by H. W. Brands
The Committee of Vigilance soon had opportunity to demonstrate its seriousness. On the evening of June 10 a store near the waterfront reported a small safe missing. Shortly thereafter a Sydney Duck named John Jenkins was seen leaving the neighborhood of the theft with an unwieldy and obviously heavy object slung over his back. On being accosted, he stole a boat and rowed out into the bay. Several other boats gave chase and eventually caught Jenkins, but not before he dumped his burden into the bay. The water, however, was shallow, and the object was retrieved; it proved to be the missing safe.
Jenkins was taken to the meeting room of the Vigilance Committee. The bell of the Monumental Engine Company sounded the alarm: two quick clangs, followed by a minute’s rest, then repeated. Some eighty members of the committee converged on the meeting place, and upon Jenkins. For two hours the committee weighed the evidence against the accused; at midnight it handed down the verdict and the sentence: guilty, and death by hanging. The condemned man was asked if he had a last wish. He requested, and received, a cigar and a glass of brandy. Shortly before one o’clock on the morning of June 11, Sam Brannan announced the verdict to the city at large. He inquired of the several hundred people gathered outside the informal courtroom whether they endorsed the judgment of the committee. “Great shouts of Ay! Ay! burst forth, mingled with a few cries of No!” recorded Frank Soulé.
Just before two o’clock, Brannan and other committee members brought the prisoner out for the execution. They marched him to the south end of the old adobe building at the northwest corner of the plaza. At this point the sheriff and some deputies made a feeble attempt to intervene. “They were civilly desired to stand back, and not delay what still was to be done,” Soulé wrote. The sheriff complied. The crowd, by now grown to more than a thousand, applauded by look and gesture as the committee completed its business. A noose was placed about Jenkins’s neck, and his arms were tied behind his back. The loose end of the rope was thrown over a beam projecting from the adobe building. Several men seized the rope and yanked it sharply, pulling Jenkins off his feet and hoisting him in the air. Within minutes he was dead. But those holding the rope didn’t let go, instead keeping the corpse high where all could see it. When the original hangmen tired, others took their place; the body was kept swinging till nearly dawn.
Later that morning the sheriff, his confidence somewhat restored with the coming of day and the dispersal of the crowd, ordered an inquest. Brannan was summoned as first witness. He defended the actions of the Vigilance Committee, irregular though they might have been. “I believe the man had a fair and impartial trial,” he declared. “He was tried before from sixty to eighty men. I believe the verdict of guilty was unanimous, and they came to the conclusion unanimously to hang him.” Asked how the jury was empaneled, Brannan responded, “They empaneled themselves.” How were the members of the committee selected? “A man is admitted to the committee on a motion by a friend who vouches for his character, and that he will devote a portion of his time to watching for burglars and other scoundrels.” Was secrecy involved in the selection? “I don’t know of any other secrecy than that of an honest man.” Then perhaps Mr. Brannan wouldn’t mind revealing the names of the committee members? “I object to give the names of any of the committee. I have understood that threats have been made against their property and lives. I have heard the threats made, have heard it said that my own house would be burned. Threats have come to me from the prisoners in the county prison that I should not live ninety days.”
The next day the inquest board reported its finding that Jenkins had met his death “by violent means, by strangulation, caused by being suspended by the neck.” The responsible parties were members of “an association of citizens styling themselves a Committee of Vigilance.” The board went on to identify Brannan and nine others as leaders of this committee. However, the inquest board at this time declined to recommend legal action against Brannan or the others.
Lest the board change its mind, the Vigilance Committee passed a resolution condemning the “invidious verdict”—such as it was—of the inquest board. The resolution was signed by 184 members who claimed equal responsibility for Jenkins’s execution with Brannan and those named by the board.
