How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [97]
Not only in the courts but in the streets, the forces of organization were increasingly challenging Sutter’s claims. The squatters now formed themselves into a political association:
Whereas, the evidence that the land in Sacramento County belongs to the United States is becoming clear and more positive everyday.…
Resolved, that we will hold our hold [sic] peaceably, if we can—forcibly, if we must—till a decision shall be had upon this question in the Supreme Court of the United States.
Resolved, that if the bail of an arrested squatter be refused, simply because the bondsman is not a landholder under Capt. Sutter, we shall consider all executions issued in consequence thereof as acts of illegal force and shall act accordingly.6
Sutter’s claims ultimately made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the decorum of which was also disrupted by his disregard for boundaries. Two attorneys claimed to be his representative. Once resolved, the legal arguments—involving “conveyances,” “petitions for surplus,” and “parol evidence”—decorously masked the fact that they had been the cause of bloodshed and death in Sacramento. In February 1859 the Supreme Court announced its ruling. It affirmed Sutter’s claim to his original land grant by Governor Alvarado but rejected his second (and twice as large) claim. That claim was based on Governor Micheltorena having sweepingly cleared any rival claims, in return for Sutter’s vow of loyalty to Mexican President Santa Anna.
The decision caused the collapse of Sutter’s shaky finances. His remaining hope was to find a means of keeping his home and the farmland on which it sat. Relief came in 1864, when California provided him with a pension of $250 per month.
Through it all, Sutter remained unchanged. In 1865 a discharged soldier whom he had hired to do odd jobs was caught stealing. Sutter, ever the lord of the manor, ordered the man flogged—as illegal under American law as it had been when he’d done the same under Mexican law. This time Sutter paid a price, similarly without regard to the boundaries of law. “The old adobe residence of General Sutter … together with its valuable contents, was destroyed by fire on Wednesday morning, the 21st,” San Francisco’s Evening Bulletin reported. “The fire was the work of an incendiary [arsonist], supposed to be a discharged soldier, who had been hanging about the premises the past few days.”
With everything in ashes, the Sutters left California, relocating in Lititz, Pennsylvania. Sutter spent his remaining years seeking to salvage something of the fortune that had slipped through his fingers. Shuttling between Lititz and Washington, DC, he had entreaties to Congress prepared on his behalf. “Now in his old age, and in a state of absolute penury,” one such plea stated, “he asks not for one cent for such aid as he rendered to his adopted and profoundly honored government in the extension of its domain to the borders of the Pacific Ocean, and … the untold treasures of California. He asks only that the government shall secure to him so much of its unsold public lands as it has caused to be unjustly taken from him, or its equivalent in money.”7
Every new Congress, over a period of fifteen years, considered another of his appeals. While in Washington continuing his efforts in 1880, Sutter died at the age of seventy-eight. Congress no longer had to decide what it thought about John A. Sutter.
ARIZONA, NEW MEXICO
JAMES GADSDEN
Government Aid to Big Business
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