Speaker 1: Good shit. Damn it, I botched another introduction. I'm Robert Evans.
Speaker 1: This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast that is never
Speaker 1: introduced professionally, despite it being literally my my one job
Speaker 1: to do um in order to distract that Sophie. Okay,
Speaker 1: everyone already knows I sucked up. You don't have to.
Speaker 1: You have to jump on, jump on the kick me
Speaker 1: pile here to distract from my failures. Uh Dollie, Wayne Davis, Hey, guys,
Speaker 1: it's good to be back. I didn't think you've messed
Speaker 1: it up. I thought the enthusiasm was there. That's all
Speaker 1: it really counts. Thank you, Billy, thank you for thank
Speaker 1: you for successfully helping to hype me back up. Now
Speaker 1: my ego has exploded again. I'll lock it up. They're
Speaker 1: real big, it's fun. I just want to I just
Speaker 1: want to publicly say that Robert told me if if
Speaker 1: he ever asks me for green juice, I'm supposed to
Speaker 1: kill him. Yes, that was our rule because of a
Speaker 1: celebrity that she'll not be named ego. Oh, you get
Speaker 1: under the green juice level. I think that's asking you
Speaker 1: can get your own green juice. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: be drinking green juice. If I care about living that
Speaker 1: long ever, then I've lived too long already. Yeah. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't have kids. See, we have to think different.
Speaker 1: You got it. You got mad at you. That's good, Billy.
Speaker 1: It's been a little while. How have you been. I'm good. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We've all been fighting the powers their own ways. M M.
Speaker 1: I saw some of your fighting the power. You can
Speaker 1: talk about the movie you were in now, I assume
Speaker 1: if it's a secret, it's a bad one. Still, I
Speaker 1: think yeah, I think, yeah. It is fun when people
Speaker 1: ask me like was that you and I don't know.
Speaker 1: I do not know. Well, Billy, I wasn't bored at
Speaker 1: too you guys were you were And it's a great movie.
Speaker 1: You were great in it. Uh. And you got to
Speaker 1: hang out with some of my favorite Chudu Pacific Northwest. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some of the people with guns who like to stand
Speaker 1: on street corners and yell at teenagers. That was lovely.
Speaker 1: I mean, it wasn't like I've told my wife and
Speaker 1: other people. It was like, they're like, were you scared?
Speaker 1: I was like, it was people I grew up or with.
Speaker 1: I know how to talk to them. Yeah, they're not
Speaker 1: they're not super complicated, but you know it is complicated, Billy.
Speaker 1: That was a great transition, Thank you. No, I was
Speaker 1: gonna guess so much stuff in my brain just eggs, eggs.
Speaker 1: You're complicated A lot going on with an egg oh man. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I forgot what podcast I was on and where we
Speaker 1: were going, and I was like, oh, eggs, and then
Speaker 1: I was like, no, this is not gonna go. And
Speaker 1: I like eggs, and now I don't like them. You
Speaker 1: like eggs, so you like eggs. You're on board? Is like,
Speaker 1: eg eggs, that's correct. Yeah, they're far as a diet,
Speaker 1: they're pretty great. How do you feel about war h
Speaker 1: m hm less I feel I mean, at this at
Speaker 1: this point in history, I think it's a silly consent.
Speaker 1: How do you feel about the city of San Francisco.
Speaker 1: I'm okay, all these things together, I'm on board with Okay. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what we're talking about, the egg war that that
Speaker 1: rocked San Francisco for like thirty years back in the
Speaker 1: eight hundreds. Hail. Yeah, yeah, we're talking about silly war
Speaker 1: that I would be involved in. It is some silly bullshit, Billy.
Speaker 1: It is some very very funny, silly bullshit, and it
Speaker 1: starts as most stories of silly bullshit do in the
Speaker 1: city of San Francisco, or at least like the collection
Speaker 1: of tents and whorehouses that became San Francisco eventually, But
Speaker 1: it was really just a campsite with a lot of
Speaker 1: prostitutes back there. Yeah. Yeah, it's always been pretty great.
Speaker 1: It's always it's always been great. Yeah. And the poop
Speaker 1: on the streets thing not new, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1: The abundance I think is the new part. Yeah. Although
Speaker 1: when I was there, I was like, it's not that
Speaker 1: their ship on the street that is not new. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of it, you guys. And they're like, that
Speaker 1: is the problem. That is the problem. And I also
Speaker 1: think the average fiber content per person shipping on the
Speaker 1: street may have increased. That's the theory I have. I think, Well,
Speaker 1: I think, if we're being honest, what happens is when
Speaker 1: you're on heroin, you get constipated and then you release
Speaker 1: all of it at once, is what we're dealing with. Yeah,
Speaker 1: um so Billy. In eighteen forty eight, the city of
Speaker 1: San Francisco's population was a mere eight hundred people, and again,
Speaker 1: it was basically just a big, muddy camp site. Um,
Speaker 1: there were more redwoods than people at this stage. And
Speaker 1: there used to be a shipload of redwoods all over
Speaker 1: San Francisco before we murdered all those priceless works of
Speaker 1: natural art so that we could have, you know, like
Speaker 1: the wee work buildings. Can you imagine if there were
Speaker 1: redwoods just all over the city now instead of the
Speaker 1: things that are there. Some of the things that are there,
Speaker 1: we're just like, no, like some of them. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: can keep like the five hundred Club, like the good
Speaker 1: bars and ship Yes, that's yeah, all of North Beaches, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: just a bunch of bars and redwoods and nothing else. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: a couple of grocery stores. So yeah. On January, a
Speaker 1: carpenter building a mill near Coloma, California, found flakes of
Speaker 1: gold in the water. The news got out, and in
Speaker 1: very short order, tens of thousands of Americans flitted into
Speaker 1: California's first gold rush. And California has kind of always
Speaker 1: been just a series of gold rushes ever since. That's
Speaker 1: why there's forty million people here, because people are dumb
Speaker 1: and they like they like easy money. Um. Also, the
Speaker 1: weather Vegas an't getting smaller, No, no, it's not, thank God.
Speaker 1: Actually the selection, Thank god for last f one time.
Speaker 1: I will say that that is that that you're looking
Speaker 1: at the mat. Huh, I'll be damned. Well they did
Speaker 1: it all right. I guess we'll keep gambling illegal everywhere else.
Speaker 1: You guys earned another four years. Well my thought was
Speaker 1: like with that was like real quick or oh he's
Speaker 1: piste off everyone. Yeah, he's he's got Vegas angry. Yes,
Speaker 1: and they're so easy to distract. Yes, Uh yeah, it
Speaker 1: is funny that he picked a fight with Philadelphia too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's just you. Yeah, you can't. They'll they'll come to
Speaker 1: they'll cross anile to get in a fight. Uh, speaking
Speaker 1: of fights, you know because the Oakland Raiders this is
Speaker 1: close enough anyway. Uh yeah. So all these people start
Speaker 1: flooding into California because they want to shipload of gold,
Speaker 1: and the city of San Francisco, or the collection of
Speaker 1: tents that became San Francisco, grew rapidly from a population
Speaker 1: of about eight hundred and eighteen forty eight to twenty
Speaker 1: thousand people by eighteen fifty. Um. Yeah, that's a lot.
Speaker 1: I just think of. Have you and we've been to
Speaker 1: those cities like where the population explodes in the infrastructure
Speaker 1: can't really handle it. Just traffic everywhere. Yes, that's just traffic.
