About this module: This is one of six modules created for DMRS-El Paso's immigration history project. The modules focus on the people and agencies that helped (or tried to help) immigrants to the United States.
Immigrants from Italian-language Switzerland came from the southernmost corner of the country, from a canton (a state in the Swiss Confederation) called Ticino (also called Tessin). Unlike the other Swiss cantons, where French, German, and Romansh are spoken, the population of Ticino speaks Lombard Italian. Most are Roman Catholic. The Alps separate Ticino from the rest of Switzerland and at the northern border of Ticino is the rough St. Gotthard Pass. For many years, Ticino was governed by Austria and the Italian states.
Swiss Immigration
The story of Swiss immigration “is a record of hardship and obstruction at home, of barriers placed in the way of the emigrant by governments, of social ostracism, and of deprivation of all his rights and privileges. The home governments feared the loss of their people by emigration as much as they might by war or pestilence, and employed all means in their power to prevent it.”1
The first Swiss person to come to what is now the United States was Theobald von Erlach (1541-1565) a part a 1564 French attempt to create a settlement in North America. Von Erlach died with some 900 French soldiers who were shipwrecked by a hurricane and killed by the Spanish.2
Some "Switzers" also lived at Jamestown in 1608-09, when it was run by John Smith. In 1657 the French Swiss Jean Gignilliat received a large land grant from the proprietors of South Carolina.
Swiss immigration to America began in 1710, when the government of Bern canton sent a request to England’s Queen Anne for permission to establish a Swiss settlement in the American colonies. The Bern government saw this as a way to get rid of both paupers and members of some Protestant sects who refused to comply with laws and rejected religious norms.3
Allowing and encouraging emigration was a major change in thinking for the Swiss.
“The old tradition forbade emigration. Leaving the country of one's birth seemed equivalent to desertion, and as desertion from the ranks was paid for with loss of life, so emigration was punishable with loss of all that the state deemed worth having, citizenship, property, land- and home-rights. Banishment, social ostracism, refusal of permission to return, imprisonment for life if caught returning, these were the conditions on which the emigrant gave up his country.…Emigration is sinful and its wages death, so judged the sixteenth, seventeenth, and most of the eighteenth century; the nineteenth introduced a more liberal view.”4
In 1710 some 100 Swiss, led by Christoph von Graffenried (1661-1743), founded New Bern in what is now North Carolina. Within a few decades other Swiss colonies were established. These colonies encountered all the hardships of pioneer settlements, extremes of heat and cold, fevers incident to the breaking of new ground, hostility of the natives, and deficiencies in material equipment. If they weren’t shipwrecked and lost at sea, disease and starvation still reduced their numbers, and they were victims of fraudulent captains and agents, who robbed them and sold them into servitude.5
Between 1710 and 1750, some 25,000 Swiss are estimated to have settled in British North America, especially in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina.6
It is difficult to know the exact number of Swiss immigrants, because with German, French, and Italian names, they were not always identified as Swiss in the official records. Historians believe that, between 1820 and 1930, some 290,000 people went from Switzerland to the United States, settling mainly in the rural Midwest, especially in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin.7 A substantial percentage apparently went back to Switzerland.
The Swiss who emigrated and stayed in America brought with them both agricultural and technological knowhow that contributed greatly to American culture.
Ticinese Emigration
The 1800s brought new problems to the Ticino villages that they had not experienced before. The area had been completely passed over by the Industrial Revolution; it was not until 1822 that there was a passable road over the St. Gotthard Pass, and not until 1882 that a train tunnel was cut through the Pass.10
Better transportation brought tourists to resorts built near the lakes of Ticino and a new prosperity. But, this further isolated the peasant villages from the cities and contributed to deepening poverty in the hillside towns where the peasants still lived in ancient stone houses built by their ancestors.
Motives for immigration
Between 1868 and 1937, a total of 35,558 Ticinese left their homes to emigrate overseas, and four-fifths came to the United States. Of these, virtually all came to California. In the 1930 census, there were 20,063 people born in Switzerland living in California, and 29,635 American-born citizens had one or two parents born in Switzerland.11
The “push” to emigrate
The “push” to emigrate from Ticino came from population growth, political turmoil, unemployment, food shortages and crop failures, floods, and landslides.
