Rich Man,
Poor Man

Two brothers walked out of the same house in a Swiss village. One stayed within a mile of it and died rich. The other crossed the world's oceans seven times and left something behind on every crossing. Between them stands the shoe company their cousin built — which, as this is written, is in the hands of the bankruptcy office.

A Wyser family history

The boy with the poem

On the fourteenth of November, 1862, Bruno Wyser left home.

He was twenty-one. He was going to Montevideo, which was about as far from a Swiss river valley as a young man could arrange to be, and the family thought the day was worth marking. Somebody wrote him a poem. Somebody else wrote the date down in the annals of the Bally family — the ruling house of the village, his mother's people — the way you note a wedding or a christening. He went out with verses in his pocket and his name in the good book.

Thirty-three years later he died in San Francisco, aged fifty-four, in a city he had washed up in twice. By then he had crossed the world's oceans seven times. He had buried three children in Australian ground. He had sworn allegiance to a country that would exist for four years. He had sent the police after his own son. And he had come down, voyage by voyage, from a young man worth a poem to a middle-aged man traveling at a foreign government's expense with everything he owned in the hold. The family that recorded his departure never found occasion to mention him again. In four and a half thousand pages of Bally papers, Bruno Wyser appears exactly twice, both times on the same page.

His brother Otto never left. Otto stayed in the valley, in the trade he was born into, within sight of the factory chimneys. He ran the great company for ten years, sat on boards, presided over the school, and died in Bern in the first week of August 1914, a wealthy man, closing his eyes on the last days of the world that had made him.

The beadles

The Wysers were not nobodies, and they had not been nobodies for a very long time.

They came from Niedergösgen, a village a few miles up the Aare from Schönenwerd — Bruno himself was born in the town of Solothurn, where his father held office — and the cantonal archives have the family in Niedergösgen from the first half of the sixteenth century. In 1527 a Heini Wiser stood in front of the bailiff and swore the civic rights. By the 1580s the Wysers held the post of beadle: a sworn officer of the canton, the man who carried the government's authority into a village that had no other government in it. The office passed from father to son for four generations.

The archive keeps the small change of their lives. In 1585 the state gave Hans Wiser a coat in Solothurn's colours to do the job in. In 1595 his son Jacob's house burned down. In 1600 Jacob had a fine reduced, being the beadle. In 1619 Jacob's son Heini turns up in the land register as a property owner, and in 1626 the government sent him cloth for a new coat.

In 1683 Franz Wiser, beadle, was granted the right to keep an inn. He called it the White Cross.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the record says plainly, they were a respected family.

And then, in 1822, comes a document that shows exactly what kind of people they had become.

Joseph Wiser and his wife Katharina Schenker, being old, made their property over to their children — eight of them, six sons and two daughters, one of the sons being Alois, the future colonel. The inventory prices every item. The farm house with its barn and stables, 3,600 francs. The store house with the cellar, 100. A house with a smithy and a hatmaker's workshop in it, 1,050. The meadows, 1,550. The arable land, 2,720.

What the old couple kept back for themselves is set down with exactly the same care. The right to go on living in house number 24. Half the kitchen. One bedroom. The small cellar. Half the cowhouse and half the pigsty. Firewood. The use of the whole orchard. One cow. A hundred and eight francs a year — and should that prove insufficient, the sons were to make up the difference between them. Should the parents fall ill, the children were bound to pay for the doctor and for the medicine. And in case of decease, for the funeral.

Remember the clause about the funeral.

The village that wove ribbon

To understand any of it you have to understand what Schönenwerd was.

It was a small place on the river Aare, and it sat inside one of the strangest industries of the nineteenth century. The valley wove ribbon. Silk ribbon first, then elastic webbing. If that sounds like a quaint way to make a living, consider what ribbon actually was in 1850. It was the hardware of every wardrobe in Europe. It trimmed the bonnets, laced the corsets, edged the gowns; elastic webbing held up the trousers of every respectable man on two continents. Ribbon was not decoration. Ribbon was infrastructure.

The families who owned the looms were the aristocracy of the district, and everybody knew exactly who they were and exactly what they were worth. The grandest of them were the Ballys.

The Wysers got their place at that table through two sisters. In 1807 Maria Anna Herzog married Peter Bally, ribbon manufacturer. Twenty-five years later her younger sister Katharina married Colonel Aloys Wyser. Maria Anna's son was Carl Franz Bally. Katharina's sons were Otto and Bruno.