Speaker 1: This is like before sewers. Yeah, like you see right
Speaker 1: now in a couple of cities in the world or
Speaker 1: even in the United States. Um, you know, they grew
Speaker 1: too fast. There was a sudden influx of people in
Speaker 1: the infrastructure can't keep up. And it's a problem, going
Speaker 1: from eight hundred to twenty thousand people in two years
Speaker 1: as a calamity. It's like a hurricane hit Like it's
Speaker 1: a natural disaster, you know. Um, And it doesn't it
Speaker 1: doesn't go well. It creates a series of problems, most
Speaker 1: of which will actually sound eerily familiar to anyone who
Speaker 1: lives in San Francisco today or who's just like driven
Speaker 1: through it. Uh. And I want to quote here from
Speaker 1: a paragraph in the Anals of San Francisco about the
Speaker 1: city culture during the gold Rush era. Despite the and
Speaker 1: again this is like written in fucking the eighteen fifties,
Speaker 1: despite the amazingly high cost of living and the extraordinary
Speaker 1: opportunities for frittering away money, everyone in daily San Francisco
Speaker 1: was supremely confident that he would be able to return
Speaker 1: home with an incalculable amount of gold. Everything was conceived
Speaker 1: on a vast scale, and there was always plenty of
Speaker 1: cash available for any scheme that might be proposed, no
Speaker 1: matter how impossible or bizarre it seemed. Oh, how the
Speaker 1: times have changed. Yeah, it's a completely different city today. Wow,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't write that exact same paragraph about San Francisco
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty years later. It's just that that that
Speaker 1: voice has changed now. It's like now it's like in
Speaker 1: a land of ones and zeros. Yeah, no, bro, you'd
Speaker 1: plenty of cash for any plan you could propose. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: they're like big cars, but they carry a lot of people,
Speaker 1: you know those busses. No, no, no, because we don't
Speaker 1: pay the driver a salary. Instead he could super mile
Speaker 1: fee based on an app and we don't have to
Speaker 1: give him healthcare. Brilliant, Yeah, brilliant. Why do you see
Speaker 1: what I'm gonna do to Rhodes. That's we're laughing, But
Speaker 1: that's a conversation. Yeah, that is a conversation. I'm excited
Speaker 1: for Rotor without an E, the app to come out
Speaker 1: and privatize the filling of potholes so that there are
Speaker 1: somehow more of them. Um do that it doesn't work.
Speaker 1: So most depictions of San Francisco in the eighteen fifties
Speaker 1: portrayed as again essentially just a pile of brothels, casinos,
Speaker 1: and crude tent neighborhoods filled with filthy male miners. One
Speaker 1: of the first problems that this explosion population had is
Speaker 1: that there were almost no women in the entire city. That's, oh,
Speaker 1: that's not good for the prostitution. Well, it's good for
Speaker 1: the prostitutes that are there. Well that, yeah, it's good
Speaker 1: for Brenda. Brenda is having a good time. It's a
Speaker 1: seller's market for Brenda. Hey, that's so. One miner during
Speaker 1: this period is purported to have acquired a single woman
Speaker 1: slipper and made a good living, charging his fellows a
Speaker 1: dollar to touch it. I know that that you understand
Speaker 1: how that works to do you know what? I just
Speaker 1: thought of times in my life from it, I could
Speaker 1: say I could see making a living doing that, and
Speaker 1: so yeah. A less ethical business person in the same
Speaker 1: field was a Liza Farnham, who operated a boat called
Speaker 1: the Bride Ship that ferried women from the East coast
Speaker 1: to the west, presumably so they could marry. Would schever
Speaker 1: miners had the best luck and uncovering gold. Yeah, time period,
Speaker 1: if we're being honest, that is not the worst way
Speaker 1: people were getting married. No, because there's a decent chance
Speaker 1: you'll die on the boat. That's way better than being
Speaker 1: married back the yea. So, food was, however, by a
Speaker 1: wide margin, the most expensive thing in the city because again, basically,
Speaker 1: no one lived in California at this point. I say
Speaker 1: basically no, like white people lived in California, and the
Speaker 1: Indigenous people were not exactly psyched to help out a
Speaker 1: bunch of gold miners, um. And also you know genocide
Speaker 1: and such. Um. So, yeah, there was not a great
Speaker 1: deal of farming infrastructure. There was not a great deal
Speaker 1: of food for this sudden this what had essentially been
Speaker 1: a small town that had turned into what at that
Speaker 1: point was like a mid size city almost overnight. Um,
Speaker 1: they're just like, wasn't fucking food And for an example
Speaker 1: of how like incredibly expensive ship was in San Francisco
Speaker 1: at this point, it was actually worse than it is
Speaker 1: today by comparison. So restaurants in imag because it's incredibly
Speaker 1: expensive to eat. That's my opening joke. The taco My
Speaker 1: opening joke is literally to the crowd like, oh do
Speaker 1: you all are you all roommates? Is that how you
Speaker 1: the whole crowd roommate? And they everyone laughs every time
Speaker 1: because it's funny. Yeah, because they're actually two different households exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So at this period of time in the early eighteen fifties,
Speaker 1: restaurants in town charged a dollar for a slice of
Speaker 1: bread two dollars if it was buttered, which is the
Speaker 1: equivalent of fifty six dollars in modern money. Wow, it's
Speaker 1: neck and neck, it is. That's because San France, where
Speaker 1: that the toast craze came from. Oh, you can get
Speaker 1: some good toast in San Francisco. Look, they've gotten good
Speaker 1: at making toast over the years. I guess it's always
Speaker 1: been a staple. Uh. In eighteen fifty a nice breakfast
Speaker 1: for two, which consisted of cheese, butter, sardines, bread, and
Speaker 1: two beers would cost the equivalent of modern dollars. So
Speaker 1: it's the same, it's the same. Yeah. As it's probably
Speaker 1: clear by now, the real money to be made in
Speaker 1: San Francisco ring the gold Rush was not in mining gold,
Speaker 1: but was in selling miners the things that they needed
Speaker 1: it radically inflated prices, which is kind of the same.
Speaker 1: There's a fun story from Redding, California, which is the
Speaker 1: center of the marijuana industry that nobody ever talks about
Speaker 1: because nobody wants to think about reading all that much.
Speaker 1: Just on the highway, so it's easy. It's where they
Speaker 1: a lot of the sales. Yeah, and it's it's a
Speaker 1: good growing area all around it because it's dry but
Speaker 1: also hot, like people talk about Humboldt, but it's a
Speaker 1: bit wet there. Um. One of the big things that
Speaker 1: is like a major product in the pot industry of
Speaker 1: turkey bags, which is what you put the pot into
Speaker 1: when you process it. And they're the bags that you
Speaker 1: would brian a turkey in. And the company that made
Speaker 1: these bags noticed that year round they were selling a
Speaker 1: shipload of turkey bags in Redding, California. So they said,
Speaker 1: like a representative out to figure out, like people just
Speaker 1: eating turkey all year round in this town. And then
Speaker 1: he found out and he had to like quietly go
Speaker 1: back home, like we can't really advertise on this. I
Speaker 1: just this is just interviewed a lady in southern Humboldt.
Speaker 1: And during the camp days, a bunch of revenuers is like,
Speaker 1: as I as I was pointed out they said the
Speaker 1: rs I was like, well, moonshine, they call the revenuers
Speaker 1: and there again and they went this guy was selling
Speaker 1: uh black pipe and he sold way anyone ever had
Speaker 1: ever ever sold ever. And they're like, let me see
Speaker 1: your books that. The old man was like, nah, no,
Speaker 1: you don't need to know why I'm selling this much
Speaker 1: of this stuff because if because you guys will make
Speaker 1: them stop doing this. And I like money, man, I
Speaker 1: ain't doing anything illegal. I just like that. The old
Speaker 1: man was like, no, no, I ain't turning that money
Speaker 1: fountain officer, nothing I need to be doing that. So
Speaker 1: the same thing is happening in San Francisco. During this period.
Speaker 1: People are figuring out the people who are really making
Speaker 1: money aren't mining gold. They're mining miners, you know, um
Speaker 1: and yeah. The most intelligent of them realize that, you know,
Speaker 1: the easiest thing to sell miners and the most profitable
Speaker 1: thing would be food, um, and sex. But there was
Speaker 1: more competition in the sex business. Now. The most desired
Speaker 1: food stuff in all of the Bay Area was eggs.
