by Fred Rosen
Indians, Mormons, Californios—the native vaqueros—all of them had more right to the land than Sutter could ever have. But Sutter also knew from his experience as a debtor that it helped to have the law, whatever it was, on your side in any dispute. Plus, Sutter was cognizant enough to know that on a day-to-day basis, there was no rule of law except who had the bigger army.
Accompanying Sutter were his Hawaiian laborers and Indians he had decided to employ as well. They sailed on the schooner Isabella, with two other ships carrying their supplies, up the Sacramento River, to its confluence with the America River, and docked. Setting foot on the dock, Sutter saw that the place was no better in terms of permanent structures than Yerba Buena was. Sutter and his companions called the place Sacramento.
Sutter had no intention of settling in such a dump. He preferred going inland; he needed higher ground, which would be easier to defend. Sutter had his laborers build some makeshift grass structures for shelter. They would take the winter to get ready to implement his vision. To make that vision a reality, in the summer of 1840, John Sutter became a Mexican citizen, thus protecting his future property rights.
Next, followed by his Hawaiians and a growing workforce of Indians—he employed hundreds of Indians as field hands, weavers, cooks, and drivers, and paid them in clothing, food, and shelter—Sutter moved inland, about five miles from the Sacramento docks. Sutter decided to situate his fort on a high, dry patch of ground that offered a commanding view of the surrounding countryside, lush with maple, oak, birch, and aspen fir.
Sutter’s design called for walls 2½ feet thick and 15 to 18 feet high. The interior was 320 feet long. Sutter began building an adobe fort in the fall of 1840. When completed in 1841. Sutter’s Fort was larger than the U.S. Army’s Fort Laramie.
Inside the compound, the central building of Sutter’s headquarters was in the middle, directly in front of the gates. The building was three stories high and made of strong oak timbers; its top floor gave Sutter a platform from which to view his own private, burgeoning empire. Sutter had constructed quarters for some of the workers, a bakery, blanket factory, blacksmith shop, carpenter shop, and other shops dotted around the fort, fitting snuggly within the walls. On the nearby American River he located a tannery.
Sutter’s concept was for his domain to be self-sufficient. He had his workforce plant acres of barley, peas, and beans. He hired vaqueros to run cattle. And then he did something that was absolutely brilliant: he advertised in the eastern papers that his fort was the place the stop, the haven, for pioneers going West.
To further protect his investment, Sutter put his Swiss militia training to good use, training his own private army of Indians. Sutter maintained an Indian guard of fifteen mounted cavalry and twenty-five infantry. He did not hesitate to punish any tribes he suspected of raiding his property. Sutter’s Indian guard was so respected on the frontier that no one ever attacked his fortress.
The business that Sutter the entrepreneur knew would come, came. Russia had a problem supplying its colony in Alaska, which stretched out across the territory down the western coast of the continent. Sitka, for example, was actually easier to supply from California than Russia. Seeing this, the Russians made a deal with John Sutter to begin exporting wheat to Sitka and other Russian towns in Alaska.
Sutter established a successful trading business with pioneers and Indians alike, specializing in everything from furs and cotton to whiskey and even brandy from his own personal distillery, on the eastern side of the fort. Unfortunately, the land on which he had his fort was still owned by the Mexican government. Despite the improvements he had made, the Mexicans still owned the land.
Sutter applied to Mexican governor Juan Alvarado for a land grant. Only a Mexican citizen could be granted one, and since Sutter had taken care of that in 1840, that legal hurdle had been surmounted. Seeing an opportunity for the Mexican government to make money through Sutter’s prosperity, Governor Alvarado officially deeded Sutter eleven leagues of land, or 47,827 acres! Alvarado made it clear in the grant that Sutter was to maintain order among the Indians and “secure the land for Mexico in return.”