There is a trap in the names here, and it is worth stepping over carefully. The two sisters' own mother was a Gretzenbach woman named Balli — spelled with an i — and she has nothing whatever to do with the Bally of the shoe firm. That name came over the mountains from Übersaxen in Austria in the spring of 1778, carried by a poor man who laid bricks for a living — a jobbing mason with nothing to sell but his hands. One small valley, two families, one letter between them.

That is the whole of the genealogy, and it is the whole of the story. Two sisters from the same house made two marriages a generation apart, and the children of one went on to build an empire while the children of the other grew up close enough to watch. Near enough to smell the money. Not near enough to inherit any of it.

A window full of shoes

Carl Franz Bally started where his father had, in ribbon and elastics, and he would probably have finished there if he had not gone to Paris.

The story the family told afterwards is too good not to repeat, whatever polish has been rubbed into it over the years. He was in Paris in the early 1850s selling suspender webbing — dull work, done well — and he passed a display of ladies' shoes and stopped. He bought every pair he could get his hands on to bring home to the women of Schönenwerd. Then he tried to buy more, and could not. Demand without supply offended something in him. He went home, and in 1851 he founded a company to make shoes rather than wait for other people to make them.

Within one generation, Bally of Schönenwerd was among the largest shoemakers on earth. A village firm put its name inside millions of shoes and more or less invented the idea that a shoe could be a brand — that the name stamped on the lining was itself worth something, worth more, in the end, than the leather.

What that did to the village is the part the family histories tend to hurry past. The factory did not sit in Schönenwerd; the factory became Schönenwerd. There is a small, telling row preserved in the old letters: the works ran straight through a church holiday, and the clergy were furious. The looms had outranked the bells. Everyone involved understood precisely what that meant, and which way it was going to go from then on.

The firm's own memory keeps softer things too. There was a guard dog, Prinz, who patrolled the yards and passed into company lore the way beloved animals do — remembered, in some of the papers, rather better than half the cousins.

And one detail that says everything about how the Ballys saw themselves. Their official family tree opens with Maria Anna Herzog and declines to look any further back. Her parents are not named. Which means the woman who married into the Ballys in 1807 is the beginning of the world, and her sister — the one who married the colonel — does not exist at all. The connection that is perfectly plain from the Wyser side stayed invisible from theirs for a century and a half. The Ballys curated their ancestors the way they curated a shop window. It worked on everybody except the cousins.

The brother who stayed

Otto Wyser's gift, if that is the word, was for standing very close to something enormous without ever being swallowed by it.

He made his career in ribbon — the old trade, the pre-shoe trade, the one the Ballys themselves had come up in and then outgrown. He rose in it on his own legs and became a director. He married a Schmuziger daughter, from an Aarau ribbon family; even his marriage stayed inside the trade. He took the school board, then its presidency. He was, in short, exactly the sort of solid burgher that nineteenth-century Switzerland minted like coin, and if that were all, he would not be worth a paragraph.

But there is the matter of his money, and what he did with it.

Otto put his capital into Gebrüder Bally and took it out again. Then in, then out. Four times, across the decades, in and out of the family machine like a man testing the water with his own savings and never quite getting in past his knees. It is a peculiar way to treat a company that half the valley would have mortgaged its house to buy into, and it tells you the shape of him: he could see the machine clearly precisely because he did not love it.

Then came the moment that makes him more than a bystander. From 1860 he ran Bally's elastic-webbing works — his own trade, inside their walls. And from 1872 to 1882 he was sole manager of Gebrüder Bally. The cousin from the junior line, the ribbon man, the one whose mother was the sister nobody wrote down, sat at the top of the enterprise for ten years and ran it.

And then he stepped back out again, exactly as he always had, and moved toward Bern with his fortune intact.

Picture him at the end of 1904, standing in a cemetery in Aarau.

His elder brother Alfred had died at half past midnight, after a long illness, at seventy-two. Alfred was the third brother, the other one who stayed, and he had built a solid career of his own as the owner of a dye-works. The family bought a handsome black-bordered notice in Zurich's grandest newspaper to announce it, and the notice does what such notices do: it lists the mourners in order of rank.

Marie Wyser-Müller, Aarau.
Widow Ferrari-Wyser and children, Nice.
Family Richter-Wyser, Basel.
Family Langner-Wyser, Solothurn.
Family Gloor-Wyser, Basel.
Otto Alfred Wyser-Dumain and wife, Aarau.
Otto Wyser, Schönenwerd.

