$10 per Dozen Eggs? Those are Rookie Numbers

I was at the grocery store to get cake ingredients, and I saw that the egg aisle was near overflowing with cartons.

The eggs were $10 a dozen, and it would seem that shoppers did not feel a particular duty to help egg corporations through these tough times with their patronage. It truly is a testament to how soft San Franciscans have gotten since the mid 1800s, the era of the gold rush. A time where boys from all over the country caught gold fever and scrambled to California.

Now, if you're wondering what the gold rush has to do with egg prices, calm down you tiktok fried zoomer, I'm getting to it.

Now, when we refer to the gold rush era, you might not understand just how much of a rush there was. It seems that the Bay Area always had a bit of that move-fast-break-things kind of attitude; the quaint little village of San Francisco had its population explode by 25 times in two years from 800 to 20,000, and that doesn't count all the people who were just passing by.

Talk about moving fast! But now to the second half of the saying: the agriculture industry had no way of supporting that many people. And miners were hungry for one kind of nutrient in particular: protein.

Now let's dust off our economics textbook. We are currently in a time where there is a shortfall in supply relative to the stable demand, so egg prices go up. The miners of the time (called 49ers for the year most of them arrived) had the opposite problem; they had a huge upshot in demand and a stable supply that couldn't keep up, so egg prices flew up higher than any chicken ever could.

How high you ask?

$1 each.

So $12 a dozen.

That doesn’t sound so bad, that sounds comparable to today’s prices right?

A single egg was $1 in mid-1800s money.

Which is about $40 in today's money. Just under $500 for a dozen eggs, and fresh eggs could fetch an even higher price.

Now with eggs at such a high premium, some entrepreneurs started looking for gold. But the gold they were searching for wasn't the shiny metal that brought them to California; it was the golden yolk of wild bird eggs that they could sell in markets. Little did they know, this search would eventually lead to the Farallon Egg Wars, complete with guns and invasion forces! But I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

First, we must talk about Farallon and the most dangerous Easter egg hunt in the world.

The Farallon Islands lay about 26 miles west of where the Golden Gate Bridge lies today. They aren't very hospitable to human habitation. The sheer rocky cliffs are slick with guano, there are jagged rocks surrounding the islands giving them the nickname "The Devil's Teeth", and the sea is so tumultuous that it's dangerous just to get a boat close enough to be able to step foot there. But these conditions make it perfect for seabirds (mainly the murre) to nest there, since nobody could bother them. At least, not until an enterprising pharmacist named 'Doc' Robinson and his brother in law hatched a plan where they decided to risk their lives for a crack at poaching the islands' eggs.

They sailed a boat to the islands and scaled the rocky cliffs while avoiding any slip that could send them tumbling down into the Devil's Teeth. They snatched up as many murre eggs as they could as the seabirds pecked and scratched at them to try to dissuade them. But to the two men, the eggs were worth their weight in gold and there was nothing that could stop them from stuffing their bags and their pockets with as many eggs they could hold.

Well, almost nothing could stop them.

The men seemed to trigger the wrath of the Farallon Islands, and the islands tried to teach them a lesson and claw back the eggs that were rightfully theirs. The waves shook the boat so hard that they struggled to make it back to port. By the time they arrived, they saw that half of their eggs were smashed to bits by the ride back! But that still left them with enough eggs to make a nice $3000, which would be about $120,000 in today's money.

After making it back to shore, they understood the message the island was sending them and they swore to never step foot on it again.

However, when others found out they struck gold, they caught egg fever and began making trips to the Farallon Islands as well. And of all the eggers, there was one group that reigned supreme.

A group of men formed the Farallon Egg Company (AKA the Pacific Egg Company) and ran their operation like a hard boiled mafia boss.

In order to get fresh eggs, at the start of an expedition they would go to the island and smash all the eggs they could find. The next day, they would come back and snatch all the newly laid eggs. They weren't any kinder to their fellow men either: they staked a claim on the largest island and used violence to keep other eggers off their turf. They hired some of the most desperate people at the time (Italian and Greek immigrants) and made them do the dangerous (and sometimes lethal) work for them.

Now in 1859 the federal government built a lighthouse, and in doing so they rejected the Farallon Egg Company's claim to the island.

At first, things went smoothly; the lighthouse keepers would either take bribes or (illegally) sell leases to eggers to make some money on the side. Eventually, the Farallon Egg Company unofficially (and unlawfully) became the only eggers allowed on the island thanks to a deal they made with the lightkeeper and the fact that the Federal Government could not be bothered to check what was happening there.

Nowadays when there is open corruption such as this, I vent my rage on Reddit or complain to my friends about the injustice. But I suppose people back then were made of different material, for there was a man named David Batchelder who did not stand for this.

Not out of any sense of moral obligation, dear no. He wanted the eggs for himself. And when dealing with any self-respecting mob boss, you don't get your way by convincing them with $10 words. You ask them kindly while they sit at the wrong end of your gun.

Well, in the case of David, he thought he would bring 27 of his own armed men to the negotiating table, alongside a four-pound cannon.

They took to sailboats and armed themselves to the teeth and made their way to the island. On June 3rd 1863, the Egg Company saw the rival eggers off the coast of the island.

I must admit, if I found myself on the wrong end of 27 men and a cannon, I would immediately crack and give into whatever demands they made. But the men of the Egg Company were made of harder material than I, for they threatened David and his men to "land at their peril", brandishing their own guns.

Not willing to back down, David shouted that they would come "in spite of hell."

On the dawn of the next day, David and his men landed onto the shore, at which point the Egg Company began shooting at the landing party. Undeterred, David and his men shot back.

For 20 minutes, the two groups of men exchanged rifle and cannon fire, the sound of shots cracking off the rocky cliffs were occasionally interrupted by men's screams. All in all, one Egg Company man died that day from a shot in the stomach. Five of David's men were injured, though one of the men's injuries was a bullet through the throat. He would die a few days later, bringing the total deaths to two.

And so began and ended the Farallones Egg War.

The federal government saw what happened, and to put a stop to the violence they decided to make the Farallones Egg Company's monopoly over the island official.

Over time however, the relationship between the company and the lightkeepers turned smellier than a rotting egg. They started boiling seal and sea lion blubber into oil on the island, a process that involves a lot of rotting meat that isn't particularly pleasant to live next to. The company demanded the fog horn be removed from the island because it scared off the birds. They told the keepers that they could not collect eggs for their personal consumption — after all they were company eggs. And when an assistant keeper was caught 'stealing' wild eggs, they were beaten to a pulp.

At this point, the federal government decided that they’d had enough. They sent 21 soldiers to chase the Egg Company off the island and they haven't been seen there ever since.

But by that point the egging business had died — the Bay Area was no longer the collection of young boomtowns it once was, and as it matured it developed the farmland to provide enough chicken eggs that there almost wasn't a need for eggers. And as for the birds, their population at the Farallon Islands had fallen drastically. As it turns out, harvesting their eggs with impunity causes the following generation to be smaller than the previous. After decades of this pattern, the population of murres fell from 400,000 to 60,000 which meant that the amount of eggs that could be harvested (as well as the profits) fell proportionally.

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending for the birds; the Farallon Islands have become a murre sanctuary and their population has bounced back to 300,000 birds strong!

And so this is the story of the Farallon Egg War. 

I hope it provides some perspective so that while the country loses its collective mind over steadily rising egg prices, know that our city will be ok for there will always be a little set of islands where eggs grow like weeds. And, like it or not, this city will always have young and reckless entrepreneurs who will be egged on by the promise of a quick buck.