Ever hear about the San Francisco Egg Wars?

In the year 1848, the city of San Francisco could hardly be called a “city” — fewer than 1,000 people lived there. But that year, James W. Marshall, a local carpenter and sawmill operator, found gold at Sutter’s Mill in nearby Coloma, California. Over the next decade or two, hundreds of thousands of people made their way to the San Francisco Bay Area in hopes of finding their fortune. Most failed, but some succeeded.

And some went to war over eggs.

The California gold rush brought a lot of people to San Francisco, but the nascent city wasn’t ready to receive that many people — there simply wasn’t enough food being produced to feed so many hungry prospectors. And protein, in particular, was in high demand. Eggs were a primary source of protein in the region at the time, and as Smithsonian Magazine reported, “chicken eggs were particularly scarce and cost up to $1.00 apiece, the equivalent of $30 today.” If you wanted to be rich, you didn’t have to strike gold — you could make an impressive living by finding eggs.

Enter the Farallon Islands, pictured above. Located about 25 miles off San Francisco, no one can live there — one expert told NPR that they “look like a piece of the moon that fell into the sea.” But just because the islands are inhospitable to human life doesn’t mean that’s true for other species. The Farallons attract many species of seabirds, and like other birds, they lay eggs. And that gave a pharmacist known as Doc Robertson an idea.

Robertson and his brother-in-law went to one of the islands and collected the eggs of the common murre (that’s a bird species), and tried to bring the eggs back to the mainland. The trip was treacherous, and the pair lost half their haul, but it was still extremely profitable, netting them more than $3,000 (nearly $100,000 today). The trek nearly cost them their lives, and the windfall profit gave Doc enough to start a pharmacy in the area, so they personally never returned to the Farallons. But word of their success spread, and many prospectors tried to replicate their egg haul. A new avocation — called “eggers” — was born.

These eggers were rough-and-tumble — you had to be to make the trip to and from the Farallons. And they didn’t play nice with other eggers. One group formed the Farallon Egg Company, claiming some of the islands as their own. When others challenged that designation by landing on the islands and “stealing” the eggs, sporadic violence broke out. In the 1850s, the federal government built a lighthouse on one of the claimed islands. As Literary Hub explains, “The regional superintendent of lighthouses, Ira Rankin, had a pragmatic streak and realized that so long as the egg rights to the land were up for grabs, the assaults, stabbings, intra- egger battles, and graft would continue. So he decided to crown the original egg company ovary overlords of the Farallones,” hoping to keep the peace. The opposite happened.

On June 3, 1863, “twenty-seven armed trespassers led by one David Batchelder sailed to the Farallones in three boats,” per SF Gate. Workers at the Egg Company directed them to leave, but Batchelder refused. The next morning, when he and his men decided to land, the Egg Company fired on them — and Batchelder’s squad returned fire. One man from each side was killed in the skirmish. Batchelder himself was charged with and convicted of murder, but the verdict was later overturned.

Thankfully, that was the end of the death toll from what would later be known as the Egg War. Territorial disputes continued for most of the century, but in 1896, the government barred the practice of taking eggs from the Farallons, citing damage to the bird population there.

Dan Lewis publishes the Now I Know newsletter five times a week — and you’ll almost always find some fun facts or a good ole fashioned yarn. You can sign up online.

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