The widow. Four married daughters, settled in Basel and Solothurn and as far away as Nice — one of them already widowed herself, with children. A son and namesake, married, in Aarau.

And then, last, alone, on its own line: Otto Wyser, Schönenwerd.

No wife beside him. No “and family.” No city — just the old village. Of all the colonel's children, the notice quietly reports, only Otto was still standing in the valley where they had all been born. He was sixty-nine. He had ten years left.

The notice closes by asking that there be no condolence visits and no floral tributes. Even the grief was to be conducted efficiently.

He died in Bern on the second of August, 1914.

Look at that date again. Germany had declared war on Russia the day before. The day after, German armies crossed into Belgium, and the lamps went out over Europe. Otto Wyser, who had timed every entrance and every exit of his life to the month, made his last exit inside the final forty-eight hours of the world that ribbon had built. Everything he had lived by — the belle époque and its careful Swiss fortunes, the silk trimmings, the export ledgers, the certainty that next year would resemble this one — went over the cliff that same week.

He did not have to watch.

The price of a ticket

Now the other side of it.

Bruno was a tanner. The city directories that record him across three continents give him two trades — tanner and farmer — and the first is the one that explains the map.

Leather was the raw end of the business his cousin was getting rich at the finished end of. And in the second half of the nineteenth century the hides were not in Switzerland. They were in the River Plate, where the slaughterhouses of Montevideo shipped cattle hides to the world by the boatload. They were in Brazil. They were in Australia. Read Bruno's itinerary again with that in mind and it stops looking like restlessness: Montevideo, São Paulo, Adelaide. He went where the animals were, every time.

Bruno's Montevideo years — 1862 to 1871, the whole of his twenties — are the quietest stretch of his life, and quiet is as good as it is ever going to get for him. Somewhere in the German community of that city he met Elisa Schönhals — daughter of Johann Schönhals, evangelical pastor of Simmersbach in Hessen-Darmstadt. A tanner out of a Catholic Swiss canton and a Lutheran minister's daughter, six thousand miles from either of their fathers.

Their first child had been born on the thirtieth of October, 1867, at six o'clock in the evening. They married fifteen months later, on the third of February, 1869 — and the wedding and the christening were the same occasion. Pastor Hoppe married the parents and baptized the daughter in one afternoon, in one church.

The register still has the entry. Ida Alice. Father: Bruno Wyser, farmer, from Solothurn, Switzerland. Mother: Elise Wyser, née Schönhals, from Simmersbach in the Grand Duchy of Hessen — the clerk has already given her the married name she acquired that same day. And in the column headed born in wedlock or out of wedlock, one word: unehelich.

Hold on to that. It comes back.

Two smaller things sit in that entry. Bruno's trade is written down as farmer — the first of four the record will hand him across four continents. And every one of the three baptismal witnesses was a proxy, standing in for somebody who was not in the room, including the one standing in for the bride. Two years later Bruno would himself be a name held by a proxy in Switzerland, while he was on the wrong side of an ocean.

Then, in 1871, after nine years away, Bruno came home. He brought his young family back across the Atlantic and stayed three years.

Emigrants went home all the time; the traffic ran both ways all century. But Bruno had a particular reason, and the reason was money.

Colonel Alois Wiser had died at Solothurn on the twenty-eighth of October, 1870, of stomach cancer. He had been a professional soldier who rose to colonel, was elected administrator of the Quartermaster Store in 1839 and held that post until the day he died, and served as Quartermaster General besides. His estate was settled on the twenty-fourth of April, 1871. It came to 44,665 francs and 59 centimes, and there were no debts to discharge.

To know what that meant, use the family's own prices. When the Wisers had divided their property two generations earlier, the farm house — with its barn, its stables and its orchard — had been valued at 3,600 francs. The colonel had left the equivalent of about a dozen farms.

There is a harder measure available too, because in 1871 a franc was not an abstraction. Switzerland belonged to the Latin Monetary Union and the franc was a legal weight of gold — 0.290322 grams of it. Every currency that mattered was defined the same way, which makes the conversions exact rather than approximate: 25.22 francs to the pound sterling, 5.18 to the American dollar.

So the colonel had left £1,771, or $8,618 — just under thirteen kilograms of fine gold, to be divided between a widow and three sons.