Speaker 1: Not only are eggs filled with protein, they're necessary ingredient
Speaker 1: in all manner of pastries and cakes. You know, you
Speaker 1: can't make fucking bagels or whatever without or whatever. I
Speaker 1: don't know, you cant of together without eggs. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: critical and a last for the growing polity gold rush.
Speaker 1: Arai San Francisco was completely the funk out of eggs.
Speaker 1: The problems started when the first ten thousand men are
Speaker 1: so flooded into the city and devoured every single chicken
Speaker 1: and rooster that they could get their hands on, like
Speaker 1: a whole word of protein hungry locusts. They just ate everything,
Speaker 1: like there's enough chicken to feed eight hundred people. People
Speaker 1: move in and eat it all overnight, and suddenly there's
Speaker 1: no more birds to lay eggs. Uh. Now, it's not
Speaker 1: quite certain why, but no additional birds arrived for years
Speaker 1: to restock the Bay area's farms. And this is a
Speaker 1: bit of a historical mystery because both southern California and
Speaker 1: Baja had farms and had chickens, and even in eighteen
Speaker 1: forty nine, it wouldn't have been hard to send a
Speaker 1: few boatloads of birds up the coast um and there
Speaker 1: are different theories about why none of them actually were,
Speaker 1: Like there were no just no populations of breeding chickens
Speaker 1: in the Bay area. One of the theories comes from
Speaker 1: an artist named Eva Croissant, who was one of the
Speaker 1: world's top experts on the very weird subject of today's episodes,
Speaker 1: and she cites some convincing evidence that a mix of
Speaker 1: two factors contributed to the lack of poultry. Number One,
Speaker 1: chicken feed wasn't terribly short supply, and thus chickens were
Speaker 1: primarily fed garbage, which didn't help their health. And some
Speaker 1: sort of horrible bird plague kept killing off imported birds,
Speaker 1: because we do have cases of people bringing in birds
Speaker 1: and then the lull die basically overnight. So for whatever
Speaker 1: the cause was, it was impossible to establish a population
Speaker 1: of chickens in the city of San Francisco for years.
Speaker 1: As a result of this, in a city famed for gold,
Speaker 1: one of the most valuable items was the humble HNN egg.
Speaker 1: It was not uncommon for eggs to be imported from
Speaker 1: as far away from Chile, like they're they're bringing Chilean
Speaker 1: eggs into San Francisco because there's no laying eggs. And
Speaker 1: you see that, I think, yeah, and I I could
Speaker 1: see those assholes still doing stuff like that today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a Chilean egg. Motherfucker. That's you're gonna have to
Speaker 1: pay a lot of money for these Chilean chickens. You
Speaker 1: know where Chili is. No, Yeah, it's real, real fancy.
Speaker 1: The eggs very they feed the chicken setting. So the
Speaker 1: price of eggs at its peak was near the equivalent
Speaker 1: of thirty dollars in a modern dollars an egg in
Speaker 1: San Francisco. Um, yeah, I know some people who would
Speaker 1: be very rich based on their backyards if that was
Speaker 1: still the case. One journalist at the time noted that
Speaker 1: the city of San Francisco was desperate for eggs and
Speaker 1: that a fortune would be made by any man or
Speaker 1: woman daring enough to figure out how to provide them.
Speaker 1: And it just so happened, Billy, that twenty six miles
Speaker 1: off the coast of the Bay lay the fire Aland Islands,
Speaker 1: known as the Islands of the Dead to the coast
Speaker 1: Miwalk tribe. The fire Lands are some of the least
Speaker 1: pleasant land on planet Earth. Two hundred and eleven acres
Speaker 1: of rocky cliffs and outcroppings of solid granite. They're basically giant,
Speaker 1: sharp boulders in the middle of the sea. That I
Speaker 1: was going to say, it's like it just sounds like
Speaker 1: big rocks. Yeah, they're huge, deadly rocks. One representative of
Speaker 1: the National Marine Sanctuary described them as looking like a
Speaker 1: piece of the moon that fell into the sea. Now,
Speaker 1: the far Lands have never hosted human populations naturally, like
Speaker 1: like the indigenous people didn't live there. They call them
Speaker 1: the Islands of the dead. Like, don't fucking go there,
Speaker 1: you'll get killed. It's a bad place to be, partly
Speaker 1: because the seas around them are incredibly rough, and until
Speaker 1: people had kind of like more modern boats, even when
Speaker 1: people had modern boats, boats crashed into them all of
Speaker 1: the goddamn time. I was gonna say, it's still just
Speaker 1: it's needless, you guys, you don't need to do this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And there was really nothing there. The island's only natural
Speaker 1: inhabitants were hordes of sea lions and hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of birds. The most common species was called the common mirror.
Speaker 1: It's a small ocean bird with exactly one note where
Speaker 1: the attribute. Its eggs are the size of soft balls,
Speaker 1: so it's smaller than a chicken, but it's eggs are
Speaker 1: like twice the size of a chicken's eggs. Now Mere
Speaker 1: eggs are actually if you look them up online. They're
Speaker 1: really cool looking eggs. I kind of want to get
Speaker 1: some and try them. They're rounded at the bottom and
Speaker 1: narrow on the top, kind of like one of those
Speaker 1: Russian nesting dolls. Um And it's theorized that this is
Speaker 1: because they lay them on the sides of cliffs and
Speaker 1: stops them from like rolling over. I really need. They're
Speaker 1: very vividly colored. Some of them are like turquoise, and
Speaker 1: they're covered in like black markings that look almost like
Speaker 1: alien handwriting. They're like like a nice like a nice
Speaker 1: mug from like from like, yeah, they look like somebody
Speaker 1: in Taus made them, and like, yeah, that's what you described.
Speaker 1: I just thought of Aunt I had. I'm like, she
Speaker 1: would love this. Side note question, Billy, when I said,
Speaker 1: do you want to come back on behind the Pastors?
Speaker 1: Did you think we would be talking about hex? I don't.
Speaker 1: I never know. I didn't. I didn't think that the
Speaker 1: president of the United States that would discuss stuff that
Speaker 1: we had discussed the bleach that was like, I was like,
Speaker 1: I don't like that. I'm ahead of this. I don't
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, I'm not. I'm not wild about the
Speaker 1: fact that the thing that we laughed at because it
Speaker 1: was absurd was then urged for people to do by
Speaker 1: the president during a pandemic. Yeah, when everyone was joking
Speaker 1: about it. When it happened, I was like, this isn't good.
Speaker 1: This is a problem. People are gonna die. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: was like, people are already doing this, and if the
Speaker 1: president mentions it, it's not good. People are like, inn't
Speaker 1: this funny. I'm like, I wish it was a dude.
Speaker 1: That's the thing. That's what's beautiful about the thing that
Speaker 1: happened with the Four Seasons because most of the things
Speaker 1: that people have thought was funny that have happened this
Speaker 1: year aren't really funny if you understand what's going on.