The authorities remained aloof, if not intimidated, while the Vigilance Committee took up another case. James Stuart, like the other Ducks, had come to California from Australia; since his arrival he had been implicated in numerous robberies, murders, and lesser crimes. Seized by the committee, he was tried and condemned to hang. At first he affected unconcern, declaring the whole business “damned tiresome.” But en route to the scaffold, in this case a derrick at the end of a dock, he nearly fainted from fear. His captors carried him the rest of the way and supported him as the hemp entwined his neck. “He did not struggle much,” remarked Soulé. “After hanging a few seconds his hat fell off, and a slight breeze stirred and gently waved his hair. This was a sorry spectacle—a human being dying like a dog, while thousands of erring mortals, whose wickedness only had not yet been found out, looked on and applauded! But necessity, which dared not trust itself to feelings of compassion, commanded the deed and unprofitable sentiment sunk abashed. Reason loudly declared—So perish every villain who would hurt his neighbor! and all the people said Amen!”
10
Sutter’s Last Stand
San Francisco’s troubles hardly ended with the emergence of the Vigilance Committee; indeed, the assertion of the committee’s extralegal authority simply stored up problems for the future. And California’s leading city was hardly alone in its travails. A dozen towns of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, not to mention a hundred mining camps, faced many of the same problems of dislocation, overcrowding, fire, crime, and violence that made San Francisco such a raucous place during its first few years. Some of those communities confronted challenges San Francisco was spared. Low-lying Sacramento was regularly ravaged by flood and by a higher incidence of contagious disease than afflicted the better-drained, better-ventilated city on the bay. Several of the mining camps gave “Judge Lynch” a far freer hand than he enjoyed in San Francisco; Hangtown proudly took its name from this form of summary justice, rechristening itself as Placerville only after things calmed down.
Yet the local turbulence had a larger context, for even as San Francisco and the other communities struggled to gain their bearings, California sought to define itself as a state. California was unique in the speed with which it went from being foreign-owned and fairly empty to being American and brimmingly full. For half a century the norm for new states had been to serve apprenticeships as territories. But that norm was based on the premise that populating each new frontier was a slow business, and that the creation of state governments might be equally slow and deliberate. Nothing happened slowly in California after 1848; populating itself overnight, the land of gold skipped the territorial stage and went straight to statehood. Yet though straight, the process wasn’t straightforward. Most of the new Californians couldn’t be bothered with politics when gold glittered on the ground; they had come west not to squabble over a constitution but to get rich. Even so, those who did take time to squabble found plenty to squabble about.
PEOPLE WHO KNEW John Sutter before January 1848 had difficulty seeing him as a tragic figure. The resourceful Swiss appeared the epitome of survival, one more likely to visit tragedy, or at least suffering, on others—his wife and children abandoned in Bern, the Indians who toiled as peons around New Helvetia—than to experience it himself. But the few years after the gold discovery overturned all manner of ideas about success and failure in California, and if some observers had difficulty feeling sorry for Sutter, he had no trouble feeling sorry for himself.
Sutter’s failure to persuade Richard Mason and William Sherman to ratify his claim to the land around Coloma was just the start of a series of setbacks. As the word of the gold on the American River spread, he found it impossible to keep his employees at the fort. The Mormons at Coloma fulfilled
their commitment to finish the sawmill before leaving for the “Mormon Diggings” downstream, but the mill didn’t cut much wood. High water on the South Fork—which had almost destroyed the mill before it was even completed—forced James Marshall to suspend sawing in the spring of 1848; by the time the water fell, no one in the area wanted to do anything but dig for gold.
Sutter succumbed to the temptation himself, after his feudal fashion. He led a troop of a hundred Indians and fifty Hawaiians into the foothills, where, according to his plan, they would do the digging and he would direct them and take the profits. The enterprise proved a fiasco. Other miners, adopting the individualistic attitude that characterized the early days in the diggings, resented Sutter’s communal approach. They forcibly resisted his attempts to claim mining rights based on the number of his employees, and assaulted his men, driving many of them off. Alcohol claimed some of the others, who got too drunk to work.
