20 Facts About Heinrich Lienhard

Johann Heinrich Lienhard was a Swiss immigrant to the United States.

Johann Heinrich Lienhard was born on 19 January 1822 in Switzerland at the hamlet Ussbuhl near Bilten, Canton Glarus.

Heinrich Lienhard spent his childhood and youth together with his three siblings on the farm of his parents.

Heinrich Lienhard 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.

At that time Heinrich Lienhard was planting and tending a new garden of fruit trees, vines, vegetables, and flowers near the Fort.

However, when Heinrich Lienhard later went to the Fort, Sutter, Jr.

Heinrich Lienhard finally accepted Sutter's flock of sheep instead and spent the following winter with Jacob Durr, a Swiss, at the sheep farm not far from the Fort.

Several weeks later Heinrich Lienhard sold out to Durr and, back at the Fort, acquiesced in Sutter, Jr.

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.

In summer 1851 Heinrich Lienhard married Elsbeth Blumer of Bilten.

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 Heinrich Lienhard had six more children, but they lost their oldest son in 1878 and their daughter Dora in 1884.

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 often joined them in those pursuits and describes their methods of procuring and preparing food.

Heinrich Lienhard's observations led him to understand that these people had organized their style of life in creative symbiosis with their surroundings, that their customs, though different, were ingenious, and that assessing them from a culturally biased vantage point did not do them justice.

Heinrich Lienhard's growing understanding was extraordinary and increasingly run counter to the then-dominant views.

Heinrich Lienhard's account is thus a factual part-description of the Anglo-American conquest of the northern Western Hemisphere with its Janus-face of environmental destruction, racial annihilation, and of a simultaneous build-up of a vibrant Anglo-American variation of Western culture.

Heinrich Lienhard, then approaching his eighties, was deeply disappointed as notes in the margins of his copy reveal.

Two newspaper articles written by Heinrich Lienhard were published independently of his manuscript.