At 27^th and "I" Streets in Sacramento stands "Sutter's Fort," one of the oldest buildings in California, preserved and reconstructed. It comes with a state historic marker:

While the marker is not wrong, it does not tell the most important facts about the fort, including who built it and how Sutter's enterprise worked. John Augustus Sutter talked the Mexican governor of California into granting him 76 square miles of the Sacramento valley. Of course, it was already occupied: about 200 Miwok Indians were living about twelve miles south of what became Sutter's Fort, Kadema Village was five miles west, and five miles north was the territory of the Maidus. Following a pattern used across the continent, Sutter negotiated with chiefs or men he considered chiefs. He honored these men with the title of "capitanos" and gave them blankets, sugar, alcohol, and other goods after they supplied him with workers.

Although unmentioned on the marker, Sutter's Fort was first and foremost a Native American site. "Except for a few overseers, Indians did all the work on Sutter's rancho," historian Albert Hurtado points out. "His" Miwoks and Maidus built the fort, plowed the fields, planted wheat and other crops, tended his livestock, wove cloth, ran a hat factory and blanket company, operated a distillery, worked his tannery, staffed something of a hotel for immigrants to California from the East, and killed deer to get food for them all.

Equally missing from the marker is any mention of the amazingly interracial nature of Sutter's Fort. While predominantly American Indian, Sutter's "New Helvetia" also had Mexicans, Swiss, Hawaiians, Russians, Germans, and Americans. Sutter even brought eight or ten Polynesian workers with him to California from Hawaii in 1839 - one as his common law wife. ¹ Two years later he bought Fort Ross and all its stores, the only Russian settlement in California, on credit. He then organized a 200-man Indian army - clothed in Tsarist uniforms and commanded in German! - and used this militia to seize children from distant and hostile tribes to maintain his labor supply.

Interpretation within Sutter's Fort does tell that Native Americans built the place, which marks an improvement over how history is presented at California's many missions. At least twenty state historical markers treat missions without mentioning Native Americans - although mission communities were Indian communities typically comprising 200 to 2,000 natives, a handful of Spanish or Mexican soldiers and their family members, and two priests. Half a dozen other markers mention Indians only as recipients of Spanish services - the most insulting is at San Juan Capistrano, which the marker describes as "seventh in the chain of 21 missions established in Alta California to christianize and civilize the Indians."

In San Luis Obispo County, a marker tells that Mission San Luis Obispo was "built by the Chumash Indians living in the area"; another marker for its outpost, Santa Margarita Asistencia, states "Here the mission padres and the Indians carried on extensive grain cultivation." No marker in any other county lets on that Indians made and laid virtually every brick in every mission in California. Instead, like the slave plantations, the head man did all the work himself, as in this marker in Santa Clara County:

When interpretation does mention Indians at missions maintained as museums - particularly at those still owned by the Catholic Church (Mission San Juan Capistrano was personally deeded back to the Catholic Church by President Abraham Lincoln) - it presents the missions as harbors of shelter and well-being built by the Spanish for the Natives, echoing the state markers. Guides and labels do not tell how overseers forced Indians to farm, build, and even worship under threat of lash and chain.

At Sutter's Fort, labels and guides similarly imply that the Indians were there voluntarily and were treated well. Sutter did feed and pay "his" Indians, but the system amounted to serfdom and verged on slavery. "I had to lock the Indian men and women together in a large room to prevent them from returning to their homes in the mountains at night," wrote Heinrich Lienhard, Sutter's manager. "Large numbers deserted during the daytime." (It has also been documented that the padres who ran the Mission system, also locked the Indians who worked the Missions, in at night, to prevent them from escaping.)

Sutter armed men from "his" nearby villages to steal children from more distant villages and sold the captives in San Francisco to pay his debts. Sexual pleasure may also have played a role; writer William Holden suggests Sutter "was fond of the young Indian women." In 1844 Pierson Reading, Sutter's manager, extolled the easy life he led: "The Indians of California make as obedient and humble slaves as the Negro in the south. For a mere trifle you can secure their services for life." One California Indian recalled a life not so easy: "My grandfather was enslaved by Sutter to help in building the Fort. While he was kept there, Sutter worked him hard and then fed him in troughs. As soon as he could, he escaped and with his family hid in the mountains."

Before condemning Sutter too roundly however, we need to compare Native life under the Spanish and Mexicans (including Sutter) to what happened under the Anglos who followed him. Spanish and Mexican rule was brutal. Indians had revolted against the missions in 1771, 1775, 1810, 1812, 1824, and 1831 according to California historian David Wyatt. Nevertheless, Sutter's enterprises did connect the Indians to the world economy. The alternative, not to be so connected, meant extermination. Anthropologists are fond of saying that the French penetrated Native American societies, the Spanish acculturated them, and the British expelled them. Or, equally accurate, the French exploited the Indians, the Spanish enslaved them, and the Anglos killed them. And of course disease played a major role, regardless of the colonizers' nationality.