Speaker 1: They're terrifying. That one was actually that's just perfect. Yeah
Speaker 1: I did. I laughed that laugh where I didn't make
Speaker 1: noise when I first read about it because I was
Speaker 1: like I did that thing where I was like, who's
Speaker 1: behind like, because I was like some comedian did this
Speaker 1: is very funny? Yeah? I did do that. Did you
Speaker 1: also do like the dry heat? Because it was like
Speaker 1: it was like my little toddler crying where I was
Speaker 1: like the harder I thought about it, the more I
Speaker 1: was like that is, it's every now and then Karma's
Speaker 1: just like here you go. What was even What was
Speaker 1: even better about that one was being able to share
Speaker 1: it with people who hadn't seen the story yet and
Speaker 1: then got to appreciate their initial laugh about it's still funny. Sorry,
Speaker 1: that eggs my bad. Perfect, No, Sophie, not back to eggs,
Speaker 1: because we're professionals and that means it's time to go
Speaker 1: to ads. Oh see, Sophie, sometimes I bring us to
Speaker 1: ads and you don't warn me because I remember and
Speaker 1: you don't. So there you go. I'm a hack on
Speaker 1: a fraud, Robert. I'll fire myself now you're making me
Speaker 1: feel bad. It was a harsh treatment. You really you
Speaker 1: really spun that back at me. Now the guns pointed
Speaker 1: in the other direction, just like Raytheon brand shoot yourself
Speaker 1: in the face rifles. Wanted a rifle that you're going
Speaker 1: to happen? Ye, I don't know. That's not my best
Speaker 1: Raytheon joke. Nope, but I'll take it. I'm sorry, ads,
Speaker 1: we're back. Uh well, Billy eggs, eggs eggs. So I
Speaker 1: do suggest looking up mirror eggs because they're they're kind
Speaker 1: of fucking awesome. Actually, they really neat eggs. Uh there
Speaker 1: and yeah, they're they're edible, um, although they have a
Speaker 1: red yolk and a bluish tint um that most people
Speaker 1: describe as unsettling to eat. Uh. And they yeah, because
Speaker 1: it's like a weird color. And it's not it's not terrible,
Speaker 1: but it's not super appetizing. Um. But there were a
Speaker 1: funckload of them. A few sailors over the years had
Speaker 1: stopped off at the fire lands and found that during
Speaker 1: big chunks of the summer it was covered in just
Speaker 1: piles of tens of thousands of eggs um. And while
Speaker 1: they wouldn't taste great fried, they worked perfectly if you
Speaker 1: mixed them in the dough. You could bake with them
Speaker 1: and you wouldn't notice that you were using a hen egg.
Speaker 1: And they're twice as big as a hen egg. So
Speaker 1: they really go a long way towards alleviating the the
Speaker 1: egg shortage. And I'm gonna quote from the Smithsonian here.
Speaker 1: Stale mirror eggs had a strong fishy aftertaste in the
Speaker 1: words of one commenter, and overripe mirror egg is something
Speaker 1: never to be for gotten. It requires about three months
Speaker 1: to get the taste out of the mouth. As a result,
Speaker 1: the eggers inaugurated each harvest season by smashing all of
Speaker 1: the mere eggs on the island, thereby ensuring the collection
Speaker 1: of freshly laid eggs. So when people started harvesting these
Speaker 1: eggs which we were about to get into, you would
Speaker 1: have to break all of the eggs that were there
Speaker 1: when you arrived, because it would force the mirrors to
Speaker 1: lay new eggs. And then you would take those eggs
Speaker 1: and bring them back home. And if you're thinking was
Speaker 1: this bad for the mirror population, yes, yeah, no I
Speaker 1: was as soon as you said commerce, these birds are fucked.
Speaker 1: They don't do great. So bit by bit people started
Speaker 1: to talk about how all the eggs on this island
Speaker 1: might be able to satisfy the Bay area's deep hunger
Speaker 1: for pastries. The first man to try and make a
Speaker 1: fortune off of Farrell and Eggs was an adventurer from
Speaker 1: Maine named Doc Robinson. He'd heard whispers of mere eggs
Speaker 1: in the saloons and gambling dens on the waterfronts. In
Speaker 1: the spring of eighteen forty nine, Doc and his brother
Speaker 1: Oran chartered a boat and headed to the islands. They
Speaker 1: found them absolutely covered in birds, hundreds of thousands of mirrors.
Speaker 1: The men loaded their boats so full of eggs that
Speaker 1: they could barely fit inside it. And I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: now from the book The Devil's Teeth by Susan Casey.
Speaker 1: Robinson and Dorman loaded their boat with eggs and headed
Speaker 1: back to San Francisco, coming up against a nasty storm
Speaker 1: and dumping half their cargo into the ocean just to
Speaker 1: stay upright. Nonetheless, they sold the remaining eggs for a
Speaker 1: dollar a dozen and pocketed three thousand dollars, serious money
Speaker 1: in those days. Robinson opened his own burlesque call, another
Speaker 1: big growth segment of the fledged in California economy, and
Speaker 1: neither man ever went back to the fire loans, but
Speaker 1: others did. Within a week of the successful egg sale,
Speaker 1: Southeast Fareland was swarming with eggers. In keeping with the
Speaker 1: land grabbing ethos, six men immediately staked their claim, declaring
Speaker 1: that the islands belonged to them exclusively due to rights
Speaker 1: of possession, and incorporating as the Fireland Egg Company. Egging
Speaker 1: the lucrative proved a tough way to make a living.
Speaker 1: The season spanned eight flurried weeks between May and July,
Speaker 1: during which time, it was man against mirror, and both
Speaker 1: parties against the goals, climbing near vertical rises of crumbling
Speaker 1: and it. The eggers carried clubs in their free hands
Speaker 1: to fend off the attacking birds at the same time
Speaker 1: stuffing the eggs and especially designed egg shirts. Giant gunny
Speaker 1: sacks with multiple pockets scalp wounds were common. So I
Speaker 1: just have no I mean, I've never wanted a fortune
Speaker 1: that bad. I don't think. Yeah, and it's it's not
Speaker 1: even a fortune because these guys. After the first guy,
Speaker 1: he makes a fortune, right, he makes sense to me.
Speaker 1: You go out, you have like one real shitty weekend,
Speaker 1: and you come back alive, and you buy a burlesque
Speaker 1: call and you sell sex for the rest of your life. Um, under,
Speaker 1: I understand that these guys are like day laborers. And
Speaker 1: it's it's so bad because the goals eat the mirror eggs,
Speaker 1: so like while you're climbing up the rock, they're like
Speaker 1: die of bombing you and like biting into your skull
Speaker 1: and clawing at you to get at eggs. Ah, it's
Speaker 1: a bad gig. It just sounds like a metaphor for
Speaker 1: modern day San Francis. Yeah, yeah, it's not any different today.
Speaker 1: I would describe what they're doing is like driving for Uber, yes,
Speaker 1: but more ethical. Yeah, though it's a it's a fair wage, Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I'm sure they were getting a better wage than Uber driving.
Speaker 1: Oh man. Yeah. So. Harper's magazine sent a journalist down
Speaker 1: to the fire Allons in the eighteen sixties to look
Speaker 1: at the egging operation, and we have from that reporter
Speaker 1: a first hand account of of what it was actually like.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna just hand making vomit noises. From fifteen
Speaker 1: to twenty men are employed during the egging season and
Speaker 1: collecting and shipping the eggs. They live on the island
Speaker 1: during that time and rude shanties near the usual landing place.
Speaker 1: The work is not amusing, for the birds seek out
Speaker 1: the least accessible places, and the men must follow, climbing,
Speaker 1: often where a goat would be. All would almost hesitate,
Speaker 1: But this is not the worst. The goal sits on
Speaker 1: her nest and resists the robber who comes for her eggs,
Speaker 1: and he must take care not to get bitten. The
Speaker 1: mere remains until her enemy is close upon her. Then
Speaker 1: she rises with a scream, which often startles a thousand
Speaker 1: or two of the birds who whirl up into the
Speaker 1: air in a dense mask, scattering filth and guano all
Speaker 1: over the aggres. So just ship clouds raining down on
Speaker 1: you and into your open scalp wounds from the goals
Speaker 1: that have dive fopped you as you're doing your job,
Speaker 1: almost as high because you're you're you're really high up,
Speaker 1: so don't you go. Yeah yeah, and if you fall,
Speaker 1: you'll die horribly. Um and yeah, it was. The men
Speaker 1: who did the job tended to be as shady as
Speaker 1: you would expect of people who are willing to do
Speaker 1: that kind of work. The egg company hired mainly Greek
Speaker 1: and Italian immigrants who were comfortable with danger and desperate
Speaker 1: for money. And we all know what Italians are like,
Speaker 1: right I don't. It's very anti Italian show billy. Yeah, No,
Speaker 1: it's fine, it's fine. I know what they're like. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the rocks they scrambled up and down were slick
Speaker 1: with water, and bird ship men fell all the time,
Speaker 1: often from great heights. When workers died, they were just
Speaker 1: entered into the company log books as missing. For an
Speaker 1: example of one death. Oh man, yeah, it's funny, and
Speaker 1: I was okay, I'm making a bad joke with the
Speaker 1: shadiness of the Italians. But one of the aspects of
Speaker 1: this that's really interesting is that a lot of the
Speaker 1: Italians involved in this were like leftist labor organizers and
Speaker 1: this was just like the only work they could get
Speaker 1: because it was a bad time to be a part
Speaker 1: of organized labor, especially as things get into the eighteen sixties. Um.
