Sutter's Gold

It isn't just that we stole Sutter's gold, while we invaded his domain, destroyed his farm, killed his livestock; it's also that we had ignored him when he invited us to join him as associates.

Sutter was born in Switzerland. He began setting his life in the new world up in New York (hung out in Brooklyn, knew Edgar Allen Poe), but soon headed west: at a time when it was well established that no one knew how to cross the Rockies: the Pacific wasn't the limit; the mountains were the limit. Sutter looked for fellow explorers to discover such a passage. He found no helpers. He found a way alone. We learned the way because he had found the way: unaided by us.

Sutter got to California, saw that the Sacramento Valley was ideal for agriculture. Again, he looked for partners, for associates, for fellow laborers and investors. He found none. He sailed further west, to Hawaii. There he found partners: Hawaiians who would invest their labor in return for a share of results. Sutter named his enterprise New Helvetia: New Switzerland. He sought, and obtained, treaties recognizing his sovereignty with Mexico, Russia, and the US. By 1849 Sutter's domain had rich farming, mighty live stock, not only employees and associates, but a private army.

Everything going swimmingly, he began to branch out into the lumber business. It was at his mill, all on "his" property that gold nuggets were found in the stream that powered the mill. It was Sutter's mill. Sutter's employees found the gold. Rightly, they reported their finding to Sutter. They were due some of the value: they found it; he was due some: they found it because they were on his land, doing his bidding. The owner gets some, the finders get some. But Sutter told them to keep mum: develop the lumber, then I'll think about developing metals.

Meantime the employees' kids played openly with the gold. Strangers passing by saw the kids, scoffed that the kids had real gold nuggets. Their moms said, "Oh, no: it's real gold alright." And that was the end of Sutter's New Helvetia, his agriculture, his lumber, his army, his mining.

People from the east poured west: over Sutter's route (finding other routes as well: once traffic was possible, it spread). (Did we thank him for the knowledge? Did we pay him a toll?) No, we tresspassed, panned for (his) gold, got hungry, killed his livestock.

The US put a court house in a rapidly developing San Franciso. Sutter summed his losses and sued. Twelve judges saw justice in his claim, awarded him hundreds of millions of dollars. The new citizens of San Francisco, suddenly finding themselves due for back rent and damages burned the court house to the ground. The judges scattered for their lives.

The US was used to gobbling land. The US, like any imperial kleptocracy, was used to taking whatever it wanted. What was different here was that we were stealing from a "white" man! It's doubly wicked irony that he'd invited us to share with him in the first place.

Oh, I don't doubt that Sutter wanted the lion's share. Why shouldn't he? Maybe he would have been difficult to work with, or for. Still, even if we'd declared emminent domain, we're building our highway through your living room, we should have paid him something for the land, the cattle, the lost profits ...

Sutter may have been the first white man robbed by the mob of white men. (He's the first I can name, where we all know the name.) But he wasn't the last: I offered social networking to the public in 1970 (as an alternative to social coercion in education: establish a cybernetic data base of learning resources, then every body mind their own business). (Johnny can learn to read: if he wants to. If Johnny choses not to and starves to death, it's nobody's business but Johnny's. If Sammy learns to read in twelve days instead of twelve years, then corners the rock-and-roll market, good for him. School was nothing really but a Procrustean bed anyway.

I asked for help, for resources, to build infrastructure. Years passed, decades. Then suddenly coercive governments and their institutional tools shove digital record keeping up our noses. I offered cheap public software development years before Microsoft was founded. I tried to engage IBM in my ideas in 1971, decades before they invested a penny in internet-related R&D. Bill Gates still didn't want anything to do with "the" (stolen) internet even after the internet was a world-wife phenomenon!

"You" all could have had convivial cheap versions of all of these things before there was such a thing as the PC! Once you did decide that you wanted them (after the kleptocracy's version was shoved up your nose) (after the money was taken from your pocket), someone should have noticed me: impoverished, a pariah, my son kidnapped, afforded no protection from the law, not published, now censored: all because I devoted my life to trying to deliver God's messages of social salvation (to people who still don't get Jesus' messages of spiritual salvation!)

I should have been killed the second the school noticed that I was intelligent. At least I should have been killed the second the fed realized that they wanted to steal and pervert my ideas. But I'm still alive, somehow, among the double-damned.