Heinrich Lienhard

Johann Heinrich Lienhard (January 19, 1822, Bilten, Canton Glarus – December 19, 1903, Nauvoo, Illinois) was a Swiss immigrant to the United States. He left Switzerland at the age of 21. His memoirs for the years 1822 to 1850 are an important historical source regarding California Trail and Sutter's Fort in California from 1846 to 1850.

Biography Johann Heinrich Lienhard was born on 19 January 1822 in Switzerland at the hamlet Ussbühl near Bilten, Canton Glarus. He spent his childhood and youth together with his three siblings on the farm of his parents. Knowing that several of his cousins had emigrated to America, his childhood dream of following their example came true when he left Switzerland in 1843 and traveled to New Switzerland, later Highland, in Illinois.

He spent the next two and a half years mainly at that place, it being a time of adjusting to new conditions. At first Lienhard worked as a farm hand and later left the Swiss settlement on occasion to travel up the Mississippi, taking on several jobs along the way in the hope of finding better-paid work. In the spring of 1846, while working in a shop in St. Louis, he met some old friends from Galena with whom only a year before he had talked about emigrating to California. They were just then preparing for that venture, and little effort was needed on their part to persuade him to join them in their undertaking.

The journey of the "Five German Boys," as Heinrich Lienhard and his four companions were called by the other emigrants, lasted six months and led them from Independence, Missouri, to New Helvetia, also called Sutter's Fort, in California. In 1846, there was no fully established trail yet to that Mexican domain for emigrants, let alone for their oxen-drawn wagons, so that especially the second half of the way required the utmost effort and skill of humans and animals alike. In his reminiscences at the sheep farm not far from the Fort.

In April 1849 Lienhard and Dürr went as partners to the mines to trade the sheep. Several weeks later Lienhard sold out to Dürr and, back at the Fort, acquiesced in Sutter, Jr.'s request of going to Europe in order to bring the rest of his family to California. Heinrich Lienhard left San Francisco in June 1849, traveling via the Isthmus of Panama to New York and from there via England and Germany to Switzerland. Taking the same route, he returned to San Francisco in January 1850. Only half a year later he decided to leave violence-ridden California for good. Although he loved its climate, prairies, valleys, and mountains, he could not tolerate the lawlessness as well as the exploitation and destruction of the indigenous peoples. On the last day of 1850 and after a journey of six months he was back at his parental home in Switzerland.

In summer 1851 Heinrich Lienhard married Elsbeth Blumer of Bilten. They purchased a homestead in Kilchberg near Zurich, where in 1852 their first son Caspar Arnold and the following year John Henry were born. In September 1853, however, the Lienhards sold their farm and in April 1854 left Zurich, first settling for two years in Madison, Wisconsin, where in 1855 they had their third son, John Jacob. In 1856 they moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, on the Mississippi, where Heinrich Lienhard was to live for 47 years as a well-to-do farmer and respected citizen. In Nauvoo he and Elsbeth Lienhard had six more children, but they lost their oldest son in 1878 and their daughter Dora in 1884. In the same year Lienhard's wife died and in 1892 the youngest daughter Barbara Adela died as well. Heinrich Lienhard died on 19 December 1903 after a brief illness and, like his wife and seven of their children, was buried in Nauvoo's Presbyterian cemetery.

Heinrich Lienhard's manuscript In the mid-1870s Heinrich Lienhard began to chronicle the experiences of the first 29 years of his life from his childhood and youth in Switzerland up to his return home from California in 1850. In regular and fluent old German script, he filled nearly one thousand pages over several years, thus leaving behind a substantial legacy. He knew from first-hand experience, however, that cooperation, escape, or resistance could all mean death for indigenous people.

Thus Lienhard's text can be read on two levels. First, as a detailed account of landscapes, fauna, flora, and peoples of the northern Western Hemisphere and the events of the Anglo-American conquest of those lands. Secondly, it can be read as a complex reflection on racial conquest, wrestling with white intruders' destruction of the environment, of animals, of indigenous peoples and their millennia-old communities, and describing with clarity their forced servitude, sexual exploitation of the indigenous women, expulsion, and death.

Publications In 1949, a granddaughter sold Heinrich Lienhard's manuscript However, Leemann's version contains many errors of transcription, substantial omissions, changes and additions, so that the original is often barely recognizable. Lienhard, then approaching his eighties, was deeply disappointed as notes in the margins of his personal copy reveal.

In the United States the first partial edition, prepared by Marguerite E. Wilbur, was published in 1941 as A Pioneer at Sutter's Fort, 1846–1850: The Adventures of Heinrich Lienhard. Wilbur translated the sections relating to Lienhard's stay in California, excluding his trip to Switzerland in 1849. On the whole she follows the original, yet often omits episodes that, according to her judgment, "proved to be of slight historic value." This severely weakens, partially falsifies the text and also seriously damages its authenticity.

In 1951 J. Roderic Korns and Dale L. Morgan used Lienhard's original text―in their view "a record of the highest importance" ―as a source in their research on the "Hastings Cutoff" since Lienhard and his friends were among the first to cross that section of the trail. In 1961 Erwin G. and Elisabeth K. Gudde edited a textually accurate, if somewhat uninspired translation of the trail under the title From St. Louis to Sutter's Fort. In their preface they characterize Lienhard's text as "one of the three classical reports of the great western migration of 1846."

John C. Abbott's book New Worlds to Seek, issued in the year 2000, is a translation of Lienhard's text about his youth and his years in Highland, Illinois. In 2010 Christa Landert published a partial German edition, titled "Wenn Du absolut nach Amerika willst, so gehe in Gottesnamen!". It represents about half of the manuscript and covers the years 1846 to 1849, that is, Lienhard's travel from Missouri to California and his stay in California during the early years of the Anglo-American takeover.

Two newspaper articles written by Heinrich Lienhard were published independently of his manuscript. The first appeared in the Glarner Zeitung after his short stay in Switzerland in 1849. It gives a first-hand account of California, Sutter's Fort, the discovery of gold, and life in the mines as well as the most advantageous route to California, undoubtedly then of much interest for many readers. The second article appeared in 1885 in the San Francisco Daily Examiner. Lienhard had sent it as a letter to the editor to recall that eventful time of the gold discovery and the beginning of the gold rush.