Marshall discovers gold. Sutter looks it up in the Encyclopedia Americana to make sure it is indeed gold. Sutter has leased the land that is not in New Helvetia from the Indians for three years. It is against the law to mine on Indian lands, which belong to the U.S. government. Gold is discovered nine days after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which is the day Sutter visits his sawmill, so California is U.S. territory. The day Sutter contracts for his sawmill, the government in Washington, D.C., signs contracts for three steamship lines: New York to Liverpool; New York to Chagres, Panama; Panama City to California and Oregon. The largest voluntary migration in history will have to figure out how to get from Chagres to Panama City. California is a conquered Mexican province ready to be penalized. U.S. laws do not apply. It takes four years for California to be admitted to the union. It takes another year for Congress to pass a law to settle private land claims in California. No land can be owned until confirmed by a U.S. court of law. In the massacre of Indians at Coloma, the Oregonians enact their rage, as members of a system of free labor, against a system of proprietors and peons. From 1848 to 1860, the number of “Digger Indians” drops from 150,000 to 30,000. The Foreign Miners Tax Law is passed in 1850 to exclude foreigners from the gold diggings, primarily aimed at Mexicans from Sonora. Why should foreigners be allowed to take gold from the God-given property of the American people? Outlaws and desperadoes lay down the only law. Sutter’s Fort is no longer the center of New Helvetia. In 1854 Sacramento becomes the capital of California.
For the first time in history, gold lay scattered on the ground, unclaimed, free, and plentiful, within the reach of anyone with the will to go after it. Argonauts came from distant shores: Europeans fleeing wars, plagues and tyrannies; Americans, ambitious and short-tempered; blacks pursuing freedom; Oregonians and Russians dressed in deerskin, like Indians; Mexicans, Chileans, and Peruvians; Australian bandits; starving Chinese peasants who were risking their necks by violating the imperial order against leaving their country. All races flowed together in the muddy alleyways of San Francisco. (Allende, Daughter of Fortune)
Landing. In 1848 Sutter’s son August arrives from Switzerland, not knowing that gold has been discovered. He is twenty-two years old and speaks little English. Six hundred ships lie abandoned in the bay of San Francisco by sailors who have deserted them for the mines. To save his father’s finances, he founds the city of Sacramento, a bustling waterfront that outfits miners. The city is plotted on a grid, with thirty-one numbered and twenty-four lettered streets, like the geometrically planned Washington, D.C., he saw on his way from Europe. He gives to the city twelve public squares, of one block each, and a cemetery. To escape the sedatives prescribed by his doctor and the land speculators who have sold Sacramento lots twice or three times, he settles permanently in Acapulco. His father never forgives him for founding a rival city to Sutterville, a phantom city that is never built, and for renaming Nueva Helvetia as Sacramento City. When Sacramento is flooded, the fort and Sutterville stay dry.
August sends Heinrich Lienhard to bring his mother and four siblings from Switzerland. They stay in a hotel that has been shipped in sections from Baltimore, cotton blankets partitioning the rooms. San Francisco is still charred from the last fire. Their father takes them to Hock Farm, forty miles north of the fort on the Feather River, where he has kept his livestock dry. He builds a new house. He builds, along with eight other Swiss, a six-hundred-acre horticultural showcase. He has a three-acre peach orchard and two acres of roses. He builds Eliza City for his daughter, who falls in love with her brother’s Swiss piano teacher, a marriage he refuses to condone. The city is eventually eclipsed by Marysville.
In 1865 a discharged soldier who has been caught stealing sets fire to Hock Farm. “A large library in four languages, ‘pictures, busts, curiosities, and everything he has been accumulating for the last forty years, excepting a medal or two and his family portraits’” (Hurtado, John Sutter), goes up in flames. Two months later, a fire destroys the house where Sutter once lived in Burgdorf.
After ten years in California, Sutter spends the next fifteen seeking reparations. He who enriched the nation is himself in ruins, the gold seekers and squatters having robbed him of everything he had. In 1855 the Land Commission says yes to his land grants; in 1857 the District Court for the Northern District of California says yes; in 1858 the Supreme Court of the United States says yes to the New Helvetia land grant but not to the Sobrante one. It was never registered. It was compensation for military participation. Two-thirds of what he owned was never his.