The heirs are named in the canton's book. Alfred Wiser, a son. Otto Wiser, a son. And then:

Bruno Wiser, a son but living in America and represented by Friedrich Baumann.

He was too far away to stand in the room, so he sent a man to stand in it for him. And then he came home.

Nobody wrote down what those three years were like, but their shape is not hard to make out. His cousin's factory was eating the world. His brother Otto was prospering in ribbon and about to be handed the whole enterprise. And Bruno, the one they had written a poem for, was back at thirty with a South American chapter behind him and evidently not enough to show for it — because in 1874 he got on another ship, this time for São Paulo.

A son was born there, and what Bruno did about it says more about him than the voyage does. The boy was registered back home in Switzerland, in the commune's book of births that happened outside the parish.

That was not sentiment, and it was not keeping up appearances. Swiss nationality is built from the bottom up. You belong to a commune first; that makes you a citizen of its canton; that makes you Swiss. The commune is inherited, it descends unchanged down the generations, and it has nothing to do with where anybody actually lives — a Swiss passport prints it where other countries print the place of birth. Bruno was born in the town of Solothurn and died in San Francisco, and in law he was a man of Niedergösgen from the first day to the last.

And the commune owed its people. Until well into the twentieth century, a Swiss citizen who fell destitute anywhere in Switzerland had to be relieved by his commune of origin, or fetched home by it. That obligation is exactly why villages kept such meticulous family registers: Niedergösgen had a standing financial interest in knowing precisely who its people were and where they had got to.

The obligation is gone now — Switzerland finished shifting it to the commune where you actually live in 2012, and the modern place of origin is heraldry, a line on a passport. It worked while people stayed in the valley they were born in. It died of precisely the thing Bruno had.

São Paulo lasted about two years. And then comes the single document that measures the entire decline, which is a ticket.

Bruno, Elisa and five children went aboard at Hamburg on the twenty-sixth of September, 1876. The Herschel anchored at Port Adelaide on Friday the twelfth of January, 1877, a hundred and eight days later, and the immigrants were not put ashore until the twenty-third. Not cabin class. Not steerage bought with their own money. Assisted passage — the subsidized emigration of families that a colony imports by the shipload because they cannot import themselves.

And note who was paying. Had Bruno come apart in Switzerland, Niedergösgen would have been legally bound to keep him. He came apart in South Australia instead, where the money ran the other way: a colony that paid to bring poor families in, and owed them nothing whatever once they had landed.

The ship was the Herschel, and even she was sailing under an assumed name. She had been built at Birkenhead in 1856 as the Edith Byrne — seven hundred and twenty-nine tons, two decks — and in 1865 a Hamburg owner bought her for £8,250 and called her something else. Her master that voyage was J. J. Kammann.

The list survives, and it is simply a column of ages in a clerk's hand.

Wyser, Bruno — 35
Elise — 32
Ida — 9
Marie — 4
Emilie — 3
Adolph — 2
Otto — ¾

Three quarters of a year. Those ages were written down when the family was accepted for the passage, some weeks before they sailed; by the time the Herschel cleared Hamburg the baby was nearly one.

And the ship's own accounts, kept at the other end, say what four months at sea cost. Three hundred and five people embarked. Four were born on the way. Five died — and all five were children: two aged between one and twelve, and three who had not reached their first birthday.

Three hundred and four souls landed alive, which the colony's clerk then converted, for the purposes of the subsidy, into two hundred and fifty-five and a half statute adults. That is what an assisted passage was. The government paid by the head, and a child was a fraction of a head.

Four years later the boy written down as Adolph, who was two when he went aboard, was dead in Adelaide, and two more of the children were in the ground beside him.

Even here the names are on the move. The boy written down as Adolph would be buried in Adelaide four years later under a different one: Alfred Alois, for his uncle the dye-works owner and his grandfather the colonel.

And among the children on that manifest is a three-year-old entered as Emilie. The family called her Lily. She would outlive every plan her father ever made, and her descendants are the reason this is being written down.

Adelaide

Four days after they let him off that ship, Bruno Wyser signed a complaint.

On the twenty-seventh of January about twenty of the German immigrants met at the Green Dragon Hotel in Adelaide, and held the meeting in German. Somebody read out a glowing account of the voyage that had appeared in the Australische Zeitung — praising the arrangements, the accommodation, the conduct of the captain. The meeting voted the passages about the accommodation and the cleanliness of the ship false, and laughed at the rest. Then fifteen of them put their names to a petition to the Commissioner of Crown Lands and Immigration. The eighth name is Bruno Wyser.

