Sutter's Gold by Blaise Cendrars
"Sutter's Gold" is a novel by Blaise Cendrars that tells the story of Johann Sutter, a historical figure who emigrated from Switzerland to California in pursuit of adventure and prosperity. The narrative follows Sutter's journey from a lonely stranger in a Swiss village to the self-proclaimed ruler of a vast empire in California, known as New Helvetia. Initially, Sutter succeeds in establishing a thriving community, but his fortunes take a drastic turn with the discovery of gold on his land, leading to an influx of greedy prospectors that ultimately destroys his empire and drives him into poverty and despair.
Cendrars portrays Sutter as a grandiose and obsessive individual, embodying the archetype of the self-made man, whose dreams are shattered by societal greed and betrayal. The novel reflects Cendrars' fascination with adventure and the human spirit, set against the backdrop of the American myth of opportunity. While it takes liberties with historical details, "Sutter's Gold" remains a poignant exploration of ambition, loss, and the fleeting nature of success. It is notable for its accessible style and has become Cendrars' most popular work, resonating with themes of individualism and the harsh realities of the frontier experience.
Sutter's Gold by Blaise Cendrars
First published:L’Or: La Merveilleuse Histoire du general Johann August Suter, 1925 (English translation, 1926)
Type of work: Historical chronicle
Time of work: 1834-1880
Locale: Switzerland, New York, Missouri, Hawaii, Oregon, Canada, Alaska, California, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C.
Principal Characters:
Johann August Sutter , a Swiss adventurer, ruined by the discovery of gold on his California landAnna Sutter , Sutter’s wife, who journeys with their children to rejoin him in CaliforniaJudge Thompson , the chief magistrate of California, who rules on Sutter’s case and later befriends himJames W. Marshall , the carpenter who discovers gold on Sutter’s landJohannes Christitsch , the leader of a Christian sect in Pennsylvania who takes control of Sutter’s spiritual and legal affairs
The Novel
For his first, and still most popular, novel, Blaise Cendrars reshaped the life of an actual historical personage, the ill-fated grandfather of his friend, the Swiss sculptor August Sutter. Following his solitary emigration to the Western Hemisphere, Johann Sutter (in the French text, Cendrars persists in giving the name its original spelling, Suter) had managed to become virtual emperor of California, until the discovery of gold on his property in the Sacramento Valley precipitated an uncontrollable rush of prospectors, who ruined him. Ironically, vast deposits of the precious metal reduced the wealthiest man in North America to destitution and madness.
Sutter’s Gold begins with the appearance of a lone stranger in a remote Swiss village. Johann Sutter has come to apply for a passport, but, when the authorities refuse to provide one to the unknown thirty-one-year-old, he crosses the French border anyway, leaving behind his wife and four children. The vagabond lives by his wits, not always by the law, and manages to book passage on a ship to New York. He vows to himself to conquer the New World.
Sutter spends two years in New York before moving on to St. Louis. He becomes haunted by alluring tales of the Western frontier and is determined, despite the many hazards, to travel to California. En route, the flip of a coin assures him that he will succeed. From Vancouver, he sails to Hawaii, and, after some time in the islands, he arranges passage with Russian sailors to Alaska. From Sitka, Sutter sails down the coast, to find himself at last alone on the deserted beach of San Francisco.
Excited by the luxuriant land he sees in the Sacramento Valley, Sutter proposes to build his New Helvetia there and is told by the Mexican governor to do as he pleases. Overcoming the natural and human dangers and the vagaries of politics, he succeeds in creating a magnificent empire. Yet, at the moment of his greatest triumph, as the forty-five-year-old Sutter prepares to send for his family in Europe, James W. Marshall, a carpenter in New Helvetia, accidentally digs into a lode of gold. By precipitating a frenetic rush onto the Sutter lands, the discovery of the valuable metal ends the sovereignty and the prosperity of the wealthiest man on the continent. Sutter loses control of his property to thousands of avaricious prospectors, and, when Anna Sutter and his four children finally arrive, they encounter a broken pauper. On seeing her husband, Anna collapses and dies.