Population boom
After 1850, Europe experienced a warming trend; this meant more food could be grown. Prosperity brought sanitation even to peasant villages. For example, when the Ticino River overflowed it left rancid pools along its banks that were breeding grounds for malaria. The river was channeled and the malaria pools disappeared.
Increased food and sanitation had an unexpected side effect: babies survived longer, so infant mortality fell, and a population boom followed. The need for more farmland caused a crisis as the villages could not support the increased population. For many, the only solution was to leave their native villages and try to find work elsewhere.
Political Turmoil and Unemployment
In early 1853, an anti-Austrian uprising took place in the Italian city of Milan. The Austrian military ruler of northern Italy—Field Marshall Josef Radetzky—determined that men and money to support the Italian cause was crossing the wide-open Ticino border. Radetzky ordered the border closed and ordered all 6,500 Ticinese living in northern Italy expelled and forced to return to their homes.12
Strained relations with Austrian-controlled northern Italy hurt the Ticino economy, which depended on cross-border trade.
The young men, often landless second sons (the patrimony of the Ticino villages allowed inheritance of whatever property the family had by the eldest son and his family) returned home with no money and no work.
Fortunately for the Ticinese, the land was covered with chestnut trees and soon enterprising young men figured there was a market for roasted chestnuts in European cities, and so some of them emigrated to try their luck at selling chestnuts in other parts of Europe.13
Food shortages, floods, and landslides
Ticino faced a severe economic crisis because it had to feed all these people without the wheat from Italy. A serious food crisis occured during the first years of the Risorgimento14 affecting the import-dependent mountain valleys of Ticino, and forcing “some to grind corn stalks, walnut husks, bark of the beech tree, vines, hay and straw into polenta and flat bread.”15
The spring thaw melted snow in the Alps, which sometimes led to widespread flooding in Ticino, a problem that continues in the 21st Century.
Following catastrophic floods in 1868, an “Appeal to the Swiss of California” went out from the Swiss Consulate:
“There remains no doubt but that we find ourselves confronted by a calamity such, perhaps, as our [Swiss] history has not recorded for centuries . . . the deaths are numerous. . . . In the canton of Tessin more than 60 persons have been drowned or crushed to death, and more than 1,000 head of stock have perished. . . . The undersigned respectfully announces to the Swiss population of California, and all others who may desire to assist the unfortunate victims of the inundations, that he has opened a subscription book at his office, No. 527 Clay Street, corner of Leidesdorff.” Francis Berton, Consul for Switzerland, Daily Alta California (San Francisco), November 21, 1868, front page.16
Melting ice and snow also triggered deadly landslides that cut off Ticenese villages until they could be cleared and villagers were displaced and sometimes injured or killed by these occurrences.
Poverty in the Ticinese villages was overwhelming, and so young men from Ticino, first in a trickle and later in a flood, did what countless millions of other impoverished Europeans did, they left for the New World.17
The “pull” to emigrate
The main “pull” factors that brought the Ticinese to America, and to California in particular, were the 1849 gold rush, availability of farm land, high paying jobs, and cheaper transport costs. They also fell for some dishonest and exaggerated promises made by for-profit emigration agencies.18
1849 California Gold Rush
The emigration of Ticinese to California in the 19th century started with the California Gold Rush. Two gold seekers from Leventina (a district of Ticino canton that is right on the southern flank of the Gotthard Pass) were the first to arrive in San Francisco in 1849. In a few years, the number of migrants increased from less than 100 to several hundred. The great majority came from the northern valleys of Ticino.
Ticino and San Francisco are 5,900 miles apart. The first leg of the immigrants’ journey was from Ticino to a seaport, like LaHavre (about 460 miles as the crow flies; much, much longer over the Alps and across Western Europe), Hamburg (520 miles), or Rotterdam (440 miles). The emigrants could walk or take a stagecoach, but they often had to cross the Gotthard Pass on foot. If they went via Lucerne, it was possible to take a train. Sometimes the migrants stayed in London for a while to work in order to pay for the trip to California.
