How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [94]
Though the dried-up town was later drowned by progress, Callville’s underwater ruins represent important American struggles—including those of a state (Utah) whose boundaries purposely never included it. Indeed, the boundary imposed on Brigham Young’s vision reveals a critical insight: national security became a boundary of religious freedom, a boundary extendable to other freedoms as well.
CALIFORNIA, NEVADA, ARIZONA
JOHN A. SUTTER
California: Boundless Opportunity
The hat must come off before the military general, the flag staff, and the church, and I preferred a country where I could keep mine on … where I should be absolute master.
—JOHN A. SUTTER1
On January 24, 1848, gold was discovered in California at Sutter’s Mill. The discovery determined the way California would be shaped. Had it not been for John A. Sutter, gold would still have been discovered. Sutter was just lucky—or, as it turned out, unlucky.
Like a moth to a flame, Sutter was attracted to fragile boundaries: geographic, social, and contractual. Born in northern Switzerland, he served in the Swiss military, married, and went into the dry goods business. By the time he was thirty, he had five children, was deeply in debt, and had lost control of his business to his mother-in-law, who had financed it. With the help of his wife, Sutter secretly sold off the store’s inventory and fled, arriving in Missouri in 1834. There he established a similar business, became an American citizen, fell deeply into debt, and fled the day before he’d been summoned to appear in court.
During the Missouri years and in the year that followed, Sutter’s business pursuits took him to Santa Fe, Oregon, Hawaii, and California. Taken together, these destinations tell us something of his instincts. At the time, none of these locations was within the United States (though it shared, and disputed, Oregon with England). All of them, however, became part of the United States within the next ten years. Sutter, of course, could not have known this. What he could have known was that they were jurisdictionally weak.
John A. Sutter (1803-1880) (photo credit 27.1)
Arriving in California in 1839, he sought permission from the Mexican government to establish an agricultural colony. “Governor [Juan Bautista] Alvarado … was very glad to hear that … I intended to settle in the interior on the banks of the river Sacramento, because the Indians … would not allow white men, and particularly of the Spanish origin, to come near them,” Sutter recorded in his diary. “I got … permission to select a territory wherever I would find it convenient.”
He selected territory at and around the juncture of the Sacramento and American Rivers, building his settlement’s initial structures slightly to the southeast, above the flood plain, and naming it New Helvetia (New Switzerland). Governor Alvarado may have been pleased about the location, but Mexico’s regional military commander, General Mariano Vallejo, was not. The area was too far in the interior for Vallejo’s forces to assert control. That fact suited Sutter, who sought a place where he need not remove his hat to anyone. It also suited him that the location was ripe for business, perched along a route used by pioneers heading to the Oregon Territory.
Adding to General Vallejo’s concern was the fact that Sutter’s initial colony was non-Hispanic, consisting of five American and German men, eight to ten Hawaiians (two of whom were, according to Sutter, wives), one bulldog, and three cannons. The bulldog and cannons provided a measure of security from hostile Indians, but Vallejo knew they could also provide protection from Mexican forces.
Sutter became well known even before gold was discovered at his mill. His importance rated inclusion in an 1844 report to the State Department. “Augustus Sutter, alcade of the new town of New Helvetia … is a Swiss, and now a citizen of Mexico, and obtained from the