Sutter sets to work again, and, for a time, his affairs once more flourish. He is honored as a hero by the mayor of San Francisco, and Judge Thompson rules that Sutter possesses full ownership of all the property in New Helvetia. The legal decision provokes a riot, a rampaging mob burns and ransacks the estate, and Sutter is again reduced to poverty, while his eldest son, Emile, is driven to suicide.
A shattered man, Sutter wanders about quoting the book of Revelation. He joins a religious sect in Pennsylvania and comes under the sway of its leader, Johannes Christitsch, who takes charge of his legal appeals. Sutter then becomes a familiar, pathetic figure in Washington, D.C., futilely petitioning Congress for the restoration of his property. Abandoned even by Christitsch, Sutter dies on the steps of the Capitol, at the age of seventy-three, unable to withstand the excitement caused by a cruel lie told to him by a seven-year-old child, that Congress has voted Sutter one hundred million dollars.
The Characters
Although it features a cast of thousands, Sutter’s Gold is the story of one monumentally obsessive man. Other figures, including his wife, his employees, and his advisers, put in flitting, fleeting appearances, but Sutter is the one character who dominates every sentence of the narrative.
Cendrars’ Sutter is an adventurer and a visionary, a fundamentally solitary man possessed of almost indomitable will. Once he determines to establish his empire in California, he refuses to allow any obstacle, human or natural, to stand in his way. Sutter is a European’s image of the American self-made man, the penniless immigrant who, by dint of sheer raw ambition, manages to re-create himself as lord of a vast enterprise. He is a grandiose figure, beyond good and evil, who is destroyed by the cupidity of a society that rejects his pastoral dream and by his own stubborn insistence on waging a holy war against the soldiers of gold.
Cendrars neglects and refashions complicating details from the actual life of Sutter in order to transform him into a myth rather than a fully rounded character. The fact that Sutter’s wife survived him by a year did not deter Cendrars from describing her melodramatic death at the moment of their reunion in California. In addition, though the historical Sutter died in a hotel room two days after learning that Congress had adjourned without taking action on his petition, Sutter’s Gold presents him as a Greek hero tragically collapsing at false news relayed by a juvenile messenger.
Cendrars’ Sutter is the last rugged individualist in a world tyrannized by a faceless, soulless mob. He is an adventurer at a moment when adventure ceases to be highly regarded. He is the flamboyant personality who gives Sutter’s Gold its only character.
Critical Context
The first and shortest of Cendrars’ novels, Sutter’s Gold anticipates the individualist adventurers of Moravagine (1926; English translation, 1968), Les Confessions de Dan Yack (1929), and Rhum: L’Aventure de Jean Galmot (1930). While much of the Swiss author’s diverse output in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction remains untranslated or otherwise unavailable, the brevity, immediacy, and simplicity of Sutter’s Gold have made the novel his most accessible and popular, though not most representative, work.
Sutter’s Gold embodies some aspects of the personality of Cendrars, himself an elusive traveler and adventurer. Its techniques reflect his intense interest in the nascent art of cinema, even as they anticipate the further development throughout the twentieth century of the cinematic novel, of narratives that have adapted the strategies of film. Flawed as a document of American history, the novel is nevertheless a vivid, if melancholy, embodiment of enduring American myths of frontier opportunity and individual assertion.
Bibliography
Birkerts, Sven. “Blaise Cendrars,” in New Boston Review. V (June/July, 1980), pp. 5-8.
Bochner, Jay. Blaise Cendrars: Discovery and Re-creation, 1978.
Chefdor, Monique. Blaise Cendrars, 1980.
Kellman, Steven G. “Blaise Cendrars’s L’Or as Cinematic Novel,” in POST SCRIPT: Essays in Film and the Humanities. IV (1985), pp. 16-28.
Studies in Twentieth Century Literature. III, no. 2 (1979). Special Cendrars issue.