There was no Panama Canal yet, so the sea voyage took several months either sailing around South America or to disembarking and crossing the Isthmus of Panama, then boarding a ship to cross the Pacific.
Availability of farm land
In 1859, as the Gold Rush was fading, a front-page feature article of the California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences contrasted agricultural conditions in Switzerland with those of California, advising Swiss farmers to
“…take advantage of the agricultural promise which was about to supplant gold fever in the Golden State: How would the Swiss exult in the superior advantages afforded by the mountains of California! Here the arable land is abundant, cheap, and prolific, needs no costly terracing and walling, and below the line of winter snows, can be cultivated for various purposes all through the year. The vine yields double, or more than double, what it does in any other country, and wine is made of a quality so excellent that it is already in demand for exportation. The pasturage for sheep is extensive and lasting, and for cattle during the sum-mer season, very rich and easy of access. Above all, we have a climate which rivals that of the plains of Italy. These facts warrant the belief, that, if every gold-field was exhausted, there would still be in the Sierra Nevada attractions sufficient to draw thousands in search of homes, and advantages great enough to hold them there contented.”19
High paying jobs
Even as the Gold Rush slowed down, the Ticinesi were able to find work in California, making enough to support themselves and, in many cases, enough to send back to their families in Switzerland. Often starting as laborers, they got work on farms and ranches. Their experience and knowledge of dairying led some into working in, and later owning, creameries and cheese factories.
In Switzerland, they had gained familiarity with grape growing and wine making, which made them pioneers in the production of California wines (the Italian Swiss Colony brand was founded by some Swiss and Italian wine merchants). They also became horticulturists, carpenters, storekeepers, hotelkeepers and bakers.20
Lower transportation costs
The journey from New York City to San Francisco was much shorter and a lot less expensive after the opening of the First Transcontinental Railroad in 1869. It also made it economically feasible for the Swiss to import goods from their home country to California.
Even before the coming of the railroad, Swiss foodstuffs and beverages were arriving in San Francisco. An 1853 report mentions boxes and barrels of extrait d’absynthe21; Kirschwasser22; cheese wheels; chocolate and cocoa products; champagne, wine from Cortaillod (in Neuchâtel); and 200 containers of Schabzieger (“Sap-sago” a hard, green cheese from Glarus). They also imported clocks, clock parts and music boxes, cigars, and textiles and ribbons.23
Dishonest and exaggerated promises
Publicity about the wonders of life in the United States, and California in particular, also drew emigrants to leave Ticino.24 Individuals, like Swiss notary C. A. Scheurer, published a glowing report on his new California home in 1854, to which he added a report on California conditions in 1853 from the Swiss Consulate in San Francisco.
The Swiss consulate was only one of many quickly set up to profit from the economic and geographic advantages of the new state of California: Scheurer also made sure his readers knew that there were consuls in San Francisco representing Austria, Prussia, Hanover, Hamburg and Bremen.
Rarely mentioned were cases of Swiss immigrants who were unable to make a living in the new land, were cheated out of their savings, or suffered from home sickness too much to remain in the New World. We do not know the numbers of repatriated immigrants from California as precisely, nor are they recorded as faithfully, as those of the immigrant arrivals.25
Help For Italian-speaking Swiss Immigrants
Financial Assistance
The cost of traveling abroad was beyond the means of many people, so they would arrange to borrow the money, promising to pay it back from the wages they hoped to earn in America.
Some emigrants got loans from local municipalities; others from the wealthy aristocracy (Patriziato or Patriciate). The emigrants would mortgage their properties or arrange for private loans. If they signed a contract with an emigration agency, the journey and the room and board were specified. Because a few of the early emigration agencies took advantage of the emigrants and swindled them, the Swiss cantons began licensing and regulating them.
Various communal forms of immigration assistance, often based on an aid society or a for-profit company, sponsored immigrant colonies. Riskier businesses, such as gold-mining, had to be financed by private, family or groups of investors.
Settlements or colonies of like-minded emigrants from Swiss communities pooled resources for starting afresh in the Golden State, always with the expectation that earnings in California would be sent back home to repay the investment.