For four years, Sutter lives at Charles Modes’s Pennsylvania Hotel in Washington, D.C. It is the end of the Civil War, and the Supreme Court is in the hands of former slaveholders. California is the only state of the New West to outlaw slavery. When Indians are so cheap, there is no need for slavery, Sutter always said. Gold gave the Union the necessary resources to fight the war. The transcontinental railroad will restore unity to a divided nation. California needs history and prestige, and Sutter is willing to provide it.
Sutter moves with Anna to Lititz, Pennsylvania, home to the Moravian Brotherhood, an offshoot of the Czech Reformation, hounded across Europe, now a German-speaking community. Anna, who has never learned English, must adjust to the Pennsylvania Dutch who say du even to strangers. They live in the only brick house apart from the hotel, today General Sutter’s Inn. Their granddaughter attends Linden Hall, the first boarding school for girls in the United States. Sutter subscribes to eight newspapers, in which he reads about California in order to feel less homesick, and he has given up the alcohol that has fueled a lifetime of fiscal mismanagement.
More and more often, he returns in thought to his distant homeland; he dreams of that peaceful little corner of old Europe where all is calm, well-ordered and methodical. There, everything is in its appointed place, the bridges, the canals, the roads. The houses have been standing forever. The lives of the inhabitants are uneventful: they work, they are content with their lot. He sees Rünenberg, as if in a painting. (Cendrars, Gold)
At his funeral in 1880, someone suggests that California has made more progress in the last ten years than Europe in the last fifty.
Landmine. Sutter’s Fort is located in Midtown Sacramento between K and L Streets and 26th and 27th Streets. The Mexican flag flies above the nation’s oldest re-created historic fort, although only one of the buildings is original. In 1890 the Native Sons of the Golden West purchase the fort, which has served as a hotel, saloon, and pigsty. They donate it to the state of California in 1891 as a memorial to Anglo-European pioneers, with a provision that it be managed by a board of trustees appointed by the governor. Between 1891 and 1893 the organization rehabilitates the central building and begins reconstruction of the exterior walls and interior shed structures. An oval pond excavated to represent a slough is cited by the City of Sacramento as a mosquito hazard and has to be filled in again. In 1921 the governor disbands the board of trustees, and in 1927 Harry Peterson, the curator of the Stanford Art Museum, is hired to complete the fort as a pioneer museum. He creates house museums by furnishing rooms with rustic furniture; he creates display museums by housing artifacts in bleached oak cases made for the 1939 Centennial. In 1947 the fort becomes part of the state park system.
Sutter’s Fort is a third smaller than the original, based on the Kunzel maps that Sutter prepared to lure German-speaking immigrants to California, published in Darmstadt in 1848. The original 1841 three-story adobe building is built in the Swiss style, with the third floor projecting over the second floor on all sides.
In 1976 the 1853 portrait of Sutter by William S. Jewet, which had hung in the state capitol building since 1869, was removed and stored in the flood-prone basement of the State Museum Resource Center.
