Shooting Stars (13 page)
Authors: Stefan Zweig
That was the terrible revenge taken by the great moment that seldom descends into the life of ordinary mortals, on a man unjustly called upon to seize it who does not know how to exploit it. All the bourgeois virtues of foresight, obedience, zeal and circumspection are helpless, melted down in the fire of a great and fateful moment of destiny that demands nothing less than genius and shapes it into a lasting likeness. Destiny scornfully rejects the hesitant; another god on earth, with fiery arms it raises only the bold into the heaven of heroes.
1834. A steamer bound for America is on its way from Le Havre to New York. In the midst of the desperadoes on board, one among hundreds, is John Augustus Sutter, as he will be known, born Johann August Suter in Rynenberg near Basle in Switzerland. Aged thirty-one, he is in a great hurry to put the seven seas between himself and the European law courts. A bankrupt, thief and forger, he has simply abandoned his wife and three children, has got some money together in Paris with the help of a false passport, and is now off in search of a new life. On 7th July he lands in New York, where he spends two years doing all kinds of possible and indeed impossible jobs, becomes a packer, a pharmacist, a dentist, a
medicaments
salesman and then a tavern-keeper. Finally, having settled to some extent in the city, he buys an inn, settles down in it, sells it again, and following the magic promptings of the time he moves to Missouri. There he sets up as a farmer, within a short time he owns a little property, and he could live a quiet life. But all manner of people keep passing his house—fur traders, hunters, adventurers and soldiers—they are coming from the west and going to the west, and that word “west” gradually acquires a magical sound. First, everyone knows, you come to prairies—prairies with huge herds of buffalo, you can go for days, for weeks on end without seeing
a human soul, apart from the Redskins hunting there; then you reach mountains, high and never yet climbed, and then at last that other land of which no one knows anything for certain except that its fabulous wealth is famous: California, still unexplored. A land flowing with milk and honey, free to everyone who wants to take it—but far away, endlessly far away, and mortally dangerous to reach
But John Augustus Sutter has adventurous blood in his veins, and is not tempted to stay put and cultivate the soil on his holding, however good the soil is. One day in 1837 he sells all his possessions, equips an expedition with wagons and horses and herds of buffalo, and sets out from Fort Independence into the unknown.
1838. Two officers, five missionaries and three women set out in buffalo wagons into the endless void, through prairies and yet more prairies, finally up the mountains and towards the Pacific Ocean. After travelling for three months, they arrive in Fort Vancouver at the end of October. The two officers have left Sutter by then, the missionaries are not going any further, the three women have died of their privations on the way.
Sutter is alone; people try in vain to keep him at Fort Vancouver, offer him a position—he rejects all such
suggestions
; the lure of the magic name is in his blood.
He begins by crossing the Pacific in a rickety sailing ship to the Sandwich Islands, and after getting into endless difficulties
off the coasts of Alaska he lands in a desolate place known as San Francisco. It is not the city of today, which after the earthquake in 1906 has shot up with redoubled growth and has millions of inhabitants—at this time it is a poor fishing village that gets its name from the Franciscan mission; it is not even the capital of the little-known Mexican province of California, lying fallow and desolate without livestock or good growth in the most luxuriant zone of the new continent.
Spanish disorder is made even worse by the absence of any authority, revolts, a shortage of pack animals and human labourers, a shortage of energy to tackle such problems. Sutter hires a horse and takes the animal down into the fertile valley of the Sacramento. A single day is enough to show him that there is not only room for a farm here, indeed for a large estate—there is room for a kingdom. Next day he rides to Monterey, the down-at-heel capital, introduces himself to Governor Alvarado, tells him about his intention of reclaiming the land. He has brought Kanaks with him from the islands, he plans to bring more of those industrious and hard-working indigenous people here regularly; and he takes it upon himself to build settlements and found a small domain called New Helvetia.
“Why New Helvetia?” asks the governor.
“I am a Swiss and a republican,” replies Sutter.
“Very well, do as you like. I’ll give you a concession for ten years.”
Deals, we can conclude, were quickly done there. A
thousand
miles from any kind of civilization, the energy of a single human being does not carry the same price tag as it does at home.
1839. A caravan is slowly carting goods along the bank of the Sacramento. Sutter rides ahead on horseback, his gun buckled around him, behind him two or three Europeans, then 150 Kanaks in their short shirts, then thirty buffalo-drawn carts with provisions, seeds and ammunition, fifty horses,
seventy-five
mules, cows and sheep, then a small rearguard—that is the whole of the army setting out to conquer New Helvetia.
Ahead of them rolls a gigantic wave of fire. They are setting the forests alight as they go along, an easier way of clearing the land than grubbing up the trees. And as soon as the raging flames have swept across the terrain, while the tree stumps are still smoking, they set to work. Storerooms are built, wells dug, seeds sown on soil that needs no ploughing, hurdles are made to pen in the huge flocks and herds. Gradually, more workers arrive from the abandoned mission colonies nearby.