Returning to his fort with the grant in hand, Sutter carried something else in his other. Handing the Mexican flag to one of his men, he ordered that it be raised above the fort. Anyone who came to Sutter’s Fort would know instantly that they were on Mexican land. Sutter began to see a flow of settlers into his fort, who came for respite, supplies, and shelter.
They partook of the goods and services he offered. Business was good, good enough for Sutter to buy Fort Ross, in nearby Alta. To Sutter it was just another deal; he bought the fort on $30,000 credit, which he agreed to pay off in four years with a combination of produce and coin. In return, Sutter got Fort Ross’s supply stores, lumber, cannon, hardware, and livestock.
For the U.S. government, the deal was even better. The Russians owned Fort Ross and were the next-to-last foreigners to get out of the United States and its contiguous territories. Mexico was to be next—that had to happen eventually. For the country to expand, they needed all foreign powers off of it. Russia was now one less country to worry about.
He made regular trips to the territorial capital in Monterey, where he established himself as a political presence. In 1844 he met William Maxwell Wood, a ship’s surgeon, on one of his regular visits there.
“Captain Sutter was a man of medium or rather low stature, but with a marked military air,” Wood later wrote. “He wore a cap and a plain blue frockcoat; a mustache covered his lips. His head was of a very singular formation, being flat and well shaped behind and rising high over the crown, with a lofty and expanded forehead. His manners were courteous.”
For the first time since leaving Switzerland, Sutter was beginning to enjoy life. Part of that was his love of waffles. Sutter liked them made from wild duck eggs and coarse grain flour from his own mill, cooked on an open fire in a rectangular iron pan that had been divvied up into numerous small, square indentations that gave the waffle its unique shape.
By 1845, Captain John Sutter of the Swiss Guard was prospering. He owned 4,000 head of cattle, 1,700 horses and mules, and 3,000 sheep. He was doing well. While no more than 50 people stayed inside the fort at any one time, a maximum of 200 could use the fort during daylight hours.
Sutter even got to help out his adopted country of Mexico in a military capacity. That happened in February 1845, when the governor needed military assistance against a revolt. He appointed John Sutter “Captain of Sacramento troops” and gave him a land grant of 33 leagues, which superseded his previous one.
With his businesses going well, Sutter finally sent for his wife and children. They joined him from Europe. Everything was looking up. His control of the frontier trade through his fort was unrivaled. His agricultural and cattle interests were extensive. He had plans for a new sawmill to help supply the lumber needs of settlers. There was no reason to assume anything would change that. With his businesses flourishing, Sutter was now poised to become the multimillionaire he had always wanted to be.
A long way from the plains of Lambertsville, New Jersey, where he’d grown up, a middle-aged James Marshall, thirty-three years old, rode his horse through the soaring Sierra Nevadas. In one way or another, he had been traveling for the past decade.
Marshall had drifted west after his parents died in the 1830s. He settled in Missouri on a nice piece of property on the banks of the Missouri River. There he began farming. He was just about to make a go of it when he caught malaria. His treatment was exactly the same as it had been for General Washington’s troops in 1775: massive doses of quinine. It worked. Marshall’s fever abated, but the Missouri doctors told him he needed a drier, more hospitable climate if he were survive even six more months. Marshall took that as a mandate to do what most people did in 1840s when times were bad: continue to go west. There was still a mythic quality to the West.
To be sure, Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery had been there f
irst, back in the early part of the century. Since that time, the West had not been fully settled by white men. In 1844, when Marshall took the Oregon Trail west, it had been only one year since the first wagon train had departed Missouri for Oregon.
Watching Marshall’s wagon train depart was preacher Robert James of Clay County, who stayed behind.
There was his family to consider, which now consisted of his wife, Zerelda, and their young son, Franklin. That plus his hemp crop and his slaves made him a fairly contented man by Southern standards, for while Missouri was a border state, Clay County was controlled by slave-holding families. No, it would take a lot more than simply settling in a new land for Robert James to leave his family, his home, and his God.
