and disappears. He acquires a passport, written in French, on which his destination is noted as America, along with those of thirty-four thousand other Swiss who leave that year for the United States and Canada. He escapes via France rather than down the Rhine, where he might be intercepted for not having completed his military service or be inducted into the military forces of some German prince. Two weeks later, from Le Havre, he notifies Anna that he intends never to return. Bankruptcy proceedings are initiated, and one of his chief creditors issues a belated warrant of arrest. When Anna’s mother dies half a year later, the substantial fortune she has left pays for only half of Sutter’s debts. Anna and her five children move into the Stöckli, or grandparents’ retreat, of an old farmhouse outside of Burgdorf. There she lives, dependent on her sisters and entrusted to Martin Birmann, a pastor in charge of the local poor, for the next sixteen years. Sutter takes all his clothes and books and leaves behind “a few bolts of cloth, aprons, slippers, handkerchiefs, neckties, gloves … a trumpet, a piano and a sign reading ‘Joh.Aug.Sutter Tuchhandlung’” (Zollinger, Sutter), as well as a journal in which nothing is written and many pages have been cut out.

  Overland. Sutter arrives in New York in 1834. The city has recently surpassed all others in size. One-third of its inhabitants are from the Germanies. John Jacob Astor, the wealthiest man in America, is an immigrant of Germanic origin. Louisiana and Missouri are the only two states west of the Mississippi, so Sutter heads for the German colony in St. Louis. He travels with two Frenchmen and two Germans through Pennsylvania and Ohio to Cincinnati. There they separate, because otherwise they will never learn English.

  Sutter is thought to have read Gottfried Duden’s Bericht über eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerika’s, published in 1829 and reprinted unofficially in 1832 by the Swiss Emigration Society in St. Gallen. Duden’s thirty-six imaginary letters from America contain passages such as the following: “It is unusually tempting to settle in regions where nothing hampers one’s choice and where, with a map in your hand, you may roam through beautiful nature for hundreds of miles, to study to your heart’s content the condition of the soil and its vegetation in woods and meadows. Here, if anywhere, it is possible to combine pleasure with utility. … And what is more, you can have your choice of climate.” The Duden farm in Warren County, Missouri, becomes the intellectual center of Duden disciples, an elite group of immigrants who attempt to become farmers but eventually drift back to the city. Lateinische Bauern, or “Latin farmers,” they are called.

  Sutter appears in St. Louis and lodges at the Hotel Schwyzerland. From Johann August Laufkötter, a newly arrived Westphalian whom Sutter reencounters in California, we learn that the Swiss in particular are almost paralyzed by homesickness. When Sutter suggests founding a settlers’ colony of his own, people are
dubious about “a man who had never handled an implement save the yardstick” (Zollinger, Sutter).

  Sutter joins a trading expedition to Santa Fe. Stolen mustangs are purchased from Apaches and sold to German farmers in Missouri. Able to speak fluent French, although one assumes with a heavy accent bâlois, a group of French merchants agree to take him along. The expedition is a financial failure. When Sutter returns, he moves to West-port (Kansas City) and begins building The Far West Hotel. Again on the verge of bankruptcy, he leaves behind “a long black silk velvet circular coat, satin lined; some knee-breeches, a silk vest or two.” He departs as “Captain John A. Sutter, formerly of the Royal Swiss Guards of Charles X of France,” which turns out not to have been possible (Zollinger, Sutter). He is headed west. He has heard about a place called California from a French-Canadian priest in Taos who has become a naturalized Mexican citizen and alcalde. Only two white women, riding sidesaddle the entire way, have completed the overland journey.

  At the rendezvous at Popo Agie (Wyoming), Sutter buys an Indian boy. Because the boy speaks English, Sutter pays more for him than he thinks he should.

  Islands. From the Willamette Valley, Sutter arrives at Fort Vancouver (Oregon) in 1838. It has taken him more than four years. The impending onset of winter and the hostility of the Indians discourage him from making his way south along the coast. He takes passage on one of the Hudson Bay boats that ply between California and the Sandwich Islands. Twenty-eight days later, he lands in Honolulu, where his letters of introduction make him a minor celebrity and he is greeted by King Kamehameha III. His arrival is announced in the Sandwich Islands Gazette under the name “Shuiter,” and he remains for four months.

  Vessels from the islands to California are not as frequent as originally indicated, and Sutter is offered a free trip to Sitka, a Russian colony, if he agrees to take the Clementine from there to California. About Sitka, Sutter writes: “With the chief clerk I had to speak Spanish, with the storekeeper German, and with the Governor, his lady and officers French. I was obliged to dance Russian dances which I had never seen before” (Zollinger, Sutter). He leaves with three white men, ten native islanders, or Kanakas, provided by the king as indentured laborers, two of them women—one of whom, Manuiki, Sutter will father several children with—and a bulldog.

  One month later, on July 1, 1839, he anchors the Clementine in the bay of San Francisco, then called Yerba Buena, which is named after the Spanish hierba buena, or “wild peppermint,” that covers the surrounding hills, consists of half a dozen huts, and is not a port of entry. Sutter sails to Monterey.

  Imagine a strip of land running from London to the oases of the Sahara and from St. Petersburg to Constantinople. This strip of land is entirely coastal. Its land-mass is considerably larger than that of France. The North is exposed to the most rigorous winters, the South is tropical. A long, deep canyon, which cuts through two chains of mountains and divides this strip of land into two exactly equal parts, connects a great inland lake with the sea. This lake would accommodate all fleets of the world. Two majestic rivers, which have irrigated the regions of the interior to the north and to the south, come to pour their waters into it. These are the Sacramento and the Joaquin. (Cendrars, Gold)

  Landscape. The Indians have kept the oak savannahs free of underbrush through controlled fires. This encourages the growth of grasses when food is scarce, in late winter and early spring. These sustain antelope, elk, and deer, which will in turn sustain them. They encourage the production of acorns on live oaks and blue oaks. Food is primarily meal ground from acorns and grasshoppers, captured in pits and baked before the fire or dried in the sun. The native perennial bunch grass gradually loses ground to herds of horses and introduced grasses on the hooves of European grazers.

