How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [96]
Four days later, Sutter traveled to the site to see for himself. This may seem blasé, but there had been discoveries of gold before in California and each had turned out to be insignificant. By the time he arrived, continual findings of gold suggested that this one could be big.
But there was a hitch. The mill was not on Sutter’s land. He and Marshall promptly leased the land and surrounding area from the Yalisumni Indians, making no mention of the gold. The Yalisumnis made no mention of not being the tribe to whom Mexico had accorded the land.
Over the next year, more than 80,000 people flooded into the region. Sutter’s debts had left him poorly positioned to profit from the gold or from providing supplies to the prospectors. To make matters worse, their arrival caused Sutter’s lax attitude toward boundaries to boomerang, as evidenced by an announcement he published in July 1849:
NOTICE TO SQUATTERS
All persons are hereby cautioned not to settle without my permission on any land of mine in this territory. Said land is bounded as follows:
What followed was a lengthy and precise stipulation of boundaries. But Sutter’s notice went unheeded due to jurisdictional weakness—the very element that had drawn him to this region. With the Mexican War just ended, Congress had not yet established a territorial government, and the military’s forces were depleted by soldiers deserting for the gold fields.
Sutter’s land claims
Unfortunate as the squatters were for Sutter, something worse was arriving in their wake: jurisdictional strength. California’s statehood convention in 1849 marked the imminent establishment of state and federal courts that would become the arena of his undoing.
The statehood convention also established California’s borders, and the debates regarding those borders were intense. Two big issues were at stake. Slavery was the more urgent of the two, and its advocates sought to create two states: a Northern and a Southern California—one free, the other slave. The second issue was water. California had very little of it in its south unless it located its border at the Rocky Mountains in order to include the Colorado and Gila Rivers. Such a border, however, would create a huge state. Opponents advocated a border just beyond the gold-filled Sierra Nevada Mountains, extending south to the Colorado River and along that river to the Gulf of California.
Among the delegates to the convention was Sutter, at whose mill all this had begun. Now out of his element, he spoke briefly only once during the proceedings, adding his support to the majority preference: a single state with the more modest eastern border.
Defining California: four proposals
Meanwhile, the Russian-American Company commenced legal action to foreclose on New Helvetia owing to Sutter’s many missed payments. The crisis was averted by the arrival of Sutter’s eldest son, August (soon followed by the rest of the family, from whom Sutter had been apart for twenty years). To delay foreclosure, Sutter transferred title to all his property to August. August proceeded to have plans drawn up for a town in the squatter-populated area at the juncture of the rivers. He named it Sacramento. Sutter objected vehemently to the plan, both because it was in a floodplain and because he had been trying to sell lots for a town of Sutterville, located on higher ground three miles below the juncture.4 But demand was so high for real estate at the point of entry, August was able to pay off all his father’s debts. Sutter then invested in gold mines, using as collateral property that was now in his son’s name.5
Sutter’s tangled title claims soon became a gold mine for lawyers, representing or suing not only Sutter but also those who had bought land from him to which his title was dubious. The Chicago Tribune reported in July 1858:
Judge Hoffman, of the United States