The venture is hugely successful. The seed that has been sown soon yields crops 500 per cent greater than its original quantity. Barns are full to bursting, soon the livestock numbers thousands of animals, and in spite of the local difficulties that are still going on—expeditions against the native inhabitants, who keep making incursions into the flourishing colony—New Helvetia grows to tropically gigantic proportions. Canals are dug, mills and factories built, shipping goes upstream and downstream on the rivers. Sutter supplies not only Fort Vancouver and the Sandwich Islands but also all the ships that put in to the coast of California. He plants fruit, the Californian fruit still so famous and popular today. It does
extremely well, so he sends to France and the Rhine for grape vines, and after a few years they cover large areas. He himself builds houses and lays out flourishing farms. He sends to Paris for a piano from the firm of Pleyel—its journey takes 180 days—and to New York for a steam engine, brought right across the continent by sixty buffaloes. He has credits and accounts with the biggest banking houses of England and France, and now, at the age of forty-five, he remembers leaving a wife and three children behind somewhere or other. He writes, inviting them to join him in his principality. For he is aware of all the wealth in his hands: he is the lord of New Helvetia, one of the richest men in the world, and so he intends to remain. At last, moreover, the United States wrests the once-neglected colony from Mexican hands. Now everything is safe and secure. A few more years, and Sutter will be
the
richest man in the world.
1848, January. James W. Marshall, his carpenter, suddenly comes bursting into John Augustus Sutter’s house in a state of great agitation, saying he absolutely must speak to him. Sutter is surprised; only the day before he had sent Marshall up to Coloma and his farm there to begin work on a new sawmill. And now the man has come back without
permission
, and stands before Sutter quivering with excitement. He makes Sutter go into his office, closes the door and takes from his pocket a handful of sand with a few yellow grains
in it. When he was digging yesterday, he says, he noticed this strange metal, and he thought it was gold, but the other men laughed at him. Sutter takes him seriously; he takes the yellow grains, extracts them from the rest of the sand and tests them. Yes, they are gold. He decides to ride up to the farm with Marshall the very next day, but the carpenter is the first to be infected by the terrible fever that will soon be shaking the whole world. He rides back that night in the middle of a storm, impatient for certainty.
Next morning Colonel Sutter is in Coloma himself. They dam the canal and examine the sand. They have only to take a sieve, shake it back and forth for a little while, and the grains of gold are left shining on the black mesh. Sutter assembles the few white men around him, makes them swear on their word of honour to keep quiet about this find until the sawmill is completed. Then he rides back to his farm in a serious and determined mood. He has matters of great import on his mind: as far as anyone can remember gold has never been so easy to pick up, has never lain in the ground so openly, and that ground is his, it is Sutter’s property. A decade seems to have passed overnight, and he is the richest man in the world.
The richest man in the world? No, the poorest, most wretched and disappointed beggar on this earth. After a week the secret is out. A woman—always a woman, of course!—has told some passing stranger and given him a few specks of
gold. And there is no precedent for what happens next. All Sutter’s men leave their work, the metalworkers leave the smithy, the shepherds and herdsmen leave their flocks and herds, the wine-growers abandon the vines and the soldiers their guns. As if possessed, they all snatch up sieves and pans in haste and run to the sawmill to sift gold from the sand. Overnight the agricultural land has been abandoned, no one milks the dairy cows, who bellow and die miserably, the herds of buffalo tear down their hurdles and stamp through the fields where the crops are rotting on the stalk, no one is making cheese, the barns are in disrepair, the huge clockwork of the vast enterprise has come to a halt. Telegraphy sprinkles the golden promise over land and sea. And already people are arriving from the cities, from the harbours, sailors leave their ships, government officials leave their posts, they are all coming from east and west in long, endless columns, on foot, on horseback or in carts. It is the gold rush, a swarm of human locusts, the gold-diggers. An aimless, brutal horde knowing no law but the law of the fist, no commandment but that of their revolver, pours over the once-flourishing colony. As far as they are concerned no one owns anything here, and no one dares to resist these desperadoes. They slaughter Sutter’s cattle, they tear down the barns to build themselves houses, they trample down the crops in his fields, they steal his machinery—overnight John Augustus Sutter is as poor as a beggar. Like King Midas, he is stifled by his own gold.
And this unprecedented storm in search of gold becomes more and more violent; news of it has reached the outside world, 100 ships set off from New York alone, in 1848, 1849,
1850 and 1851 great hordes of adventurers come over from Germany, Great Britain, France and Spain. Some sail round Cape Horn, but that is too long a journey for the most
impatient
, who take the more dangerous way across the Isthmus of Panama. A company swiftly decides to build a railway line on the isthmus, and thousands of workers die in the fever of its construction just so that the impatient will be saved three or four weeks and they will get at the gold sooner. Huge caravans cross the continent, people of all races and languages, and they all dig up John Augustus Sutter’s property as if it were their own. A city rises in dreamlike haste on the site of San Francisco, which belongs to him by virtue of a signed and sealed governmental act, strangers buy and sell his land to and from one another, and the name of New Helvetia, his domain, disappears behind the magic name of El Dorado, California.