What they alleged was this. That Captain Kammann had been "most uncivil and in many instances even inhuman." That the rations had not been issued according to the printed scale handed to them in Hamburg — short in weight, insufficient, and bad, so that around the time the ship crossed the Line "many families actually suffered the pangs of hunger." That the water was exceedingly bad. That the sleeping quarters of married families were unjustly divided. That patients were left for days in the ship's hospital unprovided for. And that one night in November 1876 the Herschel, showing no lights, came so close to another vessel that the passengers believed they were about to be run down.

A hundred and ten of them had already signed a memorial and sent it in to the port's doctor, carried by two of the women. Nothing came of it. The enquiry eventually held was held on the poop of their own ship, with Captain Kammann himself acting as interpreter — "we look upon such an enquiry as a mere farce."

A commission was appointed, and it sat aboard the Herschel at Port Adelaide on the afternoon of Friday the second of February, taking evidence entirely in German.

Two Wysers are in it.

Bruno is named among the passengers who told the captain to his face that they were hungry.

The Commission almost entirely exonerated Captain Kammann.

It found that his behaviour had been nothing more than was necessary to preserve discipline on board. The memorial signed by a hundred and ten passengers — the very first thing they had done on reaching Australia — was never called for, and never produced.

So on the twelfth of February the passengers wrote to the newspaper instead, and Bruno Wyser signed that too.

They thanked the Register for treating them fairly, "in bold contrast to the bias shown by the German Zeitung." They pointed out that the editor of that paper had gone aboard the Herschel as soon as she docked, been hospitably received by Captain Kammann, and promptly published a long article in which the ship, the provisions and everything else were lauded to the skies. They mentioned that one of their number had withdrawn his signature after an uncle prevailed on him. And they said the finding was "as inexplicable to us as to you."

Then they made the best argument any of them made:

nearly all the adult men amongst the passengers have been soldiers in Europe, and as such used to discipline; but the treatment received from Captain Kammann might have driven them to break through all discipline.

We know what discipline is, they were saying. That was not discipline.

It got them nothing. A hundred and eight days of short rations and foul water, a hundred and ten signatures, two public meetings, a government commission — and the master walked away with his character intact, while the immigrants went into the record as men who could not take discipline.

• • •

South Australia was the worst of it.

Between March 1879 and March 1881, in the space of twenty-four months, Bruno and Elisa buried three children in Adelaide.

Fanny went first, at about a year old. The daughter born twelve months after her was christened Bertha Fanny, for the sister she would never meet, and she died in January 1881 at nine months. Alfred Alois followed that March, aged six — a boy born back in Switzerland during the three years home, carrying in his two names Bruno's prosperous dye-works brother and their father the colonel. Bruno had named him toward the family he had left behind, and then carried him to the far side of the world to bury him.

The three graves are scattered across the city rather than gathered in one plot. That is not sentiment; that is arithmetic. A family that can buy ground of its own buries together. A family that cannot buries wherever the parish has room.

• • •

And in exactly those months, the family began to lose the living children too.

Ida was thirteen when she disappeared in 1881, in the same season as the two small funerals. She was the eldest, born in Montevideo in the good years, and she had seen every place her father had ever tried. When she surfaces again in the records she is an inmate of the Destitute Asylum, entered under a name that was not hers. What happened in between, the documents do not say, and after a hundred and forty years nobody is going to pretend to know.

What can be followed is what she became. The Adelaide and Sydney papers of the 1880s carry theatrical notices for performing Wyser sisters — and actress, in the vocabulary of the day, was a word respectable families pronounced carefully, at a slight distance.

Then, on the second of May, 1887, in Sydney, a baby girl was born to a mother who gave her name as Lily Nixon, her age as twenty-four, her birthplace as Glasgow, and no father at all. A previous daughter was noted as having died.

Ida was nineteen, and she had been born in Montevideo. Almost every word on that certificate is a costume.

But look at the name she chose to wear. Of all the names available to a woman inventing herself in front of a registrar, she reached for Lily — her little sister's name, the name from home. At her most alone, under an alias, she still signed herself family.

Eighteen days later, in the same suburb, Ida Alice Wyser married Albert Widmer under her own name.