And so, while pioneers flowed west, and his family was firmly ensconced at their farm and his slaves in the field, James left home and hearth on a spiritual journey back to his Kentucky roots to decide what to do about his future.
While Robert James was visiting Kentucky, James Marshall arrived in Oregon in 1845 and for some reason didn’t like the place. Taking to horse again, Marshall wound up in July of that year mounting a rise just south of Port Sacramento. Looking down, there in the middle of no place was a huge adobe fort set in a perfect rectangle. It was ideally situated on a hilltop, with a view of the Sacramento River harbor. Marshall rode his horse up to the fort and faced the giant gates. They were open, and the first thing that hit Marshall was the activity. He saw the shops that Sutter had set up all around the interior perimeter, and the open areas. The place was full of people, a veritable shopping plaza.
James Marshall was a very clever man, but he did not know that he was the only wheelwright in all of northern California. Combining the talents of both a carpenter and a blacksmith, Marshall specialized in producing wheels for carriages, stagecoaches, whatever was needed to keep people and freight going. It was a very important talent to have in an outpost of civilization where such skills were heavily valued.
Realizing this, Sutter hired him immediately. Plying his trade in the fort’s blacksmith shop, Marshall soon made enough to buy a ranch outside the fort, on Butte Creek. He was excited at the prospect of farming again.
Marshall was perfectly content to continue and perhaps end his life as a farmer. It gave him peace and contentment and quelled the desire to have a drink. Marshall was an inveterate drinker of alcohol, so anything that stopped him from drinking was inherently, in his opinion, a good thing. Sutter, meanwhile, had taken special pains to become a Mexican citizen so he’d own vast tracts of land on his march to entrepreneurial independence.
Neither man expected what happened next. History always has a way of biting its participants in the ass.
2.
MARSHALL ON THE MOVE
It had been a long time coming. Ever since Texas declared independence from Mexico in 1836, the final showdown with Mexico was inevitable. While the United States, Britain, and France all acknowledged the Republic of Texas as a free and independent state, Mexico reneged on its promise and did not.
What’s more, Texans fixed their southernmost boundary at the Rio Grande. The Mexicans felt it should be a hundred miles farther north, encompassing millions of fertile acres. The Texans also wanted to be annexed by the United States and had unsuccessfully petitioned the U.S. Congress to do exactly that. The Mexicans, in turn, were outraged that the United States was trying to cheat them out of what was rightfully their property.
By 1844, this border dispute led to calls for war in both countries. Before President John Tyler could act, he lost the election to James K. Polk, who favored annexation. Polk’s inauguration was in March 1845, but Tyler thought that too long too wait. To hasten things along, the lame duck president suggested a joint resolution of Congress offering Texas statehood.
The new state would have to meet certain preset conditions to become an official member of the Union. Accordingly, the U.S. Congress passed the Texas annexation resolution on February 28, 1845. All that was left was for envoy Andrew Jackson Donelson to get to Texas and get the Texans to sign on the dotted line.
The United States sent government agents to Texas to lobby the citizens to accept annexation as the only viable option for the state’s future. Texas public opinion, already in support of annexation, skewed the pendulum even farther. Now it was all up to two bodies: the Texas Congress and a specially convened state constitutional election.
Anson Jones, president of the Texas Republic, called the Texas Congress to order on June 16, 1845. He did the same with the state delegates on July 4. Each body was given a choice: annexation to the United States, or independence recognized by Mexico. Seeing little future with the latter solution, both voted for the former. Quickly, the state delegates drew up a state constitution. Ratified by popular vote in October 1845, it was accepted by the U.S. Congress on December 29, 1845. On that date, Texas entered the Union as a state that allowed slavery within its borders.
In leaving his post as the last president of the Republic of Texas, Anson Jones said, “The final act in this great drama is now performed; the Republic of Texas is no more.” Not only was Jones wrong, his counterpart, General Santa Anna, the same Santa Anna who had butchered Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and the Alamo defenders, that Santa Anna was still alive and well as Mexico’s dictator.