  Trappers collect over one hundred thousand beavers a year. Dams disintegrate, ponds empty, meadows dry up. Large and small animals dependent on the succulent grasses of the flooded lowlands starve or move on. Indians, dependent on the small and large animals, starve or move on. In Paris hats are now made of silk, which in 1834 induces John Jacob Astor to sell his American Fur Company.

  The first night, clouds of mosquitoes make it impossible for Sutter and his crew to rest. Six out of nine men have decided to turn back to Yerba Buena. The three remaining are from Germany, Belgium, and Ireland. Hudson Bay Company trappers from Oregon have brought malaria to Sacramento’s alluvial plain, which becomes prime habitat for its transmitter, the Anapheles mosquito.

  It is scarcely possible to imagine a more delightful temperature, or a climate which is more agreeable and uniform. The sky is cloudless, without the slightest film of vapor apparent in all the vast azure vault. In the middle of the day the sun shines with great power, but in the shade it is nowhere uncomfortable. At night, so pure is the atmosphere, that the moon gives a light sufficiently powerful for the purposes of the reader or student who has good eyesight. There is no necessity of burning the “midnight oil.” Nature here, lights the candle for the bookworm. (Bryant, What I Saw in California)

  Inland. Sutter wants to settle on a navigable river. It takes him a week to find the mouth of the Sacramento. He imagines building a fort like the Russian Fort Ross at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers. He wants to trade with Indians and californios. He wants to defend himself against Indians and californios. He wants to cultivate Indian lands. He wants to live beyond Mexican law. He wants to be a law unto himself. He wants to establish a colony of Swiss compatriots. He wants to be a farmer, but for two years he has made no attempt at agriculture.

  Sutter’s Fort begins as two houses roofed with thule grass, built by Kanakas. Four years later, it will have adobe walls eighteen feet high and two and a half feet thick. It will be a trading post for mountain men, trappers, and Indians. An Indian army wearing green and blue uniforms with red trim acquired from the Russians will march to cadence called in German. A half-hourglass in the guardroom marks the “all is well” call every thirty minutes during the night.

  Sutter settles in Nisenan country near villages of the Pusane and Momol Indians, north of Miwok territory, on the borderland between the Miwok and Nisenan. The Nisenan have been decimated by the malaria epidemic of 1833. The Miwok have learned to plant and harvest crops, ride horses, build irrigation systems, and make adobe bricks, at the Franciscan missions begun in 1769. They have been Hispanicized and Christianized, before the missions are secularized in 1834. Sutter provides rancheros with Indians for pay and sells Indian orphans. Indians are issued metal disks, to be worn as pendants on necklaces. Holes are punched, representing a monetary value that can be redeemed only at Sutter’s store. Like Sutter, they are always in debt.

  In 1841 Sutter acquires all the movable property of Fort Ross from the Russians, a debt, owed over four years primarily in wheat, that he finally pays off in 1849. Included are two cannons, taken from Napoleon after his defeat in Moscow.

  In 1841 the first overland immigrants arrive from Oregon and Missouri. To these Americans he offers free shelter and supplies. He treats them as guests in the hope that they will become customers, even coworkers. He tries to extract the Swiss and Germans, but few agree to stay.

  In 1845 the Mexicans attempt to buy Sutter’s Fort to prevent further immigration, to prevent further Americanization of California by a Swiss. In 1846 the war begins between Mexico and the United States; at the end of it Mexico will have lost half of its territory.

  In 1847 there are ten to twelve Swiss living at the fort; all of them are unmarried men, including Heinrich Lienhard of Glarus.

  Sutter’s letters had to travel north to the Columbia, thence with the couriers of the Hudson’s Bay Company through Canada, from there to England and to Switzerland. Later the Russian agent who came to collect the wheat in autumn would take a letter to Sitka, where it traveled to the coast of Siberia, across the Continent of Asia to Russia, Germany and Switzerland. (Zollinger, Sutter)

  No-Man’s-Land. In 1842 Micheltorena, the last of the Mexican ce
ntralist governors, becomes governor of California. Alvarado, who considers him a foreigner, leads a group of insurgents against him. Sutter leads his men against Alvarado by marching toward what is now Hollywood and Universal City. Micheltorena surrenders but promises Sutter another twenty-two square leagues of land, bringing the total to 229 square miles. John Frémont captures Sonoma and raises the flag of the Bear Republic, which lasts twenty-six days. The United States arrives to conquer California and discovers it has declared itself a republic. Mormons arrive, hoping to escape persecution, only to discover that the so-called uninhabited Pacific coast has become U.S. territory. In 1846 the U.S. flag is raised on Sutter’s Fort, and the fort is renamed Fort Sacramento. “Don Juan Augusto Sutter” is now “John A. Sutter.” That autumn, the first members of the Donner party arrive. Two Indians whom Sutter has sent as part of a rescue mission succumb to members of the party who prefer not to starve. In 1847 the Mormons are on their way to Salt Lake, but there is nothing for them to eat, they are told, so they stay. For Sutter they are like Swiss: skilled, diligent, trustworthy. John Marshall of New Jersey, who has been at Sutter’s Fort for several years, is sent to build a sawmill at Coloma, another of Sutter’s follies.

 

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