John Sutter: The Fugitive Whose California Empire Was Ruined by Gold

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Johann August Sutter was a failed Swiss shopkeeper facing debtor's prison when he abandoned his wife and five children in 1834 and sailed for New York. By the time he reached America he was calling himself Captain John Augustus Sutter and claiming a military past he never had. This episode follows his roundabout journey through Oregon, Hawaii, and Russian Alaska to Mexican California, where he talked Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado into granting him 48,400 acres in the Sacramento Valley for a settlement he named New Helvetia.

The fort he built depended on coerced Native American labor, and the accounts of men who worked beside him describe locked rooms, feeding troughs, and raids on villages. Sutter switched loyalties as California passed from Mexican to American control. Then, in 1848, James W. Marshall found gold at the sawmill Sutter had ordered built at Coloma. The rush that followed brought squatters who slaughtered his cattle, trampled his crops, and took his land.

• Sutter reached California by way of Honolulu and Sitka, Alaska, landing at Yerba Buena in July 1839 with 10 Native Hawaiian laborers.
• His manager Heinrich Lienhard wrote that workers were locked in rooms at night without beds, and explorer James Clyman described hundreds fed from troughs made of hollowed tree trunks.
• Sutter and Marshall confirmed the gold with an encyclopedia and simple tests and tried to keep it secret, until merchant Samuel Brannan paraded gold through San Francisco.
• His son John Augustus Sutter Jr., newly arrived from Switzerland, laid out a new city and named it Sacramento against his father's wish for a town called Sutterville.
• Sutter spent his last years petitioning Congress for restitution. In June 1880 it adjourned without acting on a bill to pay him 50,000 dollars, and he died two days later in a Washington hotel at 77.