Speaker 1: So that's a dimension of all of this too, is
Speaker 1: that there's like these these guys who are kind of
Speaker 1: locked out of the main economy because of you know, uh,
Speaker 1: companies not companies not wanting to hire people who want
Speaker 1: to stand up for their rights as labors, so instead
Speaker 1: they get dive bombed and covered and ship. Um it's yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't want to know, you don't want to work
Speaker 1: for the man, you can work for the birds. Well,
Speaker 1: and then it's also probably one of those gigs you
Speaker 1: don't know one tails you what it's really like, and
Speaker 1: then you learn what it's like when you get out there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And the point I'm making by bringing this up is
Speaker 1: that a lot of these guys, a lot of them
Speaker 1: did have you know, some sort of criminal background. The others,
Speaker 1: you know, being a labor organizer in this period means
Speaker 1: you've been in a lot of street fights. And the
Speaker 1: point I'm making is that these are really tough people
Speaker 1: who are comfortable with violence, and that's going to matter
Speaker 1: in a bit. Yeah. Yeah, But first I want to
Speaker 1: talk about people dying on the job, because that's always fun.
Speaker 1: It's can I just say, let's do the job pitch
Speaker 1: where if if you're just like, okay, yeah, you gotta
Speaker 1: ride a boat out there. Okay, that's fine. I don't
Speaker 1: care about that, and then you like heights trick, I
Speaker 1: don't care about that, like caney climb yeah, who you
Speaker 1: just climb up there and get that egg, all right. Also,
Speaker 1: the birds will they're gonna try to hurt you, all right,
Speaker 1: and you're gonna get covered and ship there go your
Speaker 1: open head wound. That's what I was gonna say. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're also you know how clean birds are. They're gonna
Speaker 1: ship in your open wounds. And then that guy goes,
Speaker 1: now I get how much an egg? Yeah, I like
Speaker 1: like ten cents. You know you're getting paid. You're getting paid.
Speaker 1: It's not bad. So for an example of one of
Speaker 1: the kind of one of the ways people died horribly
Speaker 1: doing the egg job. In eight fifty eight, the Daily Alta,
Speaker 1: California reported that an egger quote missed his hold while
Speaker 1: robbing a goal's nest over the edge of a precipice,
Speaker 1: and falling was dashed to pieces on the rocks below.
Speaker 1: That's how you wants Yeah, that's instant. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I hope so, I hope it wasn't slowly dashed to pieces. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you know nobody went for that body. They just said, oh,
Speaker 1: I didn't show up to work today. Yeah, no way
Speaker 1: to know. Send his wife and children a bill for
Speaker 1: the passage over. So the eggers developed a distinctly bleak
Speaker 1: view of their work, due in part to their forbidding
Speaker 1: surroundings and in part due to the death rate. Stories
Speaker 1: began to spread that if an egger spent too much
Speaker 1: time on the islands, he would start to see his
Speaker 1: name spelled out in the markings on the mirror shells.
Speaker 1: But still, the money was good, and the Pacific Egg
Speaker 1: Company was soon harvesting thousands of dollars and eggs every
Speaker 1: single trip. It was not long before other entrepreneurial types
Speaker 1: noticed this, as a journalist for Harper's wrote, of course
Speaker 1: there was an egg war. The prize was too great
Speaker 1: not to be struggled for. Well, yeah, you're gonna have
Speaker 1: a war with the eggs. Yeah, it's good to know
Speaker 1: that the that the press has always been stroking just say,
Speaker 1: any type of war. Yeah, if you guys tried shooting
Speaker 1: at each other yet, I'm gonna stand over here, maybe
Speaker 1: give it a shot. Uh okay from the Devil's Teeth quote.
Speaker 1: There were NonStop dust ups as rifle gangs battled the
Speaker 1: company for the right to harvest the eggs. On more
Speaker 1: than one occasion, soldiers were summoned to calm things down.
Speaker 1: The battles often lasting for weeks, involving threats, fist fights, barricades,
Speaker 1: and small arms, and during those interlude San Franciscan's would
Speaker 1: go eggless once again. Sometimes the ejected gangs would hide
Speaker 1: in see caves instead of sailing back to San Francisco,
Speaker 1: waiting for the authorities to leave so they could take
Speaker 1: another run at the eggs. One tenacious group steered their
Speaker 1: boat inside Great Mirror Cave and remained there for two days,
Speaker 1: during which they were drizzled non stop with guano. The
Speaker 1: ammonia build up inside the cave killed several men and
Speaker 1: the danger. They were piste to death, and the dangers
Speaker 1: didn't stop once the cargo was collected. Boats returned running
Speaker 1: eggs to the mainland were hijacked with regularity, so we
Speaker 1: got egg pirates in the mix. Well that's why, as
Speaker 1: you're describing this, it just made me laugh because I'm like, man,
Speaker 1: if you gamify, humans are down for whatever the fucking prizes. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: wait here, while my friends choked to death on bird piss,
Speaker 1: we're gonna make money, right, will beat those guys. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just as long as I get more eggs than the
Speaker 1: other assholes exactly. Now. What was already a very complicated
Speaker 1: and violent situation was compounded by some decisions the government
Speaker 1: made in eighteen fifty two. They decided to build a
Speaker 1: lighthouse on the Farrelland Islands. This was a sensible call geographically,
Speaker 1: because ships kept running into the rocks in the dead
Speaker 1: of night or during storms. It's a good place for
Speaker 1: a lighthouse, um. But actually building a lighthouse on such
Speaker 1: inhospitable terrain was easier said than done. Stone had to
Speaker 1: be quarried on the island to create the lighthouse. Workmen
Speaker 1: had to haul bricks up the hillside on their backs,
Speaker 1: it was just a miserable, miserable, miserable job. They completed
Speaker 1: construction in eighteen fifty three, and just as they were
Speaker 1: about to begin operation, they had to like the last
Speaker 1: thing they had to do. After spending like more than
Speaker 1: a year agonizingly quarrying rock to build a lighthouse, the
Speaker 1: last thing they had to do was take a lens
Speaker 1: up into the tower. And it's soon as they try
Speaker 1: they realized that the lighthouse wasn't big enough for the
Speaker 1: lens to fit. So they had to knock down the
Speaker 1: lighthouse and rebuild it two years. Oh I think one
Speaker 1: dude about how well it was like halfway up. It's
Speaker 1: like how you get you know what? Never mind, never mind,
Speaker 1: never mind, mind. I'm just not gonna say anything. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna not be here. I'm gonna quit tomorrow. Uh So,
Speaker 1: in eighteen fifty five they finally finished the damn thing.
Speaker 1: Several lighthouse keepers and eventually their families moved on to
Speaker 1: the island as its only permanent residence. Now this immediately
Speaker 1: caused problems with what by then was just called the
Speaker 1: Egg Company. See, the Egg Company claimed to have a
Speaker 1: total monopoly on the island, a fact which was disputed
Speaker 1: by the government and basically everyone else who wasn't the
Speaker 1: Egg company names. No, that's on purpose, like when you
Speaker 1: name your cat cat or tiger. Well no, I think
Speaker 1: what they're doing is like, now there can only be
Speaker 1: one and we are the egg the Egg Company. We
Speaker 1: we will abide no competition. Facebook ship drop the Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean Facebook was the Egg Company was the first
Speaker 1: investor in Facebook. I think it should just be company.