Sutter volunteered his Indian garrison to U.S. Army Lieutenant John C. Fremont in Fremont's 1846 campaign against the "Californios," the Mexican Californians on the coast, during the Mexican-American War. (After invading California, Fremont persuaded a group of miners to kidnap the Mexican governor of California, to force him to surrender. After getting drunk on the Mexican governor's liquor, his kidnappers proceeded to establish California as an independent state called the Bear Republic, which became the genesis of the modern State of California. WFI) Fremont's victory helped secure California for the United States, but the new territorial government had no further use for Native Americans. A newspaper account related the 1849 massacre of a Pomo Indian village at Clear Lake, north of San Francisco: "The troops arrived in the vicinity of the lake and came unexpectedly upon a body of Indians numbering between two and three hundred… They immediately surrounded them and as the Indians raised a shout of defiance and attempted to escape, poured in a destructive fire indiscriminately upon men, women, and children. They fell, says our informant, as grass before the sweep of the scythe." Sutter would surely have had his Indian army conquer and enslave the Pomos rather than massacre them, but Sutter was not long to be a factor in California. That same year James Marshall discovered gold some fifty miles east of Sutter's Fort. Sutter tried to keep it secret, but soon thousands of Americans, hundreds of Chinese, and other immigrants from Europe and Latin America (as well as African American fugitives from slavery) surged to California to seek their fortune. Sutter's rule was not strong enough to withstand this rush. His Indians fled, leaving no one to harvest his wheat. Miners plundered his livestock and even stole his millstones. In the ensuing anarchy, even his legal claim to the land was challenged (though eventually upheld) and Sutter went bankrupt.

The Natives likewise had to deal with this anarchic white frontier. For a moment, it seemed they might benefit from the discovery of gold. In 1848, of 4000 gold miners in the central mining district, more than half were American Indians. One white might hire fifty Indians, who received about forty dollars a month, four times what Sutter had paid two years earlier, yet whites made huge profits from their labor. Some Native Americans were able to mine on their own using willow baskets, and some became temporarily middle-class from their earnings. Almost immediately however, whites began driving Native workers out of the labor force. Indian men were confined to panning gold at the edges of white society; many Indian women became prostitutes.

Even these alternatives did not last long. White Americans thought of California Indians as depraved because most wore little or no clothing, "Digger Indians" because they used "primitive" gathering technology and ate "disgusting" food, "horrendously ugly and dirty," and heathen even if Catholic. As a result, in the words of historian Tomas Almaquer, "the California state government launched a systematic policy of sanctioned decimation." In January 1851, Gov. Peter H. Burnett's message to the California legislature read, "A war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct." (California had a bounty on Indians that lasted until the last decades of the 19^th century. In one year alone the State of California paid out $1 million to people who had killed Native Californian Indians. WFI) A startling drop in native population ensued. In 1848 perhaps 150,000 Indians lived in California, compared to about 15,000 non-Indians, mostly Mexican Californians. Ten years later just 16,000 Indians were left.

In 1910 "Sutter Indians" had been ravaged. The Maidus, who had numbered at least 9,000, were reduced to 1,000 people, and the Miwoks, starting with like numbers, to 670. They did not disappear though, and even rebounded somewhat by 1990 - the Maidus to 2,334 - and are contesting nearby Davis's renaming a street for Sutter, whom they call "an enslaver." They have disappeared from the historical marker for Sutter's Fort however, even though they built it. ²

1. He also had a legal wife in Switzerland.

2. Santa Barbara Indian Center and Dwight Dutschke, "A History of American Indians in California," in CA Dept. of Parks and Recreation, Office of Historic Preservation, ed., Five Views (Sacramento: Office of Historic Preservation, 1988), 42, 70; Albert Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988), 47-49, 75 88-89, 104-7; Hurtado, "John A. Sutter and the Indian Business," in Kenneth N. Owens, ed., John Sutter and a Wider West (Lincoln: U. of NE Press, '94); Jack D. Forbes, "What Do We Honor When We Honor Sutter?" email, 1/19/99; Heinrich Lienhard, A Pioneer at Sutter's Fort, 1846-1850 (Los Angeles: Calafia Society, 1941), 67-68; David Wyatt, Five Fires (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997), 39; William Holden, " 'Captain' John Sutter," American History 2/98: 34, 66; Joe Pitti conversation, 1/14/99; Philip Burnham, How the Other Half Lived (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995), 101-8; Tomas Almaquer, Racial Fault Lines (Berkeley: U. of CA Press, 1994), 5, 8, 26, 120-30; Francis L. and Roberta B. Fugate, Roadside History of NM (Missoula: Mountain Press, 1989), 14; Melanie Turner, "Yes, Street Will Remain Sutter Place," Davis Enterprise, 1/10/99.

SOURCE: Excerpted from "Lies Across America," #4, Exploiting vs. Exterminating the Natives. Pgs. 62-67 (New Press, 1999)