Alcohol claimed Sutter, too. He had always had a taste for spirits. Sherman, in his account of the Independence Day dinner at New Helvetia, wrote, “Before the celebration was over, Sutter was very ‘tight.’” When Sutter read Sherman’s account, he complained, “I was no more intoxicated than he. Men cannot drink liquor without feeling the effects of it. I believe it was in bad taste for an officer of the Army to partake of my hospitality and then make flippant remarks about it, accusing the host of drunkenness.” Sherman liked Sutter personally, and, learning of his host’s annoyance, he amended “very ‘tight’” to “enthusiastic” in the revised edition of his memoirs. Yet Sherman wasn’t the only one who noticed. A verse circulated in California:
I went to eat some oysters, along with Captain Sutter;
And he reared up on the table, and sat down in the butter.
In the leisurely days before the gold discovery, Sutter’s weakness for liquor wasn’t a particular problem. But under the press of the Gold Rush, it placed him at a severe disadvantage.
Sutter’s tippling revealed other character flaws—or, more precisely, traits of character that were ill-suited to the new circumstances. He had never been careful with money. He was a trusting soul, willing to wait when his debtors had cash-flow problems. In California before 1848, time was something everyone had plenty of, and personal relationships counted for more than the markings in a ledger book. But all that changed with the gold discovery. Time was money (as Pérez Rosales was repeatedly reminded), and, amid the flood of strangers, money was something that had to be watched very carefully. Sutter couldn’t manage the feat. Heinrich Leinhard, an old-country associate who became Sutter’s right-hand man at New Helvetia, remarked of the invaders, “Most miners were so greedy, treacherous and unreliable that no man’s life was safe. Law and order were unknown, fights occurred daily and anyone who could not protect himself with his fists was unfortunate. Every man carried a gun.” Sutter was simply out of his element. “He was so careless with his gold,” Leinhard said, “that I was amazed that all of it was not stolen, when he had so many men of questionable character among his associates.”
Within months, Sutter was forced to admit that mining wasn’t for him. He paid his remaining Indians and Hawaiians and returned to the fort. When he got there he discovered that the greed of the diggings had spread downstream. The newcomers slaughtered his cows and sheep for food; they cut his grain for their horses and mules; they dismantled his fences for firewood. Two hundred barrels for packing salmon were gone; likewise the fort’s cannons, church bells, and even the counterweights from the main gate. “There is a saying that men will steal everything but a milestone and a millstone,” Sutter recalled disconsolately. “They stole my millstones…. The country swarmed with lawless men. I was alone; there was no law.”
A MID THE THIEVES, however, one newcomer gave Sutter reason for hope. For fourteen years Sutter had had no contact with his family back in Switzerland. His creditors there attached what little property his wife possessed, and she and the children had to move in with her relatives. For a few years Annette Sutter awaited her husband’s letter saying that he had found his niche in the New World and that she and the children should join him. But no letter came, and eventually she realized that no letter would. Then, in 1848, the news arrived of gold in California. Not every report included the name of the man who sponsored the portentous sawmill, but some did, and Annette rediscovered her long-lost husband. Although she was too old to make the trip to California, her son August, seven at the time of his father’s departure and now twenty-one, was perfectly capable of the journey. With a kiss and what money she could spare, she sent him off to the land of gold to find his father and their salvation.
August reached San Francisco in September 1848. He doubtless was heartened to know that everyone had heard of his father; but he must have been shocked at what they had heard. Sutter’s reputation for heavy drinking was accompanied by reports of the most undignified behavior at New Helvetia. According to one of Sutter’s neighbors, New Helvetia was a place “where orgies and debauchery occurred as regularly as Saturday comes after Friday.” By everything August learned, his father had never intended to return to Switzerland, nor to send for his wife or children. August could only wonder how he would be received by a father who had deserted and evidently forgotten him. Beyond the emotional issues were the financial ones: every second person August met seemed to have a claim against his father. August’s hopes fell further on arrival at New Helvetia, where, with his father gone gold-digging, the interlopers were busy dismantling the Sutter estate.
When Sutter returned from the mountains, father and son had a teary reunion. Sutter offered excuses for not writing or sending for his family; August, wanting to believe his father, evidently accepted them. The two considered how they might solve the old man’s money problems, and at the urging of some of Sutter’s associates, who hoped (partly for their own sake) to keep his creditors at bay, Sutter signed over most of his property to his son. Neither the Sutters nor the advisers seriously expected to fool anyone; they chiefly sought to buy time—the time Sutter had always required to do business, and which was in such short supply at present.