Albert Widmer was twenty-five, a waiter, living in King Street in the city. Ida gave her age as twenty; she was nineteen. Eighteen days earlier, in front of a different clerk, she had given it as twenty-four.

The certificate has a column for each father's occupation. Against the groom's father it says: tanner.

Against the bride's father it says: carpenter.

He was a tanner, and the paperwork says so everywhere else: tanner on Fannie's birth certificate at Glebe in 1884, tanner in the Sands directory of Sydney in 1886, tanner again in 1888. Tanning was the filthiest respectable trade a man could hold — the lime pits, the raw hides, the smell that does not come out of clothes — and a marriage certificate is a public paper, read by the family your daughter is marrying into. Make of that what you like.

The surname wanders across those same four documents too: Wyser, Weyser, Weiser, Wiser. Nobody in Sydney was entirely sure what these people were called, and there is no sign the family was insisting.

By 1889 Albert Widmer had given up waiting on tables and had a business of his own — a fruit shop with refreshment rooms attached. The directory gives the address as 132 Elizabeth Street, Sydney, and spells him Widmar.

Two years later, when Bruno swore out the warrant against his son, the address he gave the police was 193 Elizabeth Street.

Ida outlived her father by forty-six years. She died on the sixteenth of February, 1941, aboard the liner Mariposa, at sea between Samoa and Fiji. She was seventy-three, and still travelling — the daughter of the man who could not stop crossing oceans, dying on one.

The baby was called Lena, and she was absorbed into Bruno and Elisa's household and raised as their own child. A granddaughter promoted to daughter; a whole generation quietly folded shut. Families did this, and did it well. This one did it so well that Lena would cross international borders for years on her grandparents' word.

Then there is the other lost child, and the hardest piece of paper in the whole file.

In the spring of 1891, in Sydney, Bruno Wyser went before the Central Police Bench and swore out a warrant against his own son. The son was Otto Edwin — the boy born in São Paulo, fifteen years old, the boy who carried the rich brother's name. The Industrial Schools Act existed for children the state deemed uncontrollable, and a warrant under it meant the reformatory system, the training ship, the machinery.

The New South Wales Police Gazette printed the result on the eighth of April, 1891, on page 121, among the stolen horses and the deserting seamen:

Sydney — A warrant has been issued by the Central Police Bench for the arrest of Otto Wiser, charged under the Industrial Schools Act. He is about 15 years of age, short and stout build, fair complexion, brown hair, blue eyes: dressed in a short-cut dark-gray sac coat and gray trousers: very shabby and dirty looking. Complainant, Bruno Wiser, 193 Elizabeth Street.

Read the last line first. Complainant. The form has no column for father.

Then read the rest, because it is the only description of Otto Edwin that anyone ever wrote down. There is no photograph of him, no letter, no signature — nothing. What survives of him is a police notice recording his height, his build, the colour of his eyes and the condition of his coat. Short and stout. Fair. Brown hair, blue eyes. Fifteen. Very shabby and dirty looking.

A tanner's boy in a rented house on Elizabeth Street, in the year his father's luck ran out. Of course he was dirty. It was printed in the gazette anyway, at his father's request, and circulated to every police station in New South Wales.

The son's answer was to vanish. Otto Edwin drops out of the family record from that day forward.

Count the household as the warrant went out. Ten children born. Three in Adelaide graves. One daughter gone into stage names and aliases. One son driven off with a warrant. One granddaughter passing as a daughter.

That was the family Bruno packed for his sixth crossing.

The oath

The last act moves quickly, the way last acts do.

San Francisco, from 1892 — and the date is his own. When he sailed back from Honolulu three years later, the manifest recorded him as a Swiss farmer who had last been in San Francisco in 1892.

Nobody has found the ship that carried them out of Australia. Somewhere between the warrant of April 1891 and that arrival, the Wysers left the country for the last time, and no passenger list has yet given up the crossing — which is fitting for a family that had spent thirty years being written down under the wrong names.

He did not go alone, and he did not go at random. Ida and Albert Widmer went too. By 1894 the San Francisco directory has Widmer behind a bar on Mission Street; by 1898 he owned a liquor store of his own at 29 Turk. His business partner in between was named Dittli — another Swiss.

