L'or (4 page)

His first expedition on horseback has brought Sutter into the Sacramento Valley. The incredible fertility of the soil and the luxuriant vegetation decide for him: he will settle here. Returning from this reconnaissance, he learns that the first convoy of Kanakas has just landed. There are 150 of them and they are housed in the hamlet of Yerba Buena, at the far end of the Bay of San Francisco. His partners in Honolulu have engaged nineteen whites to come over with them; they are tough, cheerful men, hard-bitten and ready for anything. Sutter reviews them. They are armed to the teeth.

Immediately, Sutter makes the overland journey to Monterey. He does it at a single stretch, riding night and day.

John Augustus Sutter presents himself to Governor Alvarado. He announces his intention of setting up in the country. His Kanakas will clear the land. His small armed band will form a vigilant cordon to prevent incursions by the totally hostile tribes to the north. He intends to reassemble the Indians from the former Missions, distribute land to them and set them to work under his direction.

'More and more ships,' he says, 'will be coming from Honolulu, where I have formed a substantial company. New convoys of Kanakas will be landing in the bay which I have chosen and further teams of white men will arrive with them, men in my pay. Give me a free hand, 
and I will get the country back on its feet.' 'And what do you propose to call your ranch?'

'
New Helvetia
.'

'Why?'

'Because I am Swiss and a Republican.' 

'Good. Do what you want. I will grant you a 
concession for ten years, in the first instance.'

Sutter and his troop travel up the Sacramento Valley.

At the head sail three ex-whalers, still decked out for sea and with a small cannon aboard. Then come the 150 Kanakas dressed in horizontally-striped shirts that reach down to their knees. They have made themselves odd little pointed hats from the leaves of tulip-trees. Following them along the banks and through the swamps are thirty wagons loaded with provisions, seeds and munitions, as well as some fifty horses, seventy-five mules, five bulls, two hundred cows and five flocks of sheep. The rearguard, some on horseback, some in canoes, with rifles slung across their backs and leather caps tilted over one ear, are keeping close ranks and driving everyone forward when the going gets rough.

Six weeks later, the valley presents a ghostly spectacle. Fire has swept this way, a fire that smouldered under the low-hanging, acrid smoke of the bracken and the shrubby trees before flaring up like a torch, high, straight, implacable, in a single blaze. On all sides now, they see smoking stumps, twisted bark, splintered branches. The great solitary trees are still standing, but riven, scorched by the flames.

There is work to be done!

The oxen plod to and fro. The mules pull the plough. Seed is scattered. There is not even time to root out the blackened stumps, so the furrows skirt round them. The cattle are already wallowing in the marshy prairies, the sheep are on the hills and the horses are grazing in a paddock surrounded by thorn-bushes. At the confluence of two rivers, they are throwing up earthworks and building the ranch-house. Roughly-hewn tree-trunks and planks six inches thick are used in its construction. Everything is solid, large, massive, conceived for the future. The buildings are laid out in a line: barns, storehouses and granaries. The workshops are on the banks of the river, the Kanaka village in a ravine.

Sutter keeps an eye on everything, directs everything, supervises the execution of the work down to the last detail; he is at every work-site at once and does not hesitate to put his hand to the task personally when one or other of the work-gangs is a man short. Bridges are built, tracks cleared, swamps drained, a well sunk, ponds, drinking-troughs and irrigation channels dug. A first palisade already protects the farm, a small fort is planned. Emissaries scour the Indian villages, and 250 of the Indians formerly protected by the Missions are brought in, together with their wives and children, to work on the various projects. Every three months, new convoys of Kanakas arrive and the lands under cultivation now stretch as far as the eye can see. Thirty-odd whites, men who have been settlers in this country for 
some time, come to offer their services. They are Mormons. Sutter pays them three dollars a day.

And prosperity is not long in coming.

4,000 oxen, 1,200 cows, 1,500 horses and mules and 12,000 sheep are dispersed around New Helvetia, covering an area that takes several days to walk round. The harvests yield 530 per cent and the granaries are full to bursting.

