Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,092

This is the grave of John Sutter.

Born in Kandern, Baden, in what is now Germany, in 1803, Johann Sutter came from a middle-class family. His father was a foreman at a lumber mill. He was probably destined for a slightly better life than that. He got to go to school, was an apprentice in a printing house, and then was a clerk in clothing stores. Then he decided to open a store. He had gotten married and his wife had some money. But he was terrible at this and the money ran out and the debts exploded and, facing debtors prison, he bailed on his wife and what was then five children and fled to the United States in 1834.

Now known as John Sutter, he decided to have a lot of adventures. He traveled all over the place. He went to St. Louis and went with a group of traders over the Santa Fe Trail to New Mexico, then part of Mexico. Then he went back to Missouri and settled for a bit in what would later become Kansas City. In 1838, he went with one of the fur trader-missionary trips across what would later be the Oregon Trail to Fort Vancouver. He wanted to get to California, but before he did that, he went to Hawaii. It seems the idea was to take the ship from Fort Vancouver to Hawaii and there to California, since there weren’t any boats at this time from Oregon to California. That’s not really surprising, there wasn’t anyone to take them and the British and Spanish weren’t exactly trading partners out there. But before he could get to California, he was stuck in Hawaii for several months. He spoke several languages and was popular in the European and American social circles there. So he was asked to take provisions to Sitka, then owned by the Russians, in what is today Alaska. He took a ship up there, stayed for a month, drank a lot with the Russian governor, and only then found his way to San Francisco Bay and up the Sacramento River, finaly arriving in 1839.

That was quite an adventure. This very ambitious man wanted an empire of his own in California. Mexico was weak and so such things were possible. The Mexican government did not shy from giving land grants to Americans who would promise to settle the region. This proved not very wise, as they would find out from slaving Texans who then rejected Mexican rule, but it was a sign of the weakness they felt on their northern frontiers. Sutter made a deal with the governor of California. Sutter would get a nice land grant of quality land, about 48,000 acres, in exchange for keeping out Americans. Since Sutter knew Americans but was German, that could make sense. But Sutter was not an honest agent. He wanted settlers on his land because he wanted to profit off it. He liked Americans. He did not like Mexicans.

So in 1839, Sutter began his new settlement. The main fort was completed in 1841, near what is today Sacramento. He needed labor. So he just enslaved Native Americans for it, common enough in California until well after the Civil War, when even northern sympathizers in California who hated African slavery were happy to enslave Native Americans. It was bad. Sutter used brutality and physical punishment to coerce this labor. Life got much worse for the indigenous people in the area when Sutter showed up. In fact, quite a few observers, including Europeans who showed up to write stories about this little known region, commented on just what a violent piece of shit Sutter was toward Native people. Beatings, starvation, dying of exposure, all the terrible things.

While all this was happening, Mexico came under the eye of the United States. James Polk decided to steal half of Mexico to expand slavery. California was part of this. There wasn’t that much action in California during the Mexican War. It just came under American control as there was no way the Mexicans could defend it, for the same reasons that they invited people such as Sutter in to begin with. Sutter was fine with it. He raised an American flag when he heard about it. By the time John C. Fremont got there heading American troops in California, it was up and that was good for him. He handed the fort over to Fremont, who handed it right back, sure he had a compliant German there.

Then, in 1848, gold was discovered on Sutter’s land. Honestly, for Sutter, this was a total disaster. He was excited–you’d better believe it. He wanted to be rich and now he could be as rich as any man ever, if he could control his lands. He could not. He tried to keep the gold a secret. That lasted about 5 minutes. Then people started flooding onto his lands. He couldn’t stop them. The Americans had no interest in protecting the land grants, even as they were legally guaranteed in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. But what were the Mexicans going to do, fight?

Sutter responded to everything he built be destroyed by the gold rush by deeding what was left of his holdings to his son, who proceeded to found the town of Sacramento, angering his father who wanted it in a different place. Given the floods of Sacramento, that probably would have been a good idea. Sutter spent the rest of his life defending his land grant rights. He sued Americans settling on his land, but in 1858, the Supreme Court overruled the grant’s validity entirely. In 1865, he went to Washington to lobby for himself and his interests. Finally, Congress granted him a $250 a month pension for compensation. He could live on that at least. But he was not satisfied and would not let it be.

Sutter was aging by this time. He had long ago remarried (not sure what happened to the wife back in Germany). They moved to the town of Lititz, Pennsylvania, which supposedly had good waters for health and a lot of Germans. Some of his grandchildren were with him and he wanted them to go through the style of good German schooling he did. He kept pushing for more compensation. There was a bill before Congress in 1880 that would have granted him a one-time payment of $50,000, which was a lot of money back then, well over a million today. Maybe not what he had lost or what he would have earned had he been able to defend his lands in 1849, but still. It was tabled when Congress ended. Two days later, Sutter died. He was 77 years old.

John Sutter is buried in Moravian Cemetery, Lititz, Pennsylvania.

If you would like this series to visit other Europeans who played a role in the American conquest of the West, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Auguste Chouteau is in St. Louis and Ceran St. Vrain is in Mora, New Mexico. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.