Written by V   

Something is rotten in the US. There is a disconnect between the leadership (sic) and the will of the people. How long it lasts remains to be seen, what the catalyzing event shall be is a mystery, but the results of the event are as plain as the dawn to those who have the eyes to see.

There are more of us than there are of them and that imbalance between what the leadership (sic) wants for this country and the will of the people can only end one way. The will of the people. It calls to mind the story of John Sutter, the owner of the mill which spawned one of the greatest migrations in the history of this country.

John Sutter owned the Sacramento Valley. Back in the days when California was still a province of Mexico, John Sutter blew into town and secured himself a land grant of eleven leagues of land, some 49,000 acres of the best bottom land imaginable near the confluence of the American and Sacramento rivers in what is now downtown Sacramento.

Sutter lost no time in building an empire. He built roads and bridges, he planted crops, established orchards, ran cattle and generally built the early infrastructure of the area. John Sutter was the King of California. Settlers flocked to his land and he worked with them to get them established. In exchange they helped him work the land and bring “civilization” to the area.

Then, while building a sawmill on the South Fork of the American River, his millwright, James Marshall, discovered nuggets and flakes of gold in gravel of the sluice he built to power the sawmill. The rest, as they say, is history.

The area was soon over run with miners and gold bugs coming to seek their fortune. They stole his cattle and slaughtered them for food. They stole his crops, they stole the fruit from his orchards, they hired his workers away from him with the lure of greater riches than John Sutter ever had hope of paying.

At first, Sutter tried to annex the area of the discovery into his land warrant from Mexico. The only problem was, John Sutter, when he asked for the land grant, asked for the good agricultural land, the bottom land. The gold, the mother load, was up in the hills and there was no way he could extend the land grant to cover that much area. It just didn’t work.

He tried to use the territorial governor’s office to enforce his claims and William Tecumseh Sherman (yes, that Sherman) denied his claims because at the time of the claim, California (he thought) was a prize of war and not part of a negotiated peace treaty. What Sherman didn’t realize when he made his ruling was that it actually was a US territory with a two day grace but 3,000 miles and lack of instantaneous communications swayed the decision.

Sutter later discovered the time line and kept pressing his claims with the territorial Governor. Eventually, the citizens of Sacramento, tired of his constant efforts to enforce the piece of paper which gave him ownership, quite literally burned him out of his home. Sutter left California a broken man. He travelled back east and spent his remaining years on the steps of the US Capital trying to get the US Senate to compensate him for his losses.

The story goes that he became a bit of a fixture on the Capital Steps and a bit of a gadfly. He was tolerated, but he had absolutely no chance of ever regaining that which he had spent so many years building. California was quickly becoming a major force in the country and the needs of the hordes of people who were moving there far outweighed anything John Sutter could offer. There were more of them than there were of him. So much for the power of the paper declaiming ownership.

On June 16, 1880, a pack of street urchins came running up to him on the steps of the Capital exclaiming, “Mr. Sutter, Mr. Sutter~! Have you heard? The Senate has granted your request~!” John Sutter was so overcome with emotion his heart failed him and two days later he died a pauper in a rooming house thinking he had his life’s work returned to him.

One hundred and thirty years later, the scenario is beginning to unfold again. There are absentee landowners who control hundreds of thousands of acres of farm and timber ground. In Birmingham, Alabama out of towners hold the paper for a state of the art water treatment facility but it is too expensive for many of the homeowners to maintain their connection. If you can’t afford it, you don’t get to take your morning constitutional in your own house and there is no secondary source of sanitation other than a slit trench in your back yard.

How long will this hold? There are more of us than there are of them. What happens when you can’t get lumber to build your house to keep your babies warm from the outside. What happens when fertile agricultural land lies fallow because an absentee owner refuses to let the locals plant their crops so they can feed their babies? How long can it last?

Eventually, it shall dawn on people that there are indeed more of us than there are of them and the people shall let fly with digitus erectus daring anyone to stop them from planting and tending their crops. Will troops come in to stop farmers from planting? Will troops come in to stop timbermen from working the ground to bring in logs to turn into lumber? Will troops close down the mines?

There are more of us than there are of them and it can only be a matter of time before the masses who live locally overwhelm all pretenses of the paper indicating ownership. Ultimately, the will of the people cannot be denied. John Kennedy told us that those who make peaceful change impossible, make violent revolution inevitable. What will our leaders (sic) do when it becomes all too clear that there are crowds baying for their blood?

To all of those who read the ruminations of my mind, and I know there are certain individuals out there reading me who are in a position to do something about it, I say this:

Don’t forget what happened to John Sutter.