As early as the end of the second year, Sutter is able to buy some fine farms along the coast, near Fort Bodega. They belong to the Russians, who are pulling out. He pays 40,000 dollars cash for them. He plans to go in for stock-breeding on the grand scale there and, more particularly, to improve the bovine strain.

In colonizations of this kind, it is sometimes possible to overcome the difficulties of a purely material nature, that arise day by day, with relative ease; a will of iron and strenuous labour, backed up by suitable equipment, may succeed in imposing a new order on the secular laws of nature, and even in transforming the aspect of a virgin land and the climatology of a region forever, but the human element is not so easily mastered.

From this point of view, John Augustus Sutter's position was absolutely typical.

At the moment of his arrival, California was on the brink of a revolution. In Mexico itself, the Compania Cosmopolitana had just been formed with the avowed aim of pillaging what was left of that unhappy country once occupied by the Mission settlements. Powerful 
political groups had just embarked a force of two hundred adventurers to be unleashed on this so-recently-prosperous land. While these men were at sea, General Santa Anna overthrew President Farias and immediately sent a courier, via Sonora, to Governor Alvarado giving him strict orders to oppose the landing of these roughnecks by force. The band was broken up just off San Diego, between the Pacific and the bay, and those of its members who managed to escape infested the country, giving themselves up to banditry. Two gangs were formed and the partisans put the country to fire and blood. Sutter was wise enough not to interfere, and skilful enough to come to terms with both factions. However, hunters, trappers and fur-traders, all of American nationality, had infiltrated into the very heart of the region, and they formed a small but very active nucleus who wanted California to join the Union. Here again, Sutter was able to manoeuvre without compromising himself, for, while the Americans benefited from his secret support (every six months he sent a courier over the mountains to carry his reports to St Louis; one of his messengers even presented himself in Washington, to submit a plan of conquest: Sutter demanded personal command of the troops and exacted one-half of the territories conquered as his reward), in the eyes of the Mexicans, his heroic conduct on the frontier, where he energetically repelled the constant incursions of savage tribes, made him appear as such a faithful ally of the government that they gave him the title Guardian of the Northern Frontier, with the rank of captain. And, to recompense him for his services, Alvarado made him a grant of eleven square leagues of land, an area as vast as the little canton of Basle, his homeland.

The Indians were Sutter's biggest headache.

The savage tribes of the Upper Sacramento looked askance upon his settlement. These ploughed lands, these farms with their flocks and herds, these buildings that sprang up everywhere, were encroaching on their hunting grounds. They had taken up arms and, by night, set fire to barns and haystacks while, in broad daylight, they murdered the lonely shepherds and raided the cattle. There were frequent armed clashes, shots were exchanged and never a day passed but a dead man was carried back to the farmhouse: the scalped corpse of a woodcutter, a hideously-mutilated planter or a militiaman struck down from behind. Never had Sutter had such good reason to congratulate himself on his brainwave of importing a Kanaka work-force as during these first two years of incessant skirmishes. Without them, he could never have achieved his goal.

There were six villages full of these islanders.

In spite of the struggles, the battles, the political complications, the ever-present threat of revolution, in spite of murders and fire-raising, John Augustus Sutter was proceeding methodically with his plan.

New Helvetia was taking shape.

The dwelling-houses, the ranch-house, the principal buildings, the granaries and warehouses were now surrounded by a wall five feet thick and twelve feet high. At each corner stood a rectangular bastion, armed with three cannon. Six other guns defended the main entrance. There was a permanent garrison of one hundred men. Further, all the year round, the immense domain was guarded by watchmen and patrols. The militiamen, recruited in the bars of Honolulu, had married Californian wives who accompanied them where-ever they were posted, carrying the baggage, grinding corn and making bullets and cartridges. In times of danger, all these people fell back upon the small fort and helped to reinforce the garrison there. Two small boats, armed with cannon, were anchored in front of the fort, ready to sail up either the American River or the Sacramento.