The flood of Italian Swiss emigrants from places like Ticino led to labor shortages in Switzerland. In 1855, following a great population decline by loss of local workers moving overseas, the Ticino parliament tried to stem the flow of emigration by passing laws to keep municipalities from financing emigration expenses. In particular, towns were forbidden to loan or advance travel costs to a departing citizen of the canton. Even so, the Swiss towns continued to gamble on the emigrants’ honesty and “paid the expenses of the voyage and guaranteed the debts contracted for it.”26
Often an immigrant started to work at a dairy as a milker earning “Swiss Diamonds”27 but then, by combining his savings with a bank loan, he would be able to buy a small farm. To do that, the Ticinese emigrants to rural California needed financial help. They were used to keeping close ties to their home canton, but the banking models of Ticino didn’t provide for bank to have a physical presence abroad. It wasn’t until 1896 that La Banca Svizzera Americana (The Swiss-American Bank) became an “immigrant bank” that handled the flow of cash, primarily from California, to family, friends, and creditors back in Tecino.28 This “immigrant bank” enabled Swiss Ticinesi Californians to send money back to their home canton and provided other banking services to immigrants in the USA.29
Eventually banks like La Banca Svizzera Americana replaced municipalities and private individuals for financing emigration. The money sent back to Tecino from California boosted, and sometimes saved, the local economy. The flow of cash led to the establishment of the first banks in the canton and a steady growth in deposits over time. According to some estimates, 90% of the banks’ assets belonged to the families of emigrants. (see Ceschi, History of the Canton of Ticino - L'Ottocento, p. 320 ) .
Another financial institution of great significance for Swiss immigrants was the Nord Amerikanischer Gruetli Bund (North American Grutli-Bund), a non-profit insurance company started in 1865 by Swiss immigrants in Cincinnati, which still exists as the North American Swiss Alliance.30
Immigrants helping immigrants
Settlements or colonies of like-minded Swiss emigrants pooled their resources for starting afresh in the Golden State, always with the expectation that earnings in California would find their way back home in order to more than repay the investment.
Italian-Swiss in California formed societies and organizations devoted to service, fraternal gatherings, leisure pursuits and political action. For example, in San Francisco they started a Bachelors’ Society, and organized benevolent societies in San Francisco, San Jose, Petaluma, Cambria and Old Creek (San Luis Obispo County).31 In San Francisco the Ticinese founded a mutual aid society, a patriotic society and a journal written in Italian with news from Ticino and the colony.
Members of the Swiss Community in San Francisco founded the Swiss Relief Society in 1886 to assist immigrants from Switzerland who had fallen on hard times.32 The original and primary mission of the Swiss Benevolent Society of San Francisco (SBSSF) was and is to provide one-time or ongoing assistance—help paying bills, shopping or transportation—as well as companionship for Swiss living in Northern California. The SBSSF notes that, “Contrary to popular belief, there are Swiss in need. Usually, it is: a sudden, monetary crisis brought on by a death or divorce, failing health and age, compounded by a lack of family living nearby who could help, someone who needs help while government assistance (US or Swiss) is arranged.” This is very similar to what many other American social service agencies do.
Swiss-American Ticinesi in California
When the gold rush was over, the Ticino prospectors had to decide whether to return home or stay in California. Those who remained thus converted to other professions: some moved to the city and became shopkeepers, clerks, waiters and confectioners.
Those who managed to make a fortune had, in some cases, the opportunity to return to Ticino. There they invested part of their accumulated earnings in the construction of villas, works of devotion or important infrastructure projects, such as the Locarno-Bignasco railway. Emigrant remittances helped restore buildings and churches. The story of a rich uncle in America was popular in Ticino.33
The emigrants didn’t just return to Ticino with large sums of money, they also had gained enough experience in the world to understand how to invest in railroad stocks, bonds or real estate speculation, and they had entrepreneurial knowledge that allowed the Canton to face the difficult economic conditions of that period.34
Among the Ticino emigrants who stayed in California were a few miners, but farm work was what they knew best. Many returned to working the land, preferring the countryside and the activities of milkers, farmers or ranchers (in California, for example, Swiss immigrants tried raising cattle like real cowboys and ran dairies where they were involved in milk and cheese production).
