Gold: the marvellous history of General John Augustus Sutter

by Blaise Cendrars

  At last, they reach Evans' Pass, the great fault of the South. They are on the summit of the great rampart that separates the United States from the territories of the West, on the frontier, 7,000 feet above sea level, 960 miles from Fort Independence.

  And now, onward!

  There is no longer a beaten track.

  There are still 1,400 miles to go from here to the mouth of the Oregon, on the Pacific.

  Onward! They must find their own way, since there is no track to follow.

  On the 1st of August, they arrive at Fort Hall. The commanding officer is anxious to detain them. The Redskins are on the warpath. But Sutter wants to push on. They have already been through the territories of so many warring tribes ! They set out again on the 4th of August. An escort accompanies them for the first three days.

  On the 16th of August, they reach Fort Boise, where the Hudson Bay Company has a large warehouse. Captain Ermatinger, having rejoined his post, leaves them there. Two of the women stay behind to work for the Company store. The remnant of the little band continues on its way through country infested with Kooyutt Indians. There has been a terrible famine, the Indians are harpooning salmon, even though it is the close season. They are savage and menacing. The rivers swarm with their canoes.

  Sutter and his companions cross the region of giant pine-forests and, at the end of September, reach Fort Vancouver, which is a great centre for the fur trade. The missionaries have finally arrived. The last of the women has died of the hardships en route.

  Now Sutter is alone.

  12

  A determined man is always welcome in this lost outpost at the extremity of the American continent and Sutter is not without charm. He receives a number of advantageous offers but refuses them all, a prey to his obsession.

  He wants to go to California.

  But today, so close to his goal, he once again finds himself faced with apparently insurmountable obstacles.

  The advice of the men at the post is unanimous. The overland journey is impossible. The Apache Indians have donned their war-paint. Only recently, they have massacred a party of bear-hunters who had ventured into the high valleys of the Cascades. There is only one way to reach California, and that is by sea. But there are no boats, and navigation is always perilous in these ocean latitudes. It is true, however, that a sailing-ship could make the voyage in three weeks.

  Sutter does not wait to hear any more. He goes down to the waterfront. A three-masted barque is anchored in the river. She is the Columbia on her way to the Sandwich Islands. 'All roads lead to Rome,' as old Haberposch would have said. Sutter comes to an arrangement with the skipper, negotiates his passage and, on the 8th of November, when the Columbia weighs anchor, he is in the process of fixing up his sleeping-quarters on deck.

  * * *

  FOURTH CHAPTER

  * * *

  13

  Sutter is hammering in a nail on which to hang up his hammock made of bark. As he is standing on tiptoe and straining upward, his trousers are stretched tight and a button pops off his braces. It is a brass button. It rolls along the deck. At once, a hideous yellowish dog throws itself upon it and brings it back to him. This is Beppo, or Beppino, a kind of sheep-dog that used to belong to Maria, the woman who died of exhaustion under the sequoia trees of Snake River in Idaho. Maria was a Neapolitan. And, in all his four years in America, this is the only thing that Sutter has acquired: this circus dog manqué, that does tricks and smokes a pipe with the sailors.

  The long crossing is uneventful.

  The ship is under full sail on a south-south-westerly course.

  On the 30th of November, at around five in the evening, the sunset is ominously grey, darkened still further by masses of black cloud, but next morning the weather is fine again and the storm-jib and the fore-topmast staysail are set.

  In the early hours of December the 4th, the wind is raging, the seas high. By eight o'clock, the gale has become even fiercer. Mounting seas wash repeatedly over the badly-caulked deck. Water pours into the storeroom and swamps the ship's stores, crates of biscuits, sacks of potatoes, rice, sugar, buckwheat, dried cod and bacon, constituting three months' supplies. The eight-man crew remain at their posts all that day and throughout the following night. By daylight temporary repairs, which were carried out in darkness, are reinforced. There is considerable damage. The bitts, or vertical posts holding the bowsprit, have snapped off at deck-level. With the aid of a block and tackle, makeshift stays are rigged and the bowsprit braced as firmly as possible. At eleven o'clock at night, on the second day, the wind drops and veers abruptly to the north-east, soon bringing rain and heavy squalls in its wake. The sails are lowered and the tack changed. Squalls continue throughout the night.

  On the 7th of January, nothing to report except the sighting of a sperm whale. Dolphins and bonitos leap all round the vessel. The waves are not excessively high but the sea is very rough, for the waves are coming from two different directions and constantly break over the bows. Everyone is drenched.

  On the 11th of February, masses of sargasso, or gulf-weed, are noticed around the ship.

  On the 27th, they are in a region of flat calm, but the Columbia is shipping water and all hands are at the pumps. Dozens of flying fish lie stranded on the deck. Pumping-out is hard work. Water is coming in at the bows, extinguishing the galley-stoves. A strong current is carrying the ship off course, towards the east.