The United Swiss Lodge of California, founded in 1981, is the umbrella organization for Swiss clubs in Sacramento. One of its main purposes is to spread the word that Sutter, the founder of New Helvetia/Sacramento, was
Swiss. In 1987, to pursue this goal, they sought to erect a monument on the grounds of Sutter’s Fort. But public objections prevented it from being placed on state property. He was, after all, a buyer and seller of Indians. It now stands across the street, on the grounds of Sutter General Hospital. The plaque reads:
General John A. Sutter
February 15, 1803–June 18, 1880
Swiss Immigrant
Founder of New Helvetia
The Beginning of Sacramento
Builder of Sutter’s Fort
A Man of Vision and Compassion
Who Deserves the Respect
and Gratitude
of Americans and Swiss
Donated by
The People of Switzerland
Swiss Americans and Friends
Landmarks. Frédéric Sauser, better known by his pseudonym, Blaise Cendrars, is born in 1887 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchâtel. An incessant traveler, he later chooses as his birthplace the address of his first hotel in Paris, 216 Rue Saint-Jacques. There in 1910 he meets the sculptor August Suter, Sutter’s great-grandson. The following year he changes his name first to Blaise Cendrart and then to Cendrars. In 1925, having had his poetry solicited by every avant-garde journal in Europe, he publishes his first novel, L’Or, ou la merveilleuse histoire du General Johann August Sutter. It becomes an instant bestseller and is translated into thirty-four languages. Stalin is thought to have kept a copy on his night table, and Eisenstein is said to have wanted to turn it into a film. The fictional biography imagines Sutter a solitary adventurer, a Swiss mercenary who swears allegiance to whatever state happens to have jurisdiction over California. At the very moment gold is discovered and the entire world is enriching itself, Sutter loses everything. His name is circling the globe, but New Helvetia has disappeared. Anna dies the moment she sets foot on the Hermitage, that is, Hock Farm, leaving Sutter to turn to the Book of Revelations: how could the gold that belongs to him bring him such misfortune? Is he to blame, or is it part of God’s design? In a letter to Martin Birmann, the surrogate father of his children, he wonders whether he should return to Switzerland or take on the world in a lawsuit. If gold digging and drinking are signs of the Antichrist, only the community of Herrenhüter can clarify his rights before God. His journey eastward is not toward open land but into the labyrinth of the law.
Caesar von Arx, the most important Swiss playwright of the twentieth century prior to Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, writes Die Geschichte vom Johann August Suter in 1929, in part based on the fabrications of Cendrars’s biography. Arx, the son of a poor typesetter from Basel, begins writing plays in the Gymnasium and in 1924 is appointed director of the Zürich Schauspielhaus, a position he loses within hours due to a quarrel over staging. He inherits his mother’s house but remains so sensitive to his quiet surroundings that he begins to write at night with three mattress-like cushions fitted tightly into the windows of his study. Following his wife’s death, he takes his own life. If Cendrars portrays gold as the Antichrist and imagines Sutter suing the world, Arx portrays the law as the biggest lie, misused by the few against the many. Sutter is again the failed father, mistaking his daughter for his wife when they arrive sixteen years later, but this time his son Emil, ready to abandon sole responsibility for the lawsuit, stands up to his father and claims that Mexicans stole the property his father is suing for. Sutter exits the stage disguised in his son’s clothes, fumbling with the tie, to escape the angry mob that eventually burns down the office and all its legal documents. Whether Sutter lost everything he owned or never owned anything in the first place, no one will allow him to singlehandedly throw the existence of the state of California into jeopardy. For Cendrars, Sutter is suing not for money but for justice; for Arx, Suter inflates prices to rob miners of their gold and seeks to fleece California of its assets.
Landward. After many years, a friend and I return to northern California, where we both attended college. We drive to Sutter Creek in the car that belonged to my father, recently deceased, a citizen of Basel whose name kept changing and who kept moving west, until, like Sutter, he landed in California. We learn that Sacramento, where together with schoolchildren we visit Sutter’s Fort, is now part of the greater Bay Area and that Amador County, with over thirty wineries, is supplanting Sonoma. When I mention Sutter, I am asked whether I mean Sutter Home. The winery, founded in 1874 by a Swiss-German man, John Thomann, still advertises “a fair product for a fair price.” The most recent Swiss biographer of Sutter first encounters his biographical subject on a bottle of Sutter Home in the Sutter Grill in a hotel restaurant in the Zürich airport. Although there are Sutter County, Sutter Creek, Sutter Buttes, General Sutter Inn, Sutter Grill, and Sutter Home, there is no mention of Sutter in the Oxford History of the American West.
New Glarus, Wisconsin (1845)
* * *
“Switzerland’s Tiniest, Most Distant Canton”
Herbert O. Kubly (1915–96)
Herbert Kubly, the grandson of Swiss immigrants, was born on the Kubly Family Farm in New Glarus. A noted author and playwright, Kubly’s first book, American in Italy, won the National Book Award in 1956. Kubly also authored ten other books and countless short stories, travel articles and plays and served as Time Magazine music editor from 1945–47.
