NON-FICTION: Golden Ghost

The Story.* When Captain Frémont entered California in 1846, 25 troopers, trained to a hair mounted on stallions, wearing gold-braided green uniforms, met him in the mountains. Impressed, Frémont complimented the burly Swiss who led them and the latter, Johann August Sutter, conducted Frémont to an eminence to behold New Helvetia, the largest richest one-man domain in the New World.

Hundreds of square miles it covered, the broad upper valley of the Sacramento. Herds of pedigree cattle browsed its meadows. Orchards bowed with tons of fruit. Gardens of European truck spread for acres, efficiently irrigated. The cavalcade passed through many a village of Sutter’s clean Kanaks slaves. Flowers smothered the walls of the master’s hacienda where a feast waited—salmon trout, venison, bear’s paws, crocodile pears—served on Spanish plate by girls from the Sandwich Isles while a Hawaiian orchestra played the “Marseillaise,” the “Berne March.”

Years before, penniless, Johann August Sutter had abandoned his wife and children in Switzerland dreaming of empire. Only after far, vigorous roving, much crime and more misery had his colossal, visionary projects come to this. From New York—where Poe had frequented his Fordham bar—he had ridden to Oregon, sailed through the Pacific, out to Hawaii, up to Alaska, recruiting henchmen in every bar, trading famously, until he reached the mud huts of San Francisco and bargained for an empire with the Spanish padrés and governors. He had gained it by merely promising to guard the Sierra passes against Americans and Indians.

Sixty white oxen drew this country’s first steam mill across the continent, to Sutter. Shiploads of firearms, seeds, implements, nails, clothing rounded the Horn annually, for Sutter. The world’s soundest banks were pleased to extend credit to America’s biggest landlord, Johann August Sutter.

While Mexico and the U. S. fought (1848), Sutter kept his realm neutral and intact; even increased it by a tract “24 hours square.” California was ceded and he smoked in peaceful reverie, thinking at last of his wife, his children, his oldtime comrades…. He sent for her and them, begging forgiveness with letters of credit which were but footnotes of his prosperity. While waiting for them, he busied himself with a new sawmill up on Sutter’s Creek. . . .

Let him tell it, in his own yellow manuscript: “Mr. Marshall of New Jersey, my carpenter. . . . was working on a new sawpit at Coloma, in the mountains, about 18 hours’ journey from the fort. . . . It was a rainy afternoon. . . . Suddenly Mr. Marshall burst into the room, he was soaking wet. . . . a piece of cotton from his pocket … a lump of yellowish metal. . . . Then I read an article in the Encyclopedia Americana. I told Marshall then that his metal was pure gold in the virgin state. . . .” But the news got out.

When Madame Sutter arrived, Sutter’s gold had wiped out New Helvetia. She died of heart failure on the spot, lucky woman. The world, quite mad, had overrun the Sacramento Valley, tearing open its hills for gold, silver, platinum. Sutter’s men deserted to wash gravel. His herds died, unmilked. His barns fell. His crops wasted. All his fat lands were squatted on, his fort occupied, by hordes of gold-mad grabbers who had shouted his name from the Mediterranean, across Panama, up to the Golden Gate; from Siberia, Japan, Russia, Sweden, up to the Golden Gate. Gunboats came but the tars deserted, to wash gravel. Troops came, and the officers dropped sabres for shovels. The Law was a huge farce; in that roaring young state there was only brigandage and a snarl of paper in the courts. Yet Sutter shook the whole country and enriched lawyers for a generation to come. He sued California for 25 millions, the U. S. for 50 millions. Years passed before he got his decision. Immediately the gold-world paused in its shoveling to raze Sutter’s remnant buildings, to hang his friend.

Washington, D.C., knew Sutter for years, enormously fat with age, gripping the Apocalypse in his pocket, supporting a parasitic swarm of lawyers until he had to shine shoes to support himself. It knew Carpenter Marshall of New Jersey, too, whose pickaxe pried loose Sutter’s hellgate; Marshall escaped from his asylum once and dug filth from Washington’s guttters, screaming, “There is gold everywhere, everywhere!” One June afternoon in 1880, old Sutter sat on the steps of the Capitol, pondering Justice. Malicious newboys ran up and told him that congress had just awarded him 100 millions of indemnity. Old Sutter jumped up, stiffened up. “Thanks,” he said and fell dead. But the newsies had lied. It was Sunday and Congress not even sitting. Sutter’s claim has never yet received a verdict from that august body. His descendants have let the suits drop but they might still be raised by some one with the right. “Who wants gold, GOLD?”

The Significance. It remained for a Frenchman, a world-wide knockabout himself, to resurrect this California Midas whom our swarming old-Americana hunters have overlooked. Perhaps Sutter was put from memory for conscience’s sake, but now he is back, a mighty, marvelous, golden ghost. Author Cendrars’s rushing historical present is a handsome medium for the sweep of such fortunes and fates. If he has anywhere exaggerated, which seems inevitable, who cares?

*SUTTER’S GOLD — Blaise Cendrars—Harper($2.50).