  On the 5th of March, they are again hove-to. Everyone is on deck. The sun is shining brightly, the leak has at last been stopped. The crew are happy, they are setting out tanks to collect the rain that is expected in the evening. There is no drinking water on board, no water to cook the food in.

  A lascar is talking: 'I've never seen coloured folks anywhere that dress in such elaborate style as they do in Paraguay. The Negresses and the mulattoes construct great scaffolds on their heads, planting high tortoise-shell combs and flowers and feathers in their frizzy hair. They always wear gaudy colours and their dresses have long trains and low-cut necklines. In that country, it's always carnival time. The . . .'

  Sutter is in his hammock. His dog is smoking. Now that the tanks are ready, the sailors are playing backgammon. A ship's boy, who has become Sutter's devoted admirer, is rocking the hammock.

  At midnight, the beneficent rain falls and the ship again makes headway in a gentle breeze. A little later, she sails in amongst the islands. As the moon is full, Sutter, from his swinging hammock, can contemplate the foliage of the palm trees and the latanias in flower.

  Sutter is enchanted by the voyage.

  Grandiose plans form in his mind. He has not wasted his time and has acquired a whole mine of information that will be of use to him. He has made the skipper and the crew talk. Now he has gained an insight into the morals and manners of California, the resources and the needs of this mysterious country, for these rough sailors have already loaded dozens of cargoes there, cargoes of planks, hides and talc. To their way of thinking, the two shores of the Pacific form but a single unit, for they do just as good a trade with the American Indians as they do with the natives of the islands; they have had as frequent dealings with the Spanish missionaries of Monterey as with the American missionaries of Honolulu. Sutter begins to get some conception of the prodigious future that awaits this vast and still unexploited part of the globe. As his plans and ideas enlarge in scope and grandeur, so they become more precisely detailed. They go far beyond anything he could have imagined, and yet they are possible. Realizable. A splendid place is there for the taking. A coup d'état. He has both the taste for such an enterprise and the strength to risk it.

  Meanwhile, he disembarks empty-handed in the capital, Honolulu, and presents his letters of recommendation (given to him by officials of the Hudson Bay Company in Fort Vancouver) to the trading post there.

  Here, too, he finds a warm welcome.

  14

  Honolulu is a bustling capital.

  The bulk of the population is made up, essentia
lly, of maritime adventurers, mostly deserters from the whaling fleets. Naturally, every race in the world is represented there, but Basque and Yankee elements predominate. Sutter is enthusiastically adopted by every social class and he has the good fortune to run into some old acquaintances from New York. Together with them, he joins in several speculative ventures, buying up cargoes of copra, mother-of-pearl and tortoiseshell that are lying out in the roadsteads, and he is lucky enough to amass a small fortune very quickly.

  During this period, the idea comes to him that he will employ a labour force of Kanakas, the Melanesians of New Caledonia, on his plantations of the future. It will take a lot of muscle-power to exploit California and reclaim the immense territories of the American West. Africa is too far away, and the Atlantic slave-trade is hampered by too much legislation these days. It is no longer possible to make a profit. Besides, it would be amusing to cock a snook at international regulations and avoid the reciprocal boarding rights between ships by starting the slave-trade in unsuspected latitudes. Cargoes of islanders could be forcibly embarked. The Pacific must learn to be self-sufficient.

  He has already given his partners just a hint of his grandiose Californian schemes; now he broaches this new idea with them. That same evening, in a tavern, they sign the articles of constitution of Sutter's Pacific Trading Company, whose emblem is a black bishop's crozier surrounded by seven red dots on a white background. For his part, Sutter puts up 75,000 Dutch florins. The first consignment of Kanakas must arrive in eighteen months' time at the latest; they will disembark in a certain Californian bay whose whereabouts Sutter reveals in confidence. In the legal documents, his future possessions appear under the name of New Helvetia.

  Once the covenants are signed, they indulge in an orgy of rum.

  Now that this business is settled, he must think about departure, but that is no simple matter.

  Sutter is in a hurry.

  15

  In the roadsteads, there was not a single vessel destined for the ports of Mexico, nor one that was willing to take him to San Diego. There was only a Russian ship, ready to sail for Sitka, a Russian trading centre far up the American coast, at the northern extremity of the Pacific.

  The Russians, fanning out from Kamtchatka, were setting up numerous trading posts along the American coast. With the constant expansion of their empire, they were coming into collision with the growing power of the United States to the east; to the south, they had already reached the Mexican coast, where they had a number of colonies. Russian schooners plied regularly between Sitka and Mexico.

  Sutter does not hesitate, he embarks at once and sails as far north as the Aleutian Islands. Moreover, he gets on very well with the Russians; he establishes a rapport with them and assures himself of their support. But he has no intention of spending the rest of his life in Sitka. He leaves at the first opportunity.