Speaker 1: Drop the V. I think the the I think the
Speaker 1: V is the key. The is the key, that the
Speaker 1: is the key. So yeah, the Egg Company says, all
Speaker 1: of the eggs and everything else on the fairylands are
Speaker 1: our property, um, which again they have no legal right to.
Speaker 1: But they do have guns. So the lighthouse keepers do
Speaker 1: understand America. They understand America. That said, the government had
Speaker 1: guns too, So the Egg Company couldn't like kick the
Speaker 1: lighthouse keepers off, but they could repeatedly threaten them with violence. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: but the problem what would I don't understand that they
Speaker 1: were like, hey, we'll gonna get you. Yeah. Part of
Speaker 1: the they were like, we don't. You can't. If you're
Speaker 1: going to be here, you can't eat any of the
Speaker 1: eggs or anything else. That's on the island, and they
Speaker 1: were like, but we live here and it's the government's island.
Speaker 1: So that starts the problem, um, and what kind of
Speaker 1: continues it is that. So in eighteen fifty eight, this
Speaker 1: guy named Amos Clift gets hired to be the head
Speaker 1: keeper of the lighthouse, and Amos kind of organize the
Speaker 1: other lighthouse keepers by saying like, hey, guys, our pay
Speaker 1: is complete. Ship, like, we're not getting nearly enough money.
Speaker 1: We have to live in this terrible death island in
Speaker 1: in the ocean where it's always miserable. The least that
Speaker 1: we can should be able to do is make a
Speaker 1: funckload of money selling these eggs like these we have
Speaker 1: a right to this island. The egg company people don't,
Speaker 1: So why why don't we try profiting off of this ship, Like, hey,
Speaker 1: you guys, we've got to have at least one perk here, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and that park should be getting rich off of the
Speaker 1: egg rack. Yeah. Now, the problem is, of course there's
Speaker 1: only a few lighthousekeepers. The Egg Company is basically a
Speaker 1: mafia at this point, including the fact that it's filled
Speaker 1: with Italians. Um. So, for the most part, the outnumbered
Speaker 1: and vulnerable lighthouse crew tried to pick at the margins
Speaker 1: of the company's egg business and avoid direct confrontation. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It worked for a little while. You got a guerrilla
Speaker 1: warfare that Yeah. Amos, however, was kind of impatient. Uh.
Speaker 1: He was not willing to just nibble at the edges.
Speaker 1: He wanted a big cut of that sweet sweet egg company.
Speaker 1: And he was also a heavy drinker um which worked
Speaker 1: at a lighthouse. You know, man, that is that's a
Speaker 1: being ambitious and headstrong and and and an alcoholic. Yeah yeah, so,
Speaker 1: author Susan Casey, he doesn't didn't write about being a drunk.
Speaker 1: But author Susan Casey, who went through all of the
Speaker 1: letters he sent home to his family during this period,
Speaker 1: noticed like the way that he wrote would change over
Speaker 1: the course of a long letter in a way that
Speaker 1: heavily just drinking quote and almost all his letters, which
Speaker 1: tended to run several pages, clifts. Elegant penmanship starts off
Speaker 1: impressively and then morphs into a scrawling mess as the
Speaker 1: handwriting degenerates. The complaints about his post became increasingly bitter,
Speaker 1: and his plans for total egg dominance grow larger in scale,
Speaker 1: and a letter to Horace was one of his family members.
Speaker 1: Written on November fifty nine, he outlined the situation. Before
Speaker 1: I came here, this egg company used to have things
Speaker 1: all their own way. But since I have been here,
Speaker 1: things have taken a turn, and they have ascertained that
Speaker 1: I am not as easily bluffed. I think it will
Speaker 1: now be settled in the egg company driven off the island.
Speaker 1: I shall not abate my efforts in the least, and
Speaker 1: if I succeed, I may perhaps reap the benefits. Uh man,
Speaker 1: he's gonna get the eggs. So imagine, I mean, just
Speaker 1: from the another perspect like the egg company, this dude
Speaker 1: shows up and they're like, it's already a nightmare here,
Speaker 1: like this is hard enough. Do you think that they
Speaker 1: called him a rotten egg? Behind back? Thank you? I've
Speaker 1: been holding them in from the entire podcast. I like
Speaker 1: to think any of these dudes use puns. No, No,
Speaker 1: he was too drunk and too obsessed with eggs. Do
Speaker 1: you want to know who's not too drunken obsessed with eggs? Though, Robert? Oh, Now,
Speaker 1: the people of Raytheon are are big into the egg business.
Speaker 1: In fact, there's the only right now are our friends
Speaker 1: who are behind such wonderful inventions as the missile guidance
Speaker 1: chip for the hell Fire missile and the missile guidance
Speaker 1: chip for the r X nine the Knife missile. Are
Speaker 1: working on a way to shoot eggs right into the
Speaker 1: mouths of hungry people. It speeds exceeding forty feet per second.
Speaker 1: Not rotten eggs, fresh eggs. We were trying to fade
Speaker 1: him to perfection. Only the fresh, so fresh they will
Speaker 1: completely penetrate up to three human bodies before shattering. That's
Speaker 1: the add ads. All right, we're we've were, we are,
Speaker 1: we are, we are we are. You try that again, buddy, No, No,
Speaker 1: we just are. We just are are. We just are
Speaker 1: We're being That's true. Yeah. So for Amos Clift, the
Speaker 1: egg racket meant a chance at more money than he like,
Speaker 1: than he would ever have a chance of making anywhere else.
Speaker 1: As he wrote back home to his family, the egg
Speaker 1: seasons the months of May and June, and the profits
Speaker 1: of the company after all expenses are paid, is every
Speaker 1: year from five to six thousand dollars quite an item.
Speaker 1: And if this island is government property, I have a
Speaker 1: right to these eggs, and I am bound to try
Speaker 1: and get it. And of course he also added that
Speaker 1: once he got rich off of the eggs, the government
Speaker 1: could kiss his foot. Um. So interesting, guy, Amos, He's
Speaker 1: decided this is how he's going to make his fortune,
Speaker 1: and he's kind of revealing his moves though too a
Speaker 1: little bit. Yeah. Yeah, this is the government's island, so
Speaker 1: I have a right to the eggs, but also suck
Speaker 1: the government once they get rich. Yeah, like, hey, man,
Speaker 1: just leave the last part out, Dude, I think you
Speaker 1: gotta play it. Yeah. Yeah, he wasn't. He wasn't a
Speaker 1: smooth customer. So Amos organized the lighthouse keepers into a
Speaker 1: brisk business that partly involved discouraging eggers from landing. Because
Speaker 1: they're the lighthouse they can make it hard for boats
Speaker 1: to land. Um. And yeah, they would also like basically
Speaker 1: work with groups of eggers to stop other groups from
Speaker 1: landing and get kickbacks from them. And of course they
Speaker 1: also got involved in the business of gathering and smuggling
Speaker 1: eggs back into the mainland. So he's gets a couple
Speaker 1: of rackets set up. Uh what did micro cause him
Speaker 1: of a city? Yeah? Yeah, it is a very San
Speaker 1: Francisco story. Yeah, it's nice. Just immediately like we can
Speaker 1: like this racket work for everybody. I think there's a
Speaker 1: little bit of money around the edges of this. For me,
Speaker 1: all I got any was over some people who aren't me.
