Portrait of Maj. Genl. (Hon.) John Sutter
at the State Capitol in Sacramento

by David Fenimore

• Draft of a Sutter timeline.
• Early draft of a first-person monologue by Sutter. It bears little resemblance to the remarks I make when I take on Sutter's character these days, but it was a start and it does contain a lot of direct quotations from Sutter's Bancroft reminiscences and assorted letters.
• Draft of an essay, "California Dreaming: The Imaginary Empire of John Sutter."
• Key Quotations By and About Sutter
• Basic Bibliography
• Dick Johnson shot this image of me, portraying Sutter at the San Bernardino Public Library on September 21, 1999.

• California History Online, a site by the California Historical Society
• A recent feature film by Swiss director Benny Fasnacht, produced in conjunction with the General John A. Sutter societies in Sacramento, California and Liestal, Switzerland. General Sutter purports to be a biography of "General" Sutter but falls woefully short of the mark, settling for a largely romanticized view of the man, leaving out most of the interesting details, and containing more than a few geographical and chronological errors.
  • Photographs taken outside the theater at the film's premiere on 17 October 1999.
• John Sutter Undisputed Truth Project: Native peoples' expression of concern over "honoring" a "genocidal" California settler in the context of similar protests across the West.
• The CCH's John Sutter page on its "The Otherness of the Past: California at 150" site (especially good for kids)
• Yuba City's Sutter Page
• PBS's take on Sutter from their documentary The West
• A Sacramento Bee article that, more than the others, focuses on the revaluation of Sutter by revisionist historians of the "New West"

Mail comments on these materials to David Fenimore (fenimore@unr.edu)
Go to my home page.