Sutter’s principal problem, besides his boozing and a temperament maladapted to the changed circumstances, was his lack of cash flow. His assets were substantial, in that he (or now August) owned a large amount of real estate at New Helvetia and in the vicinity. By everyone’s reckoning, that real estate would be worth a great deal of money as Sacramento, the town that was already emerging there, developed. Sutter, assessing his situation in these terms, was encouraged enough to leave his affairs in August’s hands and head back to the mountains. Although his mining venture had proved unprofitable, he had established a store at Coloma (in the double cabin built for Jennie Wimmer’s family, since departed), and it was doing a brisk business. Besides, although he apparently didn’t confide this to August, he had an Indian mistress in the mountains to whom he was eager to return.
So off he went to Coloma—only to be marooned there when winter snows rendered the road back down impassable. In his absence, Sacramento grew rapidly, but on land he (or August) did not own. “Had I not been snowed in at Coloma,” he declared later, “Sacramento never, never would have been built.” This was debatable, in light of Sutter’s demonstrated ineptitude at property management. But regardless of the cause, what quickly became California’s second city arose on the doorstep of Sutter’s Fort, and Sutter could do little except gnash his teeth and drown his sorrows. He did try to promote an alternative townsite a few miles downstream. And though Sutterville had some significant advantages over Sacramento—the chief one being several additional feet of elevation— Sacramento was where the ferry crossed the river, it was closer to the mouth of the American River, and, ironically, it was more convenient to Sutter’s Fort, with the associated stores, shops, and stables. Consequently, the real estate boom bypassed Sutter, who had only the grim satisfaction of standing on dry ground at the stillborn Sutterville when spring floodwaters inundated Sacramen
to, as they regularly did.
WHATEVER HIS PERSONAL foibles, the larger reason for Sutter’s inability to capitalize on the gold strike was his failure of vision. He possessed a vision for California, but it was based on conditions ante aurum. The agricultural empire he created at New Helvetia probably would have thrived, and he grown old and rich, if not for the stampede to the mines. His empire, his vision, required cheap labor (the corollary of ample time), which vanished in the twinkling of the gold in the bed of the American River. Sutter lacked the driving audacity, the willingness to risk all in the service of a personal El Dorado, that marked the successful entrepreneurs of the dawning age of gold. New Helvetia was the vision of the past, El Dorado of the future.
In regard to vision, Sam Brannan had everything Sutter lacked. It was significant that Brannan’s business was business—that is, trade—rather than land, for it prepared him for the commodification—that is, treating everything as for sale—that pervaded life in California after 1848. It was also significant that Brannan could be as cunning as anyone west of the Sierras. Brannan cajoled and threatened August Sutter into supporting Sacramento against his own father’s competing Sutterville; then he turned around and threatened to abandon August, and stuck with the son only after extorting two hundred town lots from him.
Brannan and the elder Sutter shared a taste for brandy, but little else. In a murder trial at Sacramento, Brannan volunteered his services as judge. Sutter was a juror. The two passed a bottle back and forth, engaging alternately in judicial and juroral misconduct. Brannan was convinced that the defendant was guilty, and at one point leaped up to make an argument supporting the prosecution. The defendant—a man locals called “the Philosopher”—objected. “Hold on, Brannan!” he said. “You’re the judge.” “I know it,” Brannan replied, “and I am prosecuting attorney, too!” At another point in the trial, Sutter, who had known and liked the deceased, was angered to hear the defense cast aspersions on his late friend. Rising unsteadily in the jury box, he lodged an objection. “Gentlemen,” he said, “the man is dead and has atoned for his faults, and I will not sit here and hear his character traduced.” Sutter thereupon grabbed the brandy bottle and headed for the door. Brannan—perhaps from prospective thirst as much as from regard for courtroom procedure—ordered him to sit down. Not surprisingly, the case ended in a mistrial. (Tried a second time, the Philosopher was acquitted.)