Wisconsin Historical Society marker,
erected in front of New Glarus City Hall, 1999
ANNE HERRMANN (AH): When I first discovered your Swiss American memoir, I thought, “I am not alone. I have found a precursor.”
HERBERT KUBLY (HK): You have brought me back as a ghost.
AH: It was pure chance.
HK: You have brought me back although I never wanted to come back. Not once I left New Glarus in search of what I thought was America. My first stop was Pittsburgh, where I am tempted to say I was born.
AH: That is before you discovered that your actual birth in New Glarus had been recorded in Glarus, Switzerland.
HK: I join the police beat for the Sun-Telegraph and end up the art critic. I eventually do the culture beat, which means attending concerts, interviewing opera singers, and accompanying painters on their weekends in the mountains of Pennsylvania.
AH: And yet, you remain the Wisconsin farm boy, you retain “the soul of a peasant” (Kubly, An American in Italy).
HK: I grow up speaking Swiss-German in a village where 90 percent of the inhabitants are Swiss or of Swiss descent.
AH: I grow up speaking Swiss-German because that is the language my parents, recent immigrants, speak to one another.
HK: I resign my position at the New York Herald Tribune to have one of my plays produced on Broadway. I begin teaching at the University of Illinois as an associate professor of playwriting, which becomes the occasion for my first novel, The Whistling Zone (1963). I volunteer for Adlai Stevenson, who fails to win the 1952 presidential election.
AH: In 1951, the year I am born, you take your first trip to Switzerland. For the first time in four generations, someone in your family returns to Elm. In seventy-four years, your father has never left the farm. “Who walks on his own land walks with God” is one of his favorite Swiss sayings.
HK: My ventures into anonymous group journalism, the commercial theater, marriage, all end in defeat. I suffer a profound sense of failure. I am urged to write and encouraged to live abroad. I decide to move to Italy.
AH: In 1956 Carl Van Vechten takes your photograph. In 1996 the New York Times publishes your obituary. The Wisconsin Historical Society has erected a commemorative marker.
HK: All markers of ghostliness.
AH: In December 2010 I find a “Book in Time Book Review” of An American in Italy for an online travel magazine. The reviewer appreciates the book’s historical specificity concerning the years following World War II, about which, he confesses, he knows very little. He considers the book’s pejoratives and political opinions somewhat outdated. He finds the imagined conversation between your American self and your newly found Italian self
a bit strained, although significant. He rates it “one of the top travel books of all time.”
Herbert Kubly, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1956 (courtesy Carl Van Vechten Trust and Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Libraries)
HK: I call him Esposito, that Italian self, “the name given by Neopolitans to foundlings.” I wonder whether to leave him in Italy or to take him back to America. He insists on coming with me. He claims I will be lonely without him, that we understand each other, in spite of the fact that he is a “citizen of a land that is Latin, pagan, Catholic and poor,” and I am from a “country whose culture is Anglo-Saxon, puritan, Protestant and rich.” He convinces me that Americans, as the “world’s greatest humanitarians, but as very poor humanists,” need Italy, and thus him (Kubly, An American in Italy).
AH: The book, considered too sympathetic to communism, is banned from libraries by the U.S. State Department. The pastor of the church you attend as a boy declares all of your books “immoral.”
HK: You’re resurrecting me as some kind of renegade, my books long forgotten, out of print, no longer read.
AH: I’m introducing you as my literary precursor. Native’s Return: An American of Swiss Descent Unmasks an Enigmatic Land and People chronicles twenty-five years of visits to Switzerland, including the centenary re-creation of Thomas Cook’s first group tour— published as Miss Jemima’s Swiss Journal in 1963—which you join as a representative for Life.
HK: I return to several places numerous times. I see myself as the wanderer “who comes back periodically and sees only change” (Kubly, At Large).
AH: This book is also a “chronicle of confrontation” (Kubly, Native’s Return), not with a newly acquired Italian self but with a Swiss self you struggle to make peace with.
Coming Out Swiss Page 17