Stand far enough back and that is the shape of all thirty-three years. Bruno never truly left Switzerland; he moved along it. A Swiss network strung between Montevideo, Sydney and San Francisco, in which a Swiss couple's daughter married a Swiss tanner's son, and the Swiss son-in-law went into business with another Swiss. Bruno crossed the world seven times and kept coming ashore among the same people.

Then, in January 1895, Bruno and Elisa sailed for Honolulu with the youngest of the household — Lena among them, entered on the manifest as their own child. The cover story held at every border it ever met.

They went steerage on the Arawa, out of San Francisco on the twelfth of January and into Honolulu on the nineteenth. The manifest gives his age as fifty-three, his trade as tanner, and his reason for coming in two words: seeking employment. With him were Eliza and five of the children — Mary, Lily, Bruno, Fanny, and Lena, entered once again as a daughter of the house.

It did not take. Five months later they were on a ship home, and Bruno had eleven months left.

And in Honolulu, on the thirtieth of January 1895, Bruno Wyser walked in and swore an oath of allegiance to the Republic of Hawai'i.

The republic was two and a half years old. It had been born out of a coup, and it would be gone into American annexation within four. Bruno — a Swiss who had by then been Uruguayan, Brazilian, Australian and Californian by residence — pledged himself, at fifty-three, to the shortest-lived country available to him.

It would be easy to read that as the last absurdity of a wandering life, and the draft of this article read it that way for a long time. It is probably the opposite. A man who has brought his wife and five children across an ocean to look for work does not swear allegiance to anything as a joke. He was trying to be from somewhere. He was trying to leave his family standing in a place, and to have a place of his own to be buried from.

His name sits in the printed lists of that winter's oath-takers. Eight days later, in the same columns, appears one James William Wilkinson, a waterfront man of the town. Neither of them could have known it, but those two names in the same February list were in-laws in waiting. Within months, Bruno's daughter Lily — the small girl from the assisted-passage manifest, grown now — had married a Wilkinson. Her people are in Honolulu still.

That was the one thing Bruno ever started that stayed put.

He himself turned around inside the year. By June 1895 he and Elisa were back in San Francisco. Seventh crossing, last ticket.

He was dying of cancer — the same thing that had killed his father in Solothurn twenty-five years before. It killed him on the seventh of December 1895, at fifty-four, in a bed at Lane Hospital in San Francisco. The crematory clerk wrote down the name of the attending physician: L. C. Lane.

That is Levi Cooper Lane — the man the hospital was named after, and one of the most consequential figures in the history of medicine on the American Pacific coast. His uncle had founded the first medical school in the West; Lane reopened it in 1870 after the old man's death, renamed it Cooper Medical College in 1882 in his honour, built the hospital, trained the nurses, and left money in his will for a medical library. In 1908, six years after Lane himself died, the college he had built was accepted as the medical department of Stanford University. It is the institution now known as Stanford Medicine, and its library still carries his name.

A man who had crossed to Australia on assisted passage did not buy that. Teaching hospitals ran charity wards because ward patients were what the students learned on, and the professor took those rounds himself. Nobody wrote down who paid. But Bruno had spent thirty years arriving on other people's accounts, and there is little reason to think the last bed was any different.

Two days after he died, the Odd Fellows' crematory received his remains and burned them at three in the afternoon. His widow did not come for the ashes until the twenty-ninth of April, 1896 — nearly five months — and when she signed for them she gave her address as 31 Minna Street, south of Market, which is not where you live when there is money. Ida was a few doors along the same street, at number 55, married now to an Australian marine engineer named Boyd and going by Edith.

She signed for them on the twenty-ninth of April. On the thirtieth she boarded the Mariposa for Honolulu, with eleven-year-old Fanny beside her. Whatever had kept her from collecting him for five months, it was not indecision about where he was going.

And there is a harder version of that. For four generations the Wysers were the beadles of Niedergösgen — the sworn officers who administered the commune, and with it the duty the commune owed its own people. The family that ran the safety net produced a man who fell through every net there was, on three continents, and died in a bed he could not pay for.

The next morning's paper carried the notice.

WYSER — In this city, December 7, 1895, Bruno, beloved husband of Eliza Wyser and father of Edi, Mary, Lilly, Otto, Bruno, Fanny and Lena Wyser, a native of Solothurn, Switzerland, aged 54 years and 9 months. [Solothurn (Switzerland) and San Francisco German papers please copy.]

