Heinrich Lienhard

"Lienhard's account of his early years consists of four segments: his boyhood and young manhood in the Swiss canton of Glarus, 1824-1843; his journey to America, August-November 1843; his two and a half years in Highland, Illinois; and his life in the upper Mississippi Valley. This section ends in April 1846, when Lienhard began the arduous and dangerous journey from St. Louis to Captain John Sutter's fort at New Helvetia, California.". "Lienhard has provided an unusually full account of his early life. The book contains fifty-one chapters, with each chapter featuring one or more life-shaping incidents for this pioneer who would successfully cross the Rocky Mountains at the same time the Donner party, taking a different and more obvious route, perished."--BOOK JACKET.

Heinrich Lienhard (1822-1903), son of a Swiss farmer, sailed for America in 1843. After three years in the Midwest, Lienhard and four other young European immigrants set off by wagon for California, reaching Johann Sutter's New Helvetia in October 1846. After a few months in the U.S. Army, Lienhard returned to Sutter's settlement. In 1849 Lienhard returned to Switzerland to accompany Sutter's family to the New World. Disillusioned by the changed California he found in early 1850, Lienhard returned to Switzerland in July. A pioneer at Sutter's fort (1941) is based on a diary kept in his years in California and focuses on Johann Sutter, his family, and his settlement on the Sacramento. It also covers Lienhard's experiences as a farmer and a miner and his crossings of Panama and the Atlantic in 1849-1850.