How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [95]
An alcade was the Mexican government’s chief executive and judicial officer for a municipality. Sutter did not possess this authority. He did, however, possess a personality ideally suited for commerce with travelers. A March 1849 item in the magazine Home Journal reveals a good deal of his gregarious character:
Captain Sutter … was one of the officers of the Swiss Guard in the Revolution of July during the reign of Charles X. After this Revolution, he emigrated to the United States.… Capt. Sutter is kind, hospitable, and generous.… Surrounded as he was, on his first settling in this country, by tribes of wild Indians, he has by kindness and just dealing, attached them to his interest.… They, for their food and a pay from four to six dollars per month, man his fort, work his farms and mills, and do all the labor generally required in the new settlement.
Actually, Sutter had been neither a captain nor a Swiss Guard. He had been a sublieutenant in the local reserves. He also appears to have misled the correspondent regarding labor-management relations. He may have paid his Indian workers $4 to $6 a month during the Gold Rush, when labor was scarce in every enterprise other than mining. Before that, however, American dollars were a rarity in what was still Mexican California. So too, for that matter, were pesos in tribal transactions, since payment was generally made in goods.
Still, as the correspondent reports, Sutter did have a character befitting a lord of the manor. To one Indian caught stealing, he imposed a sentence of twenty-fives lashes, which was duly carried out, despite the fact that Mexican law prohibited private citizens from exercising judicial functions.3 Mexican law enforcement, however, was 90 miles downriver in San Francisco.
In 1841 Sutter purchased the Russian-American Company’s coastal trading post known as Fort Ross (near present-day Jenner, California). He transported its movable goods and livestock to New Helvetia and held the distant Pacific Coast land as an investment. To finance the purchase, he borrowed from the Russian-American Company, using New Helvetia as collateral. He subsequently took out loans to finance his agricultural, ranching, fur-trapping, and distilling enterprises by putting up portions of his land as collateral, despite the fact that all his land was now mortgaged to the Russian-American Company. The common denominator in these and later transactions was the boundaries that contracts were written to stipulate. Sutter was not big on boundaries.
Loyalty, too, is a boundary, dividing certain actions one will and will not do. Sutter’s political loyalties were just as supple regarding that boundary. At the time, Mexico’s control of California was being challenged both by native-born californios (under the leadership of José Castro, General Vallejo, and Governor Alvarado) and by the United States. After Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna replaced Governor Alvarado with Manuel Micheltorena, the new governor sought to secure his authority by offering Sutter clear title to all his land in return for a vow of loyalty to Mexico. Sutter avowed it. When General Vallejo confronted Sutter regarding his action, Sutter avowed his loyalty to Vallejo.
After the Mexican War commenced in 1846, Sutter kept the Mexican military informed of events that came to his attention—until events tilted in favor of the U.S. forces. Sutter then sent a letter of support to General John C. Frémont. By adjusting his sails to the prevailing winds, Sutter spent the war years expanding his enterprises. For one such project, the construction of a lumber mill, he partnered with James Marshall, with Sutter providing the financing and Marshall overseeing construction. In Sutter’s diary entry for January 28, 1848, he wrote in his less than perfect English, “Marshall arrived in the evening. It was raining very