The Ticinese dairy farmers, in their letters to their families back home, explained the everyday hard work; that they were milking about twenty cows by hand; that the ranch was much bigger than an Alpine pasture. In winter they worked in sawmills or in factories.35
The second generation of Swiss in California assimilated easily and quickly. “Ticinese” and Italian were no longer spoken, and family connections became more difficult. The descendants are now scattered all over the United States. Family names, street names and tombstones in Catholic cemeteries are the current traces of emigration from Ticino.
Californians viewed the Italian Swiss favorably; they were seen as a well-liked, respected and prosperous people, according to an 1878 article in the San Francisco Chronicle entitled “Our Ticinese Population.”
Swiss emigration to the United States ceased after World War II.
What you may not know about Italian-Swiss immigration - the Red River Colony
In 1811, the English Earl of Selkirk got control of a huge (116,000 square miles or 300,000 square km) piece of land in Canada on the banks of the Red River near the mouth of the Assiniboine River (in present-day Manitoba). The Red River Colony was established in an area that today straddles the Canadian province of Manitoba and the American states of Minnesota and North Dakota.
Selkirk set up his base in what is now downtown Winnipeg and started with a small number of Scots settlers. Fighting broke out between the Selkirk settlement and Canadian fur traders and the settlement was destroyed in 1815. Selkirk rebuilt it and recruited a regiment of mercenary soldiers (the de Meurons)36 to defend it. Many of the soldiers were Swiss.37
Dr. George Bryce describes what happened to the Red River Colony:38
But the De Meurons were not only bachelors, but they came from the peasantry of Austria and Italy, they had not fought for home and country, and their life of mercenary soldiering had made them selfish and deceitful. A writer of the time speaks, and evidently with much prejudice, against the De Meurons. "They were," he says, "a medley of almost all nations—Germans, French, Italians, Swiss and others. They were bad farmers and withal very bad subjects; quarrelsome, slothful, famous bottle companions and ready for any enterprise however lawless and tyrannical." A few years later we find it stated that they made free with the cattle of their neighbors, and the chronicler does not hesitate to say that the herds of the De Meurons grew in number in exactly the same ratio as those of the Scottish settlers decreased.
Lord Selkirk, in the very last years of his life, planned to bring a band of Protestant settlers from Switzerland. A Colonel May, accepted the duty of going to Switzerland, issuing a very attractive invitation to settlers, and shipping a considerable number of Swiss families to his so-called Red River paradise.39
This band of [about 170] Colonists, consisting as they did of “watch and clock-makers, pastry cooks and musicians,” were quite unfit for the rough work of the Selkirk Colony. In 1821 they were brought by way of Hudson Bay, over the same rocky way as the earlier Colonists came.
Having taken about 3 months to cross the Atlantic and then getting stuck in the ice of Hudson’s Strait for another three weeks, the Swiss emigrants had to row up the Hayes River—over some 6o portages—and across the full length of Lake Winnipeg.40
Bryce continues:
“They were utterly poverty stricken, though honest, and well-behaved. Instead of travelling to a fertile land where, the captain promised, rich harvests of grains, vegetables and fruit could be expected, they arrived at a desolate outpost at the start of a harsh winter, with no available housing and the settlement’s provisions nearly exhausted.”41 Nothing had been prepared for them, neither lodging nor food was there due to plagues of grasshoppers and floods that had destroyed the harvests of the previous four years. Their only possession of value was plenty of handsome daughters.
The Swiss families on arrival were placed under tents nearby Fort Douglas. As soon as possible many of the Swiss settlers were placed alongside the De Meurons on German Creek.
The settlement of the De Meuron soldiers opposite Fort Douglas gave some promise of a military flavor to Selkirk Settlement. But as we shall see it was an ill-advised attempt at colonization. It was a mistake to settle some hundred or more single men as these soldiers were without a woman among them, as Lord Selkirk was compelled to do. The Swiss weren’t in the colony more than 24 hours before the soldiers “began to flock in, each eager to get a wife”.