“The new state had come into the Union claiming the Rio Grande as her southern and western boundary. By the terms of annexation all boundary disputes with Mexico were referred by Texas to the government of the United States. President Polk sent John Slidell of Louisiana to Mexico in the autumn of 1845 to adjust any differences over the Texan claims. But though Slidell labored for months to get a hearing … Mexico refused to recognize him, and he was dismissed from the country in August 1846,” explains David Saville Muzzey in his popular 1911 text, American History.
President Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to the southern U.S./Texas border, which had been previously established in the annexation ratification as the Rio Grande. When Taylor got there, he saw that Mexican troops had already fortified the southern bank of the river. The Mexicans ordered Taylor to retreat; he refused. The Mexican commander then crossed the Rio Grande, ambushing a scouting force of sixty-three Americans. The killed and wounded Americans added up to sixteen. As soon as President Polk received word of the attack in early May, he sent a special message to Congress that concluded:
“We have tried every effort at reconciliation.… But now, after reiterated menaces, Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States [the Rio Grande], has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil. She has proclaimed that hostilities have commenced, and that the two nations are at war. As war exists, and, notwithstanding all our efforts to avoid it, exists by the act of Mexico herself, we are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights, and the interests of our country.”
By a vote of 174 to 4, the House approved a measure to go to war with Mexico. The Senate followed with an even more impressive 40 to 2 vote. Back in Texas, Taylor was not waiting for orders. He had engaged the Mexicans in the Battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma and pushed them back into Mexico.
Six days after Congress voted to sanction the war, Taylor crossed the Rio Grande and occupied the Mexican frontier town of Matamoros. Making the town his base, during the summer and autumn of 1846 he captured the capitals of three of the Mexican provinces. But as with most wars, the government had more in mind than the Republic of Texas, which had become the biggest state in the Union in land size.
No; the United States had other matters in mind, especially the last two parts of the continental United States still under Mexican control: New Mexico and California. New Mexico and Texas were big but California was the real prize. Its fertile lands, a vibrant, Spanish-influenced character, and most importantly, its border on the Pacific Ocean and the attendant trade made California the greatest prize of all.
It was no surprise, then
, when Lieutenant Colonel John C. Frémont arrived in Upper California in early 1846. He had been there the previous year, when looking out upon the entrance to San Francisco Bay, he called it Chrysoplylae (Golden Gate). The name stuck. Already famous as an explorer of the Far West, Frémont was there to search out “a new and shorter route from the western base of the Rocky Mountains to the mouth of the Columbia River.” That was the official government story given out by Secretary of State William L. Marcy.
The possibility that the handsome and dashing Frémont could be working as a government operative in foreign territory the United States prized was never mentioned publically. Nor, for that matter, was Frémont’s close relationship with his father-in-law, Missouri’s expansionist senator, Thomas Hart Benton.
Frémont next showed up in Monterey in the spring of 1846, in command of an all-civilian party of “explorers.” The only one in uniform, Frémont petitioned General José Castro, the Mexican government’s commander of Upper California’s military forces, for permission to quarter his men securely in the San Joaquin Valley. At first Castro granted permission, but then reneged. There was a good possibility that Frémont, well known and respected, could easily incite American settlers to revolt against Mexico.
Frémont wasted no time in responding to his censure. He went to the top of a mountain adjacent to Monterey. There, Frémont had his men build a makeshift fort, which, he told anyone who would listen, he would defend in a “fight to extremity … trusting to our country to avenge our death.”
Rhetoric aside, Frémont was a practical man. Whoever the men he commanded really were—explorers, soldiers, or a combination of both—he had little or no confidence in their fighting prowess. It only took Frémont a few days of siege warfare by the Mexicans to decide to retreat. He managed to spirit his men out and away from the Mexican lines before the Mexicans realized what was going on.
