How the States Got Their Shapes Too

by Mark Stein

  Despite the venom in the article, it reported two facts that proved to be significant. It noted that the Brigham Young faction proposed “to remove all the Saints beyond the Rocky Mountains” and that the “mass of the Mormons appear to be disposed to adhere to Young and his party.” Indeed, the majority did opt for the path proposed by Young. The area around the Great Salt Lake had the advantages of being sparsely populated and outside the United States (the Southwest then still belonged to Mexico). Just as the Mormons were resettling, however, the United States won the Mexican War, and Young’s followers found themselves back inside the boundaries of the United States. Less than a year after that, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the west. Suddenly it was rush hour on the Mormon Trail. Before the year was out, California had become a state.

  Brigham Young (1801-1877) (photo credit 26.1)

  Mormon proposal for state of Deseret

  In response, Young organized a predominantly Mormon convention that sent Congress a proposal for a state of Deseret. It stipulated boundaries that encompassed all of the Great Basin between the Rockies and the Sierras and extended to include Southern California with its Pacific ports.

  Congress gave it a different border and a different name. Suspicion of the Mormon agenda had only increased with their migration outside the boundaries of the United States. With the U.S. acquisition of this land, the vast boundaries of the Mormons’ proposed state of Deseret further fed the fear that they might eventually declare independence and establish their own nation—right between California and the rest of the United States.

  In lieu of the state of Deseret, Congress created the Utah Territory. Its northern and southern boundaries are those that Utah possesses to this day, but at the time they extended westward from the crest of the Rockies to California. Because Utah was designated a territory rather than a state, its governorship became a presidential appointment rather than an elected office. President Zachary Taylor, however, prudently appointed Brigham Young.

  Fear that the Mormons might create a separate nation was not, however, as preeminent a national security concern as fear that slave states might create a separate nation. The town of Callville illustrated the connection between both controversies.

  In the years just before Callville was founded, the Democrats had been losing ground to a newly formed abolitionist party known as the Republicans. In 1854 Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas sought to cope with slavery (and propel himself to the presidency) by convincing Congress to enact a policy known as “popular sovereignty.” It removed the federal government from deciding where slavery would or would not be allowed, leaving the decision to the individual states and territories. The Mormons seized upon this principle to defend Utah’s right to allow polygamy (the practice was eventually abandoned in 1890 by the church’s main branch). The Democrats responded by, first, disagreeing, and second, making Mormon polygamy a campaign issue in the 1856 presidential election. In so doing, they hoped to disentangle themselves from the Mormons’ inconvenient logic and, by fanning fears regarding marriage and morality, to divert attention from their party’s highly nuanced position regarding slavery.

  They succeeded. The shift in attitudes was reflected in the nationwide publication The Saturday Evening Post. In 1849 the magazine published positive commentary regarding the proposed state of Deseret:

  The progress of the Mormon sect in this country, when duly considered, must be regarded as an extraordinary phenomenon of the times. From small beginnings they have gone on increasingly steadily, in spite of persecutions and hardships.… But the strangeness of the thing consists in the wonderful and rapid extension of a faith of which so little is known, and which had its origin in stories and devices apparently the most absurd that ever made mockery of human credibility. The converts to this faith, moreover, do not appear to belong to that class of enthusiasts that give way to hallucinations. The Mormons are a practical people; they are industrious, temperate, orderly. Wherever they plant themselves in the wilderness, the aspect of a cultivated region is soon visible.

  Following the 1856 election, the same magazine sounded the alarm:

  The accounts from Utah—or as the “saints” now insist on its being called, “Deseret”—are chock-full of fight.… It will be noticed by the threat relative to Jackson County, Missouri, that some of these fanatics really cherish the delusion of ultimate success, in the case of war with the United States.… It’s a pity that proper measures were not taken years ago to remove this cancer, when it was comparatively small and powerless.

  After the Democrats won the White House in 1856, newly elected President James Buchanan had to make good on the moral outrage his party had exploited. He did so by replacing Young with a non-Mormon governor and by dispatching 2,500 troops to Utah to erect a permanent fort.

  Young, in turn, prepared for war. Among those preparations, he directed Anson Call to locate a settlement on the farthest navigable point of the Colorado River. With Callville as the terminus of a string of Mormon settlements leading from the Salt Lake Valley to the Colorado River, landlocked Utah now had access to the sea via the Colorado to the Gulf of California to the Pacific.

  Callville soon became a landing for food and mining supplies. It also served as a portal for immigrants recently converted to Mormonism by missionaries who had traveled to Europe, Latin America, India, Australia, and the Pacific Islands. These foreigners, arriving out of devotion to the Mormon Church as opposed to the United States, contributed to government concerns regarding an eventual Mormon nation.