A modern "Sabine raid" was made upon the young damsels, who were actually carried away to the De Meuron homesteads. The Swiss families which had the misfortune to have no daughters in them were left to languish in their comfortless tents.42
Embittered and disgusted, one family after another left the Red River between 1821 and 1826, some alone, others in groups. The disappointed Swiss moved to other parts of the mid-West—Minnesota, Illinois, and Wisconsin. In 1825 several Swiss settled at Gratiot's Grove northeast of Galena, Illinois.43 Some, like artist Peter Rindisbacher and his family relocated to Wisconsin in 1826, and then settled permanently in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1829. Somehow or other they turned what started out as a tragedy into a success story.
What you might not know about Italian-Swiss immigration - the "spazzacamini" Chimney Sweeps
The Ticinesi also marketed another useful skill. Because of decades of village poverty, Ticino men were smaller and less developed than other Europeans. This meant they were better equipped to crawl into confined areas and the Ticino men developed a new talent, becoming chimney sweeps, called “spazzacamini.” So successful were they that the spazzacamini even developed their own language to communicate with one another.44
“Most of the boys, usually 8 to 12 years old, were from the canton of Ticino, coveted by their padroni45 chimney sweepers because they were small and slim and therefore able to climb the narrow chimneys and to clean them. When the boys had reached the top of the chimneys, they had to shout "Spazzacamini!" to prove that they actually had climbed up the dark, stuffy fireplaces. The working conditions were catastrophic. For lunch, the children often had nothing to eat and had to go begging for bread, and they had often to sleep in stables. The boys were hired in the winter, so at the family tables in the badly developed valleys of Ticino one mouth less had to be fed. At that time, bitter poverty and hunger was widely spread in Ticino during the winter months. Many children came from the Valle Verzasca, the Cento Valli and also from the Italian Val Vigezzo valleys and frequently worked in northern Italy.”46
The Spazzacamini tradition was carried over by Ticinesi who emigrated to America and American chimneysweeps still take part in the annual Spazzacamini festival in Italy.47
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Special Thanks
- Ann Marie Ott, Treasurer: New Glarus (Wisconsin) Historical Society
- Duane Freitag, {New Glarus Historian}
- Lori B. Bessler; Microforms Reference Librarian: University of Wisconsin–Madison
Steven B. Zwickel, 2021
1 Faust, Albert B. "Swiss Emigration to the American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century” The American Historical Review, Oct., 1916, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Oct., 1916), pp. 21-44 (Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association) <http://www.jstor.com/stable/1836193> p.21
2 Schelbert, Leo “Swiss Americans” in Countries and their Cultures: World Culture Encyclopedia https://www.everyculture.com/multi/Sr-Z/Swiss-Americans.html#ixzz6XTMDCRtm
3 Faust, Albert B. "Swiss Emigration to the American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century” p. 23
4 Faust, Albert B. "Swiss Emigration to the American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century” p. 24
5 Faust, Albert B. "Swiss Emigration to the American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century” p. 21
6 Schelbert, Leo “Swiss Americans”
7 Schelbert, Leo “Swiss Americans”
8 The Italian-language name for the canton is “Ticino” (English “Tessin”) and the plural noun “Ticinesi” indicates people from this canton and their offspring, while “Ticinese” is used as an adjective in descriptions.
9 Wikipedia.org entry for “Someo”
10 Quinn, Tony “Canton Ticino And The Italian Swiss Immigration To California” Swiss American Historical Society Review: (2020 Vol. 56 : No. 1 , Article 7). Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/sahs_review/vol56/iss1/7 p. 100. Until the train tunnel, it was difficult and slow to travel from the German speaking cantons to Ticino. In 1842, the Gotthard Post, a stagecoach drawn by five horses with ten seats, took 23 hours to get from Flüelen in Canton Uri to northern Italy’s Lake Como.
11 Perret, Maurice Edmond “The Italian Swiss Colonies in California,” Master of Arts thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1942, p.25, p. 33
12 Two years later the order was abolished.
13 Quinn, Tony “Canton Ticino And The Italian Swiss Immigration To California” p.101
14 Risorgimento is Italian for “Rising Again”, the movement for unifying the Italian states that started in 1848 and culminated with the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861.