Speaker 1: Just every American story ever is just going like, oh
Speaker 1: I got this, Yeah you can. There's a lot about
Speaker 1: America in this tale. So right around the same time
Speaker 1: as Amos is getting his his his egg scheme off
Speaker 1: the ground, San Francisco's Daily Alta newspaper reported that the
Speaker 1: egg company had begun to wage an open guerilla war
Speaker 1: against the state, breaking up government roads as well as
Speaker 1: drawing lines fencing off chunks of the island and putting
Speaker 1: up warnings that light keepers and their families could only
Speaker 1: cross on pain of death. So like destroying the roads
Speaker 1: that were built to allow the lighthouse to function um
Speaker 1: and to allow like like basically trying to cut off
Speaker 1: their supply lines, fencing off the areas where the eggs are,
Speaker 1: and threatening to murder government employees who cross onto egg territory.
Speaker 1: In June of eighteen sixty is things escalated to a
Speaker 1: point where lightkeepers felt unsafe to travel outside without rifles.
Speaker 1: Clift wrote a letter to his family that we are
Speaker 1: now in the midst of the egg season and the
Speaker 1: egg Company and the Lightkeepers are at are now. Soon
Speaker 1: after this point, the Eggers launched a full frontal assault
Speaker 1: on the Lightkeepers, trying to force them off the island
Speaker 1: at gunpoint. In July, one of the assistant lightkeepers was
Speaker 1: ambushed and injured. Justice Clift was plotting his response to
Speaker 1: these offenses. The US government realized what was going on,
Speaker 1: and rather than getting broiled in an egg based insurgency,
Speaker 1: they fired Clift for the undue assumption to monopolize the
Speaker 1: valuable privilege of collecting eggs. I hate to side with
Speaker 1: the government that they got a goddamn point on this one.
Speaker 1: This kind of seemed like he was a problem. Do
Speaker 1: you take any of his relatives, like he had some
Speaker 1: smartass cousins or stuff. They're like, dude, you've got to
Speaker 1: read Amos his egg letters. They are awesome. I think
Speaker 1: he might be. I think he might be in some
Speaker 1: real trouble. He's talking about gunfights. It's but he's talking
Speaker 1: about eggs. It's the funniest ship you have ever heard,
Speaker 1: uh people. Yeah. So, at the same time that the
Speaker 1: egg company men were sparring with the lighthouse Keepers, another
Speaker 1: rifle egg poaching company was forming with the goal of
Speaker 1: conquering the Farrelland Islands for themselves and taking them from
Speaker 1: the Egg Company. While the Egg Company was American run,
Speaker 1: this new company was made up entirely of Italian immigrants.
Speaker 1: Both claimed to have legal possession of the island, and
Speaker 1: it seems unlikely that either did. From a local news
Speaker 1: article at the time quote the chief of police and
Speaker 1: a posse visit the scene. For a long time two
Speaker 1: years or more, the right to gather the eggs on
Speaker 1: the Farrelands Islands has been in dispute between rival companies,
Speaker 1: and rumblings of approaching troubles between them have been heard
Speaker 1: for a year. One of these companies has composed mainly
Speaker 1: of Americans, and it is known that the far as
Speaker 1: the Farrelands Egg Company. The other is made up of
Speaker 1: Italian fishermen. The American company claimed to have had original
Speaker 1: possession of the island and issued script in the usual
Speaker 1: manner of corporations. The Italian company were subsequent claimants, and
Speaker 1: in a suit between them and Judge Hager's Court lately
Speaker 1: a writ of ejectment was sued against the Italians, who,
Speaker 1: being in part possession, refused to obey the summons yesterday,
Speaker 1: Chief Barks sent out officers Ellison Clark to arrest certain
Speaker 1: of the Italians, and when they found two parties armed
Speaker 1: to the teeth, in possession of different parts of the
Speaker 1: island and breathing defiance against each other, the officers attempted
Speaker 1: to serve their writ but were opposed, and though the
Speaker 1: partisans of the egg companies sided with the officers, they
Speaker 1: were unable to effect the arrest of more than three
Speaker 1: of the other party, the rest vowing that they were
Speaker 1: ready for a fight and would rather be shot down
Speaker 1: than arrested. So yeah, yeah, I just I don't over eggs.
Speaker 1: Starting a farm a little outside of town would have
Speaker 1: been way easier than this. Yeah, it does seem like that.
Speaker 1: Seems like that would have been eggs over easy, and
Speaker 1: they chose eggs over hard. I can't even look at
Speaker 1: you right now. I know, I know. I wanted to
Speaker 1: throw the microphone, but it's mine. Yeah, well that's why
Speaker 1: I missed the studio. We'd be throwing a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some for somebody said they are upset that we're not
Speaker 1: throwing bagels anymore, and it's because we're own houses. That's
Speaker 1: my property. No, I yeah, when I throw eggs in
Speaker 1: the in the office, it's Daniel who has to clean
Speaker 1: them up. And when I throw eggs in my own home,
Speaker 1: it's well, not me still, but someone else who has
Speaker 1: to clean them up. Yeah. Wow, you're gonna make your
Speaker 1: cat clean that up. Yeah, she loves eggs. Probably over
Speaker 1: the next couple of years, that's one story. There were
Speaker 1: multiple gunfights like that, and like they would send in
Speaker 1: like police and soldiers to the island and there would
Speaker 1: be like partisan sniping between the sides, and it just
Speaker 1: kept happening between these Americans what are essentially American and
Speaker 1: Italian gangs who are are smuggling eggs. Um. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like the meth trade, but sillier. As the Smithsonian Institute notes,
Speaker 1: it does not get you high. I mean, if you
Speaker 1: eat only protein, you can get a little bit fucked up,
Speaker 1: but not in a pleasant way. No, were like a
Speaker 1: sick tier stomach way, feel good. Yeah. The egging season
Speaker 1: became increasingly violent. In the words of one commentator, the
Speaker 1: eight weeks between May and July evolved into an annual
Speaker 1: naval engagement known as the Egg War. Brawls broke out
Speaker 1: constantly between rival gangs, ranging in brutality, from threats and
Speaker 1: shell throwings to stabbings and shootouts. The fighting was not
Speaker 1: confined to the islands. Boats transporting eggs were hijacked regularly.
Speaker 1: According to the San Francisco Examiner, there were many a
Speaker 1: bitter and fatal encounter between larger parties of rival claimants
Speaker 1: in boats mounting small cannons. Back in San Francisco, the
Speaker 1: courts were barraged by a dizzy variety of egg related
Speaker 1: cases that included charges of petite larceny, trespassing, property damage,
Speaker 1: resisting an officer, and manslaughter. So cannons have entered into it.
Speaker 1: Just well, we got lawyers involved, we got the press involved.
Speaker 1: Now that. Now we've got arms dealers involved, gun runners
Speaker 1: running guns to the eggmen. So they got they got raffles,
Speaker 1: need a cannon. Oh yeah, those rifles aren't gonna work
Speaker 1: if they brought cops into the matter. Just a cannon
Speaker 1: is what you guys need. And I got a cannon, okay.
Speaker 1: So it all came to a head. Finally, in the
Speaker 1: spring of eighteen sixty three, a man named David Batch
Speaker 1: Elder managed to gather together an army of Italian fishermen.
