Utah Business Lawyer: The Gold-Hungry Forty-Niners Also Plundered Something Else: Eggs

You’ve heard of the San Francisco gold rush. But that rush spurred one other, lesser-recognized occasion: the egg rush. The legions of miners who swept into the area within the 1850s hoping to strike gold all needed to be fed. And they wanted protein to remain robust. But when meals shortages hit, wily entrepreneurs appeared for eggs in an unlikely supply: the Farallon Islands.

Completely remoted and surrounded by nice white sharks and sea lions, “the Farallon Islands are the most forbidding piece of real estate to be found within the city limits of San Francisco,” says Gary Kamiya, a journalist and writer of Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco. “The islands are 28 miles outside the Golden Gate in extremely turbulent, dangerous seas.”

But these rocky, skeletal islands did have one engaging high quality for gold miners: They harbored the most important seabird rockery within the contiguous United States, and subsequently have been rife with loads of protein-wealthy eggs.

Getting these eggs wasn’t straightforward. The islands “look like a piece of the moon that fell into the sea,” says Mary Jane Schram of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary. “There are really no shores where you can land a small boat except with great perils.”

Between 1849 and 1854, hundreds of fortune-hunters flooded into San Francisco from everywhere in the world. Kamiya describes the town as a mixture of casinos, campgrounds and brothels.

“Early on, some shrewd forty-niners began to realize that there was more money to be made mining the miners than there was in mining the gold fields,” Kamiya says. Dozens of crude consuming joints sprang up across the metropolis, and tons of of voracious miners would crowd into tents, consuming in shifts. “The egg was one of the foodstuffs that was in such short supply.”

Eva Chrysanthe, an artist and chronicler of the historical past of the Farallones, describes San Francisco presently as a “protein-hungry town.” What few chickens there have been had been devoured, she says, and other people have been foraging. “After you wipe out all the bird nests on shore, then you go out to the Farallones.”

The first egg entrepreneur was Doc Robinson, a pharmacist. He and his brother-in-law, Orin, would sail out to the Farallon Islands and haul again dozens of murre eggs, which they might then promote to eating places and grocery shops.

The work was “tough, dirty and dangerous,” says Kamiya. “The murres lay their eggs up on these towering, steep cliffs — higher than Nob Hill.”

And although Robinson and his brother-in-law have been capable of poach $three,000 value of eggs, that they had “no interest in going back. It was a hellish experience,” says Crysanthe.

But the thought took maintain: Robinson’s egg enterprise kicked off the “egg rush.”

The eggs of the widespread murre — a penguin-like chook — have been probably the most sought-after, most delectable on the Farallones. Strange, lovely, blue-speckled and pointy-tipped, they’re about twice the dimensions of hen eggs.

When fried, “the white of the murre egg stays clear and gelatinous. The yolk is deep reddish, and very unappetizing to look at,” says Keith Hanson, a chook illustrator.

In 1851, six males shaped the Pacific Egg Co., which claimed unique rights to the islands, says Peter White, writer of The Farallon Islands: Sentinels of the Golden Gate. In May, when the birds first started to put, the corporate would land 10 to 30 males, principally Italian and Greek, on the Farallones’ talus-crammed shores. They got here in little rowboats — in itself a check of stamina.

Kamiya is amazed on the derring-do of those males: “They’d send the men up to these sheer guano-stinking cliffs, being attacked by swirling gulls. These were rough-necked guys, waterfront types, climbing up and pushing eggs into their special egg pockets in their egg shirts.”

When the egg-pickers went in for the primary time, they might smash each egg. “That way they could be assured that the next day, when they returned, every egg gathered would be fresh,” White says.

The eggers beginning popping out at about the identical time the lighthouse was being constructed on the Farallones, says biologist Peter Pyle. “They’ve got hundreds of these ships coming in response to the gold rush, and a lot of them crashed on the Farallones.”

Being a lighthouse keeper on the Farallones was a extreme, lonely and harsh obligation, says Gary Kamiya. “And then they had to contend with these raucous, aggressive eggers.”

Rival eggers would sail out to problem them. “One man in particular, David Batchelder, just kept showing up with his own bands of roughnecks,” Kamiya says. “The Great Egg Wars of the Farallones took place just a few weeks before the Battle of Gettysburg.”

On June three, 1863, three boatloads of closely armed males got here to the islands. They even had a cannon with them.

“The guys at the egg company yelled out to them, ‘Land at your peril!’ ” Kamiya says. “Batchelder said, ‘I’ll land! I’ll go through hell!’ Then he and his men spent the night drinking. They got themselves into an aggressive, alcohol-fueled state.”

When the egg firm warned them, they opened hearth. The first casualty was one of many egg firm staff, Edwin Perkins, who died after being shot via the abdomen. Five of the boatmen have been shot, and ultimately pushed off.

Finally, the federal authorities dominated all business eggers off of the islands. Any egging after that was carried out by the lighthouse-keepers. “But it was black-market trading, trying to line their pockets with eggs,” says Kamiya.

The plundering of eggs had prompted the murre inhabitants to say no yr after yr, dropping from almost 400,000 down to six,000. In the early 1850s, a few half-million eggs have been gathered per yr.

“For decades, it was said that if you ate any baked goods in San Francisco, you were probably eating murre eggs,” Kamiya says.

But when chickens lastly acquired established in Petaluma, it ended up doing within the murre egg business. The Farallones at the moment are utilized by scientists to watch hen and animal life, and to trace the restoration of species on the islands.

“It’s a robust population now, despite the best efforts of the Farallon eggers,” Kamiya says.