15 Hacken, Richard "A History Of The Swiss In California" Swiss American Historical Society Review: (2020 Vol. 56 : No. 1, Article 8). p. 130
16 Hacken, Richard "A History Of The Swiss In California" p. 131
17 Quinn, Tony “Canton Ticino And The Italian Swiss Immigration To California” p.102
18 Wikipedia.org entry for “Someo”
19 California Farmer and Journal of Useful Sciences (San Francisco, August 12, 1859), 1. cited in Hacken, Richard "A History Of The Swiss In California,” p.126
20 Wikipedia.org entry for “Someo”
21 Absinthe is a traditional Swiss liquor. It is made from distilled wormwood, anise, and fennel.
22 Kirschwasser is a colorless, clear brandy made from cherries
23 Hacken, Richard "A History Of The Swiss In California" p. 124
24 Hacken, Richard "A History Of The Swiss In California" p. 123
25 Hacken, Richard "A History Of The Swiss In California" p. 128
26 Perret, Maurice Edmond “The Italian Swiss Colonies in California,” Master’s thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1942, 23. cited in Hacken, Richard p.129
27 Milking cows by hand was exhausting. It caused back pain and hurt one’s hands. The friction from pulling on cows’ udders caused large, painful blisters on the palms within a few days. Considering the origin of the Ticino workers, the wounds on their hands became a distinctive sign and were soon called “Swiss diamonds”. Republic and Canton of Ticino https://www4.ti.ch/can/oltreconfiniti/dalle-origini-al-1900/storia-dellemigrazione-ticinese/una-vita-umile-in-california/
28 Hacken, Richard "A History Of The Swiss In California" p. 156
29 Hacken, Richard "A History Of The Swiss In California" p. 157
30 wikipedia.org entry for “List of North American ethnic and religious fraternal orders”
31 “The Swiss Societies,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 27, 1878, p. 3
32 Swiss Benevolent Society of San Francisco <http://www.sbssf.com/>
33 Wikipedia.org entry for “Someo”
34 Republic and Canton of Ticino https://www4.ti.ch/can/oltreconfiniti/dalle-origini-al-1900/storia-dellemigrazione-ticinese/una-vita-umile-in-california/
35 Republic and Canton of Ticino https://www4.ti.ch/can/oltreconfiniti/dalle-origini-al-1900/storia-dellemigrazione-ticinese/una-vita-umile-in-california/
36 <wikipedia.org> entry for “Regiment de Meuron” The Regiment de Meuron was a regiment of infantry originally raised in Switzerland in 1781 for service with the Dutch East India Company (VOC). At the time the French, Spanish, Dutch and other armies employed units of Swiss mercenaries. The regiment was named for its commander, Colonel Charles-Daniel de Meuron, who was born in Neuchâtel in 1738.
37 History of the Red River Colony http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~reak/hist/redriver.htm
38 Bryce, George The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists: The Pioneers of Manitoba (1909; Musson Book Co., Toronto) p.154 http://www.archive.org/details/romantic00brycuoftBi
39 Bichsel, Theresa Überleben am Red River (Survival on the Red River); (2018, Zytglogge AG) ISBN-13: 978-3729609853 Captain Rudolf von May got a commission and hoped to use the money to pay off his gambling debts.
40 de Courten, Antoine The Swiss Emigration to the Red River Settlement in 1821 and its Subsequent Exodus to the United States; 2013 Trafford Publishing
41 Freitag, Duane {New Glarus Historian and author of A Common Treasure: the challenging first decade of New Glarus} personal communication 13 August 2020
42 Bryce, George The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists: The Pioneers of Manitoba p.156
43 https://www.everyculture.com/multi/Sr-Z/Swiss-Americans.html
44 Quinn, Tony "Canton Ticino And The Italian Swiss Immigration To California”
45 Plural of padrone, Italian for a labor broker, often an immigrant, who acted as middlemen between immigrant workers and employers
46 wikipedia.org entry for “Spazzacamini”
47 Spazzacamini festival https://www.italybyevents.com/en/events/piemonte/international-meeting-chimney-sweeps/
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