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some on horseback, some in canoes, with rifles slung across their backs and leather caps tilted over one ear, are keeping close ranks and driving everyone forward when the going gets rough.
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    Six weeks later, the valley presents a ghostly spectacle. Fire has swept this way, a fire that smouldered under the low-hanging, acrid smoke of the bracken and the shrubby trees before flaring up like a torch, high, straight, implacable, in a single blaze. On all sides now, they see smoking stumps, twisted bark, splintered branches. The great solitary trees are still standing, but riven, scorched by the flames.
    There is work to be done!
    The oxen plod to and fro. The mules pull the plough. Seed is scattered. There is not even time to root out the blackened stumps, so the furrows skirt round them. The cattle are already wallowing in the marshy prairies, the sheep are on the hills and the horses are grazing in a paddock surrounded by thorn-bushes. At the confluence of two rivers, they are throwing up earthworks and building the ranch-house. Roughly-hewn tree-trunks and planks six inches thick are used in its construction. Everything is solid, large, massive, conceived for the future. The buildings are laid out in a line: barns, storehouses and granaries. The workshops are on the banks of the river, the Kanaka village in a ravine.
    Sutter keeps an eye on everything, directs everything, supervises the execution of the work down to the last detail; he is at every work-site at once and does not hesitate to put his hand to the task personally when one or other of the work-gangs is a man short. Bridges are built, tracks cleared, swamps drained, a well sunk, ponds, drinking-troughs and irrigation channels dug. A first palisade already protects the farm, a small fort is planned. Emissaries scour the Indian villages, and 250 of the Indians formerly protected by the Missions are brought in, together with their wives and children, to work on the various projects. Every three months, new convoys of Kanakas arrive and the lands under cultivation now stretch as far as the eye can see. Thirty-odd whites, men who have been settlers in this country for  some time, come to offer their services. They are Mormons. Sutter pays them three dollars a day.
    And prosperity is not long in coming.
    4,000 oxen, 1,200 cows, 1,500 horses and mules and 12,000 sheep are dispersed around New Helvetia, covering an area that takes several days to walk round. The harvests yield 530 per cent and the granaries are full to bursting.
    As early as the end of the second year, Sutter is able to buy some fine farms along the coast, near Fort Bodega. They belong to the Russians, who are pulling out. He pays 40,000 dollars cash for them. He plans to go in for stock-breeding on the grand scale there and, more particularly, to improve the bovine strain.
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    In colonizations of this kind, it is sometimes possible to overcome the difficulties of a purely material nature, that arise day by day, with relative ease; a will of iron and strenuous labour, backed up by suitable equipment, may succeed in imposing a new order on the secular laws of nature, and even in transforming the aspect of a virgin land and the climatology of a region forever, but the human element is not so easily mastered.
    From this point of view, John Augustus Sutter's position was absolutely typical.
    At the moment of his arrival, California was on the brink of a revolution. In Mexico itself, the Compania Cosmopolitana had just been formed with the avowed aim of pillaging what was left of that unhappy country once occupied by the Mission settlements. Powerful  political groups had just embarked a force of two hundred adventurers to be unleashed on this so-recently-prosperous land. While these men were at sea, General Santa Anna overthrew President Farias and immediately sent a courier, via Sonora, to Governor Alvarado giving him strict orders to oppose the landing of these roughnecks by force. The band was broken