The men who ran the sawmills (where the giant trees of the locality were sawn up) and the innumerable workshops were mostly ships' carpenters, helmsmen or boatswains who, while in port on the coast, had been persuaded to desert their sailing-ships for a wage of five dollars a day.

It was not unusual to see white men coming to the ranch-house to apply for work, attracted by the renown and the prosperity of the settlement. They were poor colonists who had not been successful on their own, mostly Russians, Irishmen and Germans. Sutter parcelled out land to them, or employed them according to their various skills.

Horses, hides, talc, wheat, flour, maize, dried meat, cheese, butter, planks and smoked salmon were embarked daily. Sutter sent his produce to Vancouver, Sitka, the Sandwich Islands and to all the ports of Mexico and South America, but, first and foremost, he provisioned the numerous ships that now came to drop anchor in the bay.

It was in this state of bustling prosperity that Captain Frémont found New Helvetia when he came down from the mountains after his memorable crossing of the Sierra Nevada.

Sutter had gone out to meet him with an escort of twenty-five splendidly-accoutred men. The horses were stallions. The riders' uniforms were made of a dark green cloth relieved by yellow braid. With their caps tipped over one ear, the lads had a martial look about them. They were all young, strong and well-disciplined.

Countless flocks of prime beasts were grazing in the lush prairies. The orchards were glutted with fruit. In the kitchen-gardens, vegetables from the Old World grew side by side with those from tropical countries. There were springs and canals everywhere. The Kanaka villages were neat and clean. Every man was at his appointed task. A most pleasing order reigned everywhere. Avenues of magnolia, palm-trees, bananas, camphor-trees, oranges, lemons and pepper-plants traversed the vast cultivated tracts to converge on the ranch-house. The walls of the
hacienda
were smothered in bougainvillaea, rambler roses and fleshy geraniums. A curtain of jasmine hung down before the master's door.

Sutter kept a splendid table. Hors-d'oeuvres; trout and salmon from the local rivers; baked ham
à l'Ecossaise
;
wood-pigeon, haunch of venison, bear's paw; smoked tongue; sucking-pig stuffed
à la rissole
and dredged with tapioca flour; green vegetables, cabbage-palm, okra salad; fruit of every kind, fresh and preserved; mountains of
pâtisserie
.
Rhine wines and several bottles of fine old wines from France, which had been so carefully handled that they had travelled round the world without being spoiled. The food was served by young women from the Islands and young Indian half-breed women who brought in the dishes wrapped in napkins of a pristine whiteness. They came and went with an im-perturbably serious air, while a Hawaüan orchestra 
played outlandish airs, the
Marche de Berne
,
with thumb-beats on the backs of the guitars, the
Marseillaise
with the sonorities of the bugle in the strings. The heavy antique tableware was made of Castilian silver-plate and struck with the royal arms.

Sutter presided, surrounded by his associates. Amongst the guests was Governor Alvarado.

Sutter was accredited with the most important banking-houses in both the United States and Great Britain. He made substantial purchases of materials, tools, arms and ammunition, seeds and plants. His transports travelled thousands and thousands of miles overland or came by sea after rounding Cape Horn. (Twenty-five years later, in the ranches in the hinterland, they still talked about a wagon pulled by sixty pairs of white oxen which, under heavy escort, crossed the entire American continent at its widest point; after crossing the prairies, the savannahs, the rivers, the fords, the mountain passes of the Rockies and the desert with its giant cactus-candelabra, it finally arrived safe and sound with its cargo, which consisted of the boiler and plant for the first steam-mill to be constructed in the United States. As will be seen later, it would have been better for John Augustus Sutter, then at the pinnacle of his success, wealth and prestige, if this wagon had never arrived, if it had foundered at the bottom of some river, if it had bogged down forever in some quagmire, if it had tumbled over some precipice or if its numerous teams of oxen had succumbed to an epidemic.)