Friends and acquaintances are respectfully invited to attend the funeral TO-MORROW (Monday), at 2 o'clock P.M., from his late residence, 56 South Park, off Third street, between Bryant and Brannan, thence to the crematorium, I.O.O.F. Cemetery.

So he was not put away like a pauper after all. There was a home to be carried out of, a notice in the paper, an hour named and an invitation to anyone who cared to come. At two o'clock on the Monday they carried Bruno Wyser out of 56 South Park. At three, the crematory took him.

Three things in those few lines are worth more than most of the rest of the file.

The children are named, and there are seven: Edi, Mary, Lilly, Otto, Bruno, Fanny and Lena. Lena is on the list. The granddaughter appears in her grandfather's death notice as his daughter — the story held all the way to the end, and got printed in a newspaper.

The eldest is called Edi. Not Ida. The name the Destitute Asylum had written down in 1881 was, fourteen years later, the name her own family used for her in print — and when she died at sea in 1941, the certificate said Edith too. Whatever happened to her in Adelaide, she carried it under that name for the rest of her life, and the family carried it with her.

And then the bracket, which is the saddest instruction in the story: Solothurn (Switzerland) and San Francisco German papers please copy. Thirty-three years after the valley wrote down his hopeful departure, his widow was still asking Solothurn to be told. She wanted the village to know. Whether anyone there ever printed it, nobody has yet found out.

Then his ashes crossed one more ocean.

They lie in Oahu Cemetery in Honolulu, under a stone carrying three names. Bruno Wyser, 1841–1895. Eliza Wyser, 1846–1910 — she outlived him by fifteen years. And Lily Wilkinson, 1873–1959: the small girl from the assisted-passage manifest, who died in Oregon at eighty-six and was brought back to lie between her mother and father.

There are fresh flowers on it.

Read down the spine and the pattern is almost too neat to be true. Every time Bruno moves, he moves with less: cabin to steerage, savings to subsidy, a family of twelve to a remnant household, a citizen of everywhere to a citizen of a country with four years to live. Every time Otto moves, it is money in or money out, always at a time of his own choosing, and always home before dark.

What the receivers found

It would be easy to stop there with the moral tidy and settled. Stay home. Mind the ledger. Die rich.

Except the story kept moving after everyone in it was dead, and the last laugh belongs to nobody.

The company at the centre of all this — the one Carl Franz founded in 1851, the one Otto ran for a decade — became everything its founder imagined and then a good deal more. Bally boots went up Everest in 1953 on the feet of Tenzing Norgay. Bally shoes turned up in American hip-hop lyrics in the 1980s — a shoemaker's surname rhymed on street corners in New York — and, as we have seen, not a Swiss name to begin with.

Then the family let go, and the name began to travel the way names do. It passed to the Reimann family's JAB Holding in 2008. In August 2024 it passed again, to an investment firm in Beverly Hills. At that point the house had around 1,500 employees, some 320 stores in sixty countries, revenue of roughly two hundred million euros — and a hundred million of debt.

It took two years to come apart. In June 2026 a court in Lugano put Bally under a debt-restructuring moratorium with an external administrator, holding off bankruptcy. Employees went unpaid. A sale to a months-old American shell company was blocked by the magistrates. And as this is written, the company founded by Carl Franz Bally in 1851 has been seized by the municipal bankruptcy office of Lugano.

Two hundred and forty-eight years after a penniless bricklayer walked over the mountains into Switzerland with nothing to sell but his hands, the house that carried his name into sixty countries is being counted, item by item, by the receivers.

So the ledger closes strangely.

Otto's fortune is long dispersed among heirs the obituaries scattered from Basel to Nice. The great company is inventory in a bankruptcy office. What remains of the empire in the village is a museum, an outlet, and a name on a wall by the river.

Elisa's surviving children went on to long, ordinary American lives. Maria Constantina died in Oakland in 1961. The youngest of the ten, Fannie — born at Glebe in New South Wales in 1884, seven years after the family landed in Australia — lived until 1971. The household that buried three children in Adelaide inside two years also produced a woman who made eighty-six and saw men walk on the moon.

And Bruno — poor, restless, diminishing Bruno, who lost on every continent he tried — turns out to have made the one investment in the family that never stopped paying. He carried a three-year-old girl up a gangway in Hamburg in 1876, at a colonial government's expense, and because he did there are great-great-grandchildren in Honolulu today, finding the graves and writing this down.

The rich man's line kept the money as long as money can be kept. The poor man's line kept the story.