A pioneer with a dark side
From hero of the old West to racist colonialist: Opinion on Swiss pioneer Johann August Sutter has changed in recent decades.
Rachel Huber
Rachel Huber is a historian and associate researcher at the University of Bern.
Unsuccessful in Switzerland and in the USA
He hadn’t been in the USA for long before he was summoned to appear before the court of appeal of Jackson County (Missouri), once again due to his failed ventures and angry creditors – this order too he failed to obey, instead fleeing further westward in 1838. As a result he became – unintentionally – a Swiss pioneer of the ‘Wild West’. ‘New Helvetia’, his settlement on the banks of the Sacramento River, was never profitable, with Sutter drunk most of the time and deeply in debt. Nonetheless, for more than a century he has, almost without exception, been depicted in glowing terms in artistic and literary interpretations of his life, which ended in Washington in 1880. Why?
Glossed over and romanticised
About 55 years later, Blaise Cendrars wrote the adventure novel ‘Gold. The marvellous history of General John August Suter’. The story of Sutter’s life, as imagined by Cendrars, became a heroic tale and formed the basis for scores of subsequent interpretations. The Zurich world premiere of the play by dramatist Cäsar von Arx in 1930 was a great success. But it wasn’t just in Switzerland that this version of the story continued to proliferate. The National Socialists were not above using the famous Swiss man, who was born in Germany, for their propaganda strategy: the 1936 film ‘Der Kaiser von Kalifornien’ (The Emperor of California) produced by Luis Trenker, was praised in the highest terms by Joseph Goebbels at the film festival in Venice. The high regard in which the heroic General Sutter is held still shows little sign of waning. The latest novel about him was published in Switzerland in 2016. In Kandern, the city of his birth, moves have been afoot since 2017 to enter into a twinning arrangement with Sacramento.
Different perception from the 1980s onwards
In the 1980s, the ‘New Western History’ challenged the existing interpretive authority of the American historiographies on the frontier narrative, and thus also the Sutter narrative, by raising questions about the traditional understanding of the history of the ‘Wild West’. People were no longer interested in the white, mostly male pioneers who were the accepted heroes of the Great American Story; instead, they wanted to know about the indigenous societies decimated by the westward migration, the rarely mentioned women, and the rest of the hitherto invisible cast of the Winning of the West story.
The U.S.L.O.C. approached private and political interest groups in the Canton of Basel-Landschaft with the request that they lobby for some form of commemoration of Sutter, as he had been a citizen of the Basel-Landschaft village of Rünenberg. And so it came about that, from the mid-1980s, the owners of the General Sutter Distillery in Sissach and a number of the Canton’s state councillors campaigned for financial involvement in the installation of a larger-than-life Sutter statue in Sacramento.
Johann August Sutter
Johann August Sutter (1803 - 1880) emigrated to the USA in 1834 after his cloth and haberdashery business went bankrupt. But there too his commercial activities were unsuccessful. He had to move from place to place constantly, leaving behind mountains of debt each time. The USA soon became too hot for the conman, and so he turned southwards. In Mexico, the governor granted him around 200 square kilometres of land in the Sacramento Valley to settle. There, he founded the ‘New Helvetia’ colony. But this venture was not economically successful either. To cover his losses, Sutter forced indigenous slaves to work for him and used indigenous children as trading commodities. After California joined the United States in 1850, Sutter spent the rest of his life fighting for his land. To no avail. Although he did receive a pension for several years, there was never a positive decision regarding his land claims.
This twin cities arrangement is still in place today. In June 2020 the statue was removed from its pedestal as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, under pressure from a number of indigenous communities in California and academic circles – clearly a signal for a more nuanced commemoration of this Swiss ‘hero’.