  Though the 1857–58 Utah War, as it became known, never erupted into full-fledged combat between the Mormon militia and the U.S. Army, over a hundred civilians died in various armed confrontations, and enormous amounts of public and private property were destroyed. Ultimately the Mormons accepted Buchanan’s governor in return for amnesty regarding destruction of government property. The federal troops soon left to deal with the actual present danger to national security: the formation of the Confederacy and the Civil War it triggered.

  Continued growth and progress in Callville enabled the first steamship to arrive one year after the Civil War ended. Not coincidentally, that same year Congress redrew the boundary between the Arizona and Nevada Territories.

  Callville before and after Nevada statehood, and after the Hoover Dam

  When Nevada became a state in 1864, it inherited the southern border of the Utah Territory—the straight line continuing to California. To its south, the Arizona Territory also extended west to California, and thus encompassed the navigable lower end of the Colorado River. In 1866, Congress gave Nevada that portion of the Arizona Territory west of the Colorado River, including Callville (and a region in this otherwise arid environment that Spanish explorers had called “Fruitful Plains”—or, in Spanish, Las Vegas).

  Congress may have been seeking to create future states more equal in natural resources. At the time, Nevada had recently exhausted its efforts to claim the crest of the gold-rich Sierras as its rightful boundary with California. It may have also been payback time for Arizonans, who, during the Civil War, had first created Arizona (extending across the southern half, as opposed to western half, of the New Mexico Territory) and been granted territorial status by the Confederacy.

  Arizona was officially outraged and baffled by the land transfer. Its outrage was expressed in a resolution passed by its territorial legislature. “By this great river the Territory receives the most of its supplies,” it protested, “and lately it has become the channel of a large part of the trade of San Francisco with Utah and Montana.” The phrase “lately it has become” referred to the recently commenced steamship traffic at Callville. Its bafflement was expressed by state historian Thomas Edwin Farish when he later wrote, “For some reason, to this day unexplained, the greater portion of the land in this Arizona county [Pah Ute County] was ceded to the State of Nevada by the Congress of the United States under an act passed on May 5, 1866.”r />
  Nevada, on the other hand, viewed the land transfer as perfectly logical. In its official state history, Beulah Hershheiser blandly noted that “the desired tract was a mining district; that Nevada was a mining State; and that the interests of the two sections were therefore identical.”

  To guard the important landing on the Colorado from these controversies, the Army erected Fort Callville. It was occupied only briefly, since the town soon began to lose population. Commerce dried up owing to the arrival of railroads and, more literally, because the Colorado River was increasingly being drained for irrigation. By 1869 Callville was a ghost town.

  Though the dried-up town was later drowned by progress, Callville’s underwater ruins represent important American struggles—including those of a state (Utah) whose boundaries purposely never included it. Indeed, the boundary imposed on Brigham Young’s vision reveals a critical insight: national security became a boundary of religious freedom, a boundary extendable to other freedoms as well.

  · · · CALIFORNIA, NEVADA, ARIZONA · · ·

  JOHN A. SUTTER

  California: Boundless Opportunity

  The hat must come off before the military general, the flag staff, and the church, and I preferred a country where I could keep mine on … where I should be absolute master.

  —JOHN A. SUTTER1

  On January 24, 1848, gold was discovered in California at Sutter’s Mill. The discovery determined the way California would be shaped. Had it not been for John A. Sutter, gold would still have been discovered. Sutter was just lucky—or, as it turned out, unlucky.

  Like a moth to a flame, Sutter was attracted to fragile boundaries: geographic, social, and contractual. Born in northern Switzerland, he served in the Swiss military, married, and went into the dry goods business. By the time he was thirty, he had five children, was deeply in debt, and had lost control of his business to his mother-in-law, who had financed it. With the help of his wife, Sutter secretly sold off the store’s inventory and fled, arriving in Missouri in 1834. There he established a similar business, became an American citizen, fell deeply into debt, and fled the day before he’d been summoned to appear in court.

  During the Missouri years and in the year that followed, Sutter’s business pursuits took him to Santa Fe, Oregon, Hawaii, and California. Taken together, these destinations tell us something of his instincts. At the time, none of these locations was within the United States (though it shared, and disputed, Oregon with England). All of them, however, became part of the United States within the next ten years. Sutter, of course, could not have known this. What he could have known was that they were jurisdictionally weak.

  John A. Sutter (1803-1880) (photo credit 27.1)

  Arriving in California in 1839, he sought permission from the Mexican government to establish an agricultural colony. “Governor [Juan Bautista] Alvarado … was very glad to hear that … I intended to settle in the interior on the banks of the river Sacramento, because the Indians … would not allow white men, and particularly of the Spanish origin, to come near them,” Sutter recorded in his diary. “I got … permission to select a territory wherever I would find it convenient.”

