The Egg War began unofficially in 1848 with the Gold Rush. San Francisco started the year with a mere thousand souls, but over the next twelve months the population rose to twenty-five thousand. The city experienced scarcities of women and of food, particularly protein. Scaling up farms to provide for the local population proved harder than it seemed. Nobody could get large groups of chickens to survive there, and the technical solutions to this problem were decades off. Without chickens, of course, there could be no eggs. And without eggs, there could be no cakes, morning scrambles, pancakes, puddings, or muffins. As Napoleon once put it, “An army marches on its stomach,” and a rootin’-tootin’ army of miners in the Wild West doubly so.
As gold poured into the city, the prices for fresh eggs skyrocketed. Out in the field, a single chicken egg might sell for $3, while in the city that same egg fetched the still exorbitant price of $1. Even without accounting for inflation, $12 to $36 per dozen eggs is ridiculously expensive. If we account for inflation, the miners paid something astounding—more like $427 to $1,282 per dozen. This explains the origins of Hangtown Fry rather well. According to legend, a guy who had struck gold wandered into the El Dorado Hotel in the mining supply camp of Hangtown (so nicknamed for its penchant for stringing up criminals). He threw down a bag of gold and demanded the most expensive meal the chef could make—which turned out to be oysters and eggs. If someone could bring good fresh eggs to San Francisco Bay, he would more than make his fortune.
By most accounts, the first people to strike it rich were “Doc” Robinson and his brother-in-law Orrin Dorman. Doc, a pharmacist from Maine, had figured out that the Farallon Islands, home to hundreds of thousands of screaming seabirds, might provide enough eggs to finance a new pharmacy. So Doc and Orrin hopped in a boat and set sail for the Farallones, about thirty miles outside of San Francisco Bay.
As a location, the Farallones are pretty cursed; they are the sort of place a third-grade boy would make up to impress and gross out his classmates. Although to call them “islands” is a bit grand—they are jagged rocks of various sizes that stick up above the water. Those rocks are a legendary site of shipwrecks. Since Sir Francis Drake set foot on the islands in 1579, mariners have referred to the group as the Devil’s Teeth, for their appearance, the rough seas that surround them, and their tendency to chomp on ships.