  Aboard a swift schooner, he travels south, hugging the coast of Alaska, crossing the whaling-grounds, passing the mouth of the Oregon - well out to sea this time - moving further and further down the coast till, at last, he lands on the beach of San Francisco.

  Sutter is alone on the shore. The high billows of the Pacific roll up to his feet and expire. The sailing-ship that landed him here is already out of sight, heading for Monterey. Foaming waves succeed one another, slowly, in parallel lines. At some distance from the water's edge, the sand takes on a greyish hue; ceaselessly battered by the waves, it is perfectly smooth and of a very solid consistency, offering the traveller a most convenient roadway that owes nothing to the efforts of man, and which stretches as far as the eye can see. A plant with long sprawling stems is the only thing that grows here and even that is sparse. Countless seagulls are lined up at the edge of the ocean, waiting for the waves to bring them their food. Other birds, whose name he does not know, are running along the beach at lightning speed, their heads outstretched in a line with their backs. Sea-swallows land and immediately take flight again. Some black birds are strolling up and down, always in pairs. There is also a large bird with feathers of a dark grey mingled with a paler shade; its beak is like an eagle's and it has a long horizontal plume at the back of its head.

  When Sutter starts walking, he crushes a great many rose-coloured vesicular molluscs, which burst with a loud plop.

  * * *

  FIFTH CHAPTER

  * * *

  16

  Ever since its discovery, California had always been linked with the crown of Spain. It formed one of the provinces of the Spanish Viceregency of Mexico. Neither its extent nor its configuration were known with any degree of exactitude. In 1828, when it finally became necessary to mark a northern boundary to this immense country, a straight line, at right angles to the ocean, was drawn on an atlas: it started at Cape Mendocino and finished at Evans' Pass, the great southern fault of the Rocky Mountains - a straight line more than fourteen hundred miles long.

  Baja California is a peninsula, almost an island, that juts out into the Vermilion Sea; although well-known, it is an unproductive, scarcely-inhabited region; as for Upper California, further north, it has hardly been explored. It is known that a mountainous chain runs the whole length of the coast and that, behind it, there is a second range, a little higher, which likewise runs from north to south; also, that there is yet a third range behind it, lying parallel to the two preceding chains. This is the Sierra Nevada, with its formidable peaks. The valleys between these three mountain ranges consist, in part, of vast plains. Behind the sierra stretches the great Californian desert, as far as the edges of the Great Basin, and beyond the great Salt Lake, the prairie and the steppes begin again.

  In 1839, this bipartite territory forms a province of the Republic of Mexico. It is administered by the Governor, Alvarado. The seat of government is Monterey, on the mainland. It has a population of about 35,000 inhabitants, of whom 5,000 are whites and the rest Indians.

  17

  Imagine a strip of land running from London to the oases of the Sahara and from St Petersburg to Constantinople. This strip of land is entirely coastal. Its land-mass is considerably larger than that of France. The North is exposed to the most rigorous winters, the South is tropical. A long, deep canyon, which cuts through two chains of mountains and divides this strip of land into two exactly equal parts, connects a great inland lake with the sea. This lake could accommodate all the fleets in the world. Two majestic rivers, which have irrigated the regions of the interior to the north and to the south, come to pour their waters into it. These are the Sacramento and the Joaquin. This is all we need remember about this vast province of California, and it is this crude sketch of it that Sutter consults in his notebook.

  He has just paddled up the channel and crossed the lake in a little pirogue with a triangular sail.

  He sets foot on land in front of the poverty-stricken Mission Post. A Franciscan, consumed with fever, comes to meet him.

  He is in San Francisco.

  Fishermen's huts made of beaten earth. Blue-skinned pigs wallowing in the sun, lean sows with dozens of piglets.

  This is what John Augustus Sutter has come to conquer.

  18

  The moment is particularly well-chosen.

  Although it is far from the political centre of the world, and outside the mainstream of contemporary history at the beginning of the nineteenth centuiy, California has just come through a series of acute crises. Events that may be no more than a nine days' wonder in the metropolis can often have the most terrible and far-reaching consequences in countries at the far ends of the earth; the repercussions may transform the old way of life from top to bottom or shatter the new and still fragile civic order.

  California's position was extremely precarious. Its very existence was in jeopardy.

  The Mission settlements, which the Jesuits had built throughout the territory of Old California as in all the other countries overseas, had passed into the hands of the Franciscans when the Jesuits were expelled in 1767. The Franciscans had undertaken the
colonization of New California, where the Jesuits had never penetrated.

  Little by little, making their way slowly up the coast, the Fathers had established themselves in eighteen posts which were no more than simple settlements at first, but which, in the course of a few years, had become important estates surrounded by prosperous villages.

  Everywhere, the organization was the same and followed a single pattern.