  He selected territory at and around the juncture of the Sacramento and American Rivers, building his settlement’s initial structures slightly to the southeast, above the flood plain, and naming it New Helvetia (New Switzerland). Governor Alvarado may have been pleased about the location, but Mexico’s regional military commander, General Mariano Vallejo, was not. The area was too far in the interior for Vallejo’s forces to assert control. That fact suited Sutter, who sought a place where he need not remove his hat to anyone. It also suited him that the location was ripe for business, perched along a route used by pioneers heading to the Oregon Territory.

  Adding to General Vallejo’s concern was the fact that Sutter’s initial colony was non-Hispanic, consisting of five American and German men, eight to ten Hawaiians (two of whom were, according to Sutter, wives), one bulldog, and three cannons. The bulldog and cannons provided a measure of security from hostile Indians, but Vallejo knew they could also provide protection from Mexican forces.

  Sutter became well known even before gold was discovered at his mill. His importance rated inclusion in an 1844 report to the State Department. “Augustus Sutter, alcade of the new town of New Helvetia … is a Swiss, and now a citizen of Mexico, and obtained from the government a large tract of land,” the U.S. consul in Mexican California informed his superiors. “All parties by land from Oregon or from the United States to California touch at this establishment.”2

  An alcade was the Mexican government’s chief executive and judicial officer for a municipality. Sutter did not possess this authority. He did, however, possess a personality ideally suited for commerce with travelers. A March 1849 item in the magazine Home Journal reveals a good deal of his gregarious character:

  Captain Sutter … was one of the officers of the Swiss Guard in the Revolution of July during the reign of Charles X. After this Revolution, he emigrated to the United States.… Capt. Sutter is kind, hospitable, and generous.… Surrounded as he was, on his first settling in this country, by tribes of wild Indians, he has by kindness and just dealing, attached them to his interest.… They, for their food and a pay from four to six dollars per month, man his fort, work his farms and mills, and do all the labor generally required in the new settlement.

  Actually, Sutter had been neither a captain nor a Swiss Guard. He had been a sublieutenant in the local reserves. He also appears to have misled the correspondent regarding labor-management relations. He may have paid his Indian workers $4 to $6 a month during the Gold Rush, when labor was scarce in every enterprise other than mining. Before that, however, American dollars were a rarity in what was still Mexican California. So too, for that matter, were pesos in tribal transactions, since payment was generally made in goods.

  Still, as the correspondent reports, Sutter did have a character befitting a lord of the manor. To one Indian caught stealing, he imposed a sentence of twenty-fives lashes, which was duly carried out, despite the fact that Mexican law prohibited private citizens from exercising judicial functions.3 Mexican law enforcement, however, was 90 miles downriver in San Francisco.

  In 1841 Sutter purchased the Russian-American Company’s coastal trading post known as Fort Ross (near present-day Jenner, California). He transported its movable goods and livestock to New Helvetia and held the distant Pacific Coast land as an investment. To finance the purchase, he borrowed from the Russian-American Company, using New Helvetia as collateral. He subsequently took out loans to finance his agricultural, ranching, fur-trapping, and distilling enterprises by putting up portions of his land as collateral, despite the fact that all his land was now mortgaged to the Russian-American Company. The common denominator in these and later transactions was the boundaries that contracts were written to stipulate. Sutter was not big on boundaries.

  Loyalty, too, is a boundary, dividing certain actions one will and will not do. Sutter’s political loyalties were just as supple regarding that boundary. At the time, Mexico’s control of California was being challenged both by native-born californios (under the leadership of José Castro, General Vallejo, and Governor Alvarado) and by the United States. After Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna replaced Governor Alvarado with Manuel Micheltorena, the new governor sought to secure his authority by offering Sutter clear title to all his land in return for a vow of loyalty to Mexico. Sutter avowed it. When General Vallejo confronted Sutter regarding his action, Sutter avowed his loyalty to Vallejo.

  After the Mexican War commenced in 1846, Sutter kept the Mexican military informed of events that came to his attention—until events tilted in favor of the U.S. forces. Sutter then sent a letter of support to General John C. Frémont. By adjusting his sails to the prevailing winds, Sutter spent the war years expanding his enterprises. For one such project, the construction of a lumber mill, he partnered with James Marshall, with Sutter p
roviding the financing and Marshall overseeing construction. In Sutter’s diary entry for January 28, 1848, he wrote in his less than perfect English, “Marshall arrived in the evening. It was raining very heavy but he told me he came on important business. After we was alone in a private room, he showed me … specimens of gold. That is, he was not certain if it was gold or not, but he thought it might be.”

  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