To think my stern New England-style schooling had fed me Hesiod and Homer, the complete works of William Shakespeare and every word of the King James Bible, but that it took a fateful brush with a frontier autocrat to have my first taste of champagne! Oh, it was heaven! A few years later, when I learned the American River ran with gold, I could only conjure that sublime, French liquid in my mind's eye. If that river exists anywhere, I should hope I have the good fortune to discover it (and the stamina to survey it), much as that lucky monk discovered the secret to making the stuff in the Middle Ages.

"I am den law!" Sutter was fond of saying. He referred to himself as "Captain Sutter of the Swiss Guards"—as in a member of that curious tribe (as I am given to understand it), which guards the Pope. The Pope was not and is not an especially popular figure in the America to which my Puritan forefathers sailed, but you must recall that California was not yet a part of my forefathers' America in 1843: it was Mexican.

Furthermore, John Sutter was Lutheran, even though he thought nothing of performing Catholic wedding ceremonies at his fort—at which Captain Sutter himself officiated.

Why? He was den law!

His hexagonal fort was 428 feet long at its longest and 178 wide at its widest; the 18-foot tall walls were nearly three feet thick, guarded by a dozen guns of varying caliber—nine-pounders and six-pounders mostly. The magnificent distillery, horse-powered mill, and magazine were complemented by barracks that could sleep 1,000 soldiers! In his constant employ, Sutter had 100 men who sowed 1,000 acres of wheat annually and tended to 20,000 head of cattle—at one point his land holdings exceeded 150,000 acres! His income was additionally supplemented by a team of trappers manning some 1,000 traps!

If the Mexican government gave Sutter any trouble, he simply penned Mexico City and threatened to raise another nation's flag: one week, the American...one week the British...but most weeks the French—the nation most generous in liquors with which one might pledge allegiance! Also, not coincidentally, the nation least likely to take him up on his offer of blind submission.

All of this awaited me as I rode into the valley and first saw my love in full flush of July—yet, as ever, in the throes of her perpetual season, which one may simply call "California." I rode down mountain meadows and into meandering foothills through the morning fog and electric colors of a multitude of mountain meadow flowers and the springs that rushed among them. I rode down to Sutter's Fort certain I had entered my own perpetual spring—certain I had found the source that would sustain me in her blue eyes and redwood hair, her face shining in the sun and the ocean spray in her long, blonde lashes! Her voice a breeze soughing through a Monterey cypress and her wandering, wise gaze zigzagging toward the sea. After all the death and danger I'd known, might I be forgiven for assuming I had found Paradise—and my Beatrice, my Eve?