Word: sutter
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Dates: during 1926-1926
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...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...
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...