The point of this story isn’t that Amadeo Giannini was a bad man because he profited from stolen land. If we’re weighing hearts, his doesn’t seem to have been so bad unless you were a complacent banker, a forgivable antagonistic tendency if ever there was one. The point isn’t even that Johann Sutter and John Frémont were bad men because they stole and enslaved, though they were and it’s worth saying so. The point is that the series of plagues visited upon California in the second half of the nineteenth century took the form of men, and we can see the character of the tendencies that shaped the state (and in turn, the world) reflected in the men seized by them.

The gold rush turned Sutter’s bell with its generic, money days into a hegemonic order, but order needs actors and Anglo California needed these men, or men like them. Gold called out to the settlers from Sutter’s bell, begging them to find the shining flakes and kill anyone who got in the way, to do it more and faster and on a bigger scale until there was more gold to be made in some other way. The state’s farms and cities and banks called out for discipline, for an ambitious outsider unbeholden to the finance elite to whip everyone into rational shape. Amadeo Pietro Giannini filled the bill, but if after watching his father bleed out in front of him he had instead dedicated his life to stitching wounds, California would have found another such outsider.