Speaker 1: They made several attempts at an aquatic landing on the island,
Speaker 1: each time the United States Revenue Cutter Service the Coastguard,
Speaker 1: before the Coastguard caught them and took their guns. But
Speaker 1: eventually batch Elder and his comrade succeeded in sneaking around
Speaker 1: the cutter Service and landing on the island. On the
Speaker 1: evening of June three, eighteen sixty three, the fishermen sailed
Speaker 1: out to the Fara Loans again and were met by
Speaker 1: a group of armed Egg Company men. Isaac Harrington, the
Speaker 1: company's foreman, warned the men who were trying to land
Speaker 1: that they would do so at their peril. In return,
Speaker 1: batch Elder shouted that they would come in spite of
Speaker 1: hell um. And then things got a little bit less dramatic,
Speaker 1: and the Italians got drunk on their boats all night
Speaker 1: and spent the evening making fun of the people on
Speaker 1: the shore. But then at dawn, but hungover Italian soldiers
Speaker 1: attempted another landing. So these these hungover Italians try to
Speaker 1: land again after making fun of the Egg Company all night,
Speaker 1: and the employees of the Egg Company opened fire for
Speaker 1: the next twenty minutes. There's just like a massive gun
Speaker 1: battle which includes cannons on both sides. By the time
Speaker 1: the Italians retreat, one egg company man is dead and
Speaker 1: five boatmen are wounded, one of whom was shot through
Speaker 1: the throat and died a little bit later. So pretty
Speaker 1: sizeable gunfight there. Now. This finally forced the government to
Speaker 1: take action, not by banning egging, but by officially banning
Speaker 1: everybody besides the Pacific Egg Company from egging. Unfortunately, for
Speaker 1: a reason that cannot be explained, the company found fewer
Speaker 1: and fewer eggs on the island every single year. There
Speaker 1: were fewer birds too, and again no possible explanation as
Speaker 1: to why this might have been happened. In true capitalistic fashion,
Speaker 1: the egg company decided to make up for lost profits
Speaker 1: by butchering hundreds and hundreds of seals and lions in
Speaker 1: order to turn them into oil, because again, there's not
Speaker 1: as many eggs anymore. Now this process the clubs. We
Speaker 1: got clubs, we were using them to hit birds, but
Speaker 1: now the birds are gone. At the birds they don't
Speaker 1: want to come around anymore. Yes, uh, capitalism, I felt
Speaker 1: that in my chest. So they start butchering sea lions
Speaker 1: and seals, and the process of turning them into oil
Speaker 1: is like it's a nightmare. You basically like cut off
Speaker 1: their fat and put them in these huge pots. So
Speaker 1: you've got these giant pots of like boiling animal fat.
Speaker 1: And since there's no money in cleaning up the rest,
Speaker 1: they would just leave the putrefying carcasses of the sea
Speaker 1: lions and the seals to rot next to these giant,
Speaker 1: like bubbling cauldrons of fucking poison fat. The once pristine
Speaker 1: wilderness of the Fara Loans were was filled with a
Speaker 1: permanent haze of at smog and the stink of rotting
Speaker 1: flesh permeated everything. So they just turning the more door
Speaker 1: like they we've won the egg war. Let's ruin the islands. God, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's good stuff. It is. It is, like, hey, that's
Speaker 1: I think that's humanity right there. Yeah. Yeah. There's a
Speaker 1: lot to say about climate change in this, including the
Speaker 1: fact that after the company wins and begin committing genocide
Speaker 1: against a second species the they also start to attack
Speaker 1: the lighthouse operators again. Um. For one thing, the company
Speaker 1: wanted to restrict the lighthouse operators and their families from
Speaker 1: taking eggs for their personal use, even though the ships
Speaker 1: that brought them food would often be late by weeks
Speaker 1: due to bad weather, and sometimes they needed to hunt
Speaker 1: the local birds in order to survive. They also tried
Speaker 1: to force the lighthouse to destroy its fog horn, which
Speaker 1: existed purely to save the lives of boats filled with people.
Speaker 1: But the fog horns scared the birds, so they were like,
Speaker 1: you gotta shut that thing off. Just in eighteen eighty
Speaker 1: one company men assaulted another lighthouse keeper for harvesting eggs,
Speaker 1: and in May of that year, the fucking army had
Speaker 1: to forcibly evict the egg company from the far Lands islands.
Speaker 1: So I just can you imagine being the governor and
Speaker 1: you just keep getting this this one island. You're like, God, damn,
Speaker 1: these egg guys have to send the army out over eggs.
Speaker 1: Army is this? Uh? And that happens, by the way,
Speaker 1: that big gun battle between those two sides occurs like
Speaker 1: the same time that Gettysburg is happening. It's just easily
Speaker 1: a much more important battle. I think we can all agree. Well,
Speaker 1: that just sounds like, oh, you guys are doing fighting.
Speaker 1: We'll do fighting. You Gettysburg cowards out would really go
Speaker 1: We'll do well, you know, you guys fighting over freedom.
Speaker 1: We got eggs doing eggs. This is a West coast.
Speaker 1: That is a West coast versus East coast. They like
Speaker 1: they're fighting. It's like racism and slavery back there. You're like,
Speaker 1: where are you guys? Eggs Yep, a slightly higher profit margin.
Speaker 1: So the egg war finally ends after like literally thirty
Speaker 1: years of escalating violence. Um and in part because they
Speaker 1: finally established chicken farms in Pedaluma and suddenly eggs every
Speaker 1: every direction around San Francisco is farms, but they weren't yet.
Speaker 1: It's I like, dude, that just immediately we started a brothel.
Speaker 1: He's like, man, I'm not going back to that island
Speaker 1: that I Am done with eggs all gonna be I mean,
Speaker 1: eggs will still be involved, but in a lesser direct way. Yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: so uh yeah. Mirror eggs became much less common over
Speaker 1: the years because after four decades of taking all of
Speaker 1: of not just smashing of like not just taking eggs,
Speaker 1: but smashing all of the eggs on the island so
Speaker 1: that they would lay more eggs and than taking all
Speaker 1: of those the bird. The mirror population on the Phara
Speaker 1: Loans dropped from an estimated four hundred thousand to sixty
Speaker 1: thousand um because you know, yeah, it was a good
Speaker 1: old fashioned genocide. So you could say there's a degree
Speaker 1: to which the industry kind of destroyed itself because it
Speaker 1: was greedy, uh, and made the environment that sustained it
Speaker 1: no longer possible. Oh yeah, I guess there's no. No,
Speaker 1: it's a thing that has never happened again and never
Speaker 1: will happen again. Probably not happening right now. There's no
Speaker 1: signs of that happening now. No, why would we? Why
Speaker 1: would we? Why would we do the same thing repeatedly, uh,
Speaker 1: thousands of times until we all die? That doesn't sound
Speaker 1: like us. What if we just made seeds that only
Speaker 1: worked once? Well, Billy, that's the war that was kind
Speaker 1: of Yeah, it was. It was a hoot of one.
Speaker 1: And I think it's like one of those where it's
Speaker 1: like I don't think there's a bad guy and I
Speaker 1: mean there's a good guy or a bad guy on
Speaker 1: that one. Yeah, I think the good guy is the
Speaker 1: guy who made that brothel on one. Yes, he was,
Speaker 1: and he told some people about the reck. How did
Speaker 1: you get this brothel? He's like, Oh, there's an egg
Speaker 1: island out there. I wouldn't go out there though, when
Speaker 1: people are like good, He's like, I told you guys
Speaker 1: not to go out there. Yeah. Um, it's a it's
Speaker 1: a it's a hoot of a tale. Um. I should
Speaker 1: note here that I found out after I had finished
Speaker 1: researching and started writing that this is another episode that
Speaker 1: I think the Dollar beat me too, So like, to
Speaker 1: hell with you, Dave, I'm gonna I'll get my revenge.
Speaker 1: I wasn't gonna not do it because it was election
Speaker 1: week when I wrote this, and I don't have that
Speaker 1: much time to research stuff. But yeah, it's okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it just happens. It's the Internet anyway, and they're both talented,
Speaker 1: so we did. Yeah. Um, so you know, listen to
Speaker 1: listen to both listen to both episodes, and then send
Speaker 1: Dave and I both extensive essays taking apart who did
Speaker 1: better at which portions? Um, because we I guarantee you
Speaker 1: will both read them and take them to heart. We'll
Speaker 1: just be like the press. We'll just sit over here
Speaker 1: and we'll be like, you guys should fight with guns.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be over here. That's what will let you
Speaker 1: guys fight. Yeah, I think I think Dave and I
Speaker 1: are going to do a joust over. I guess who
Speaker 1: has the right to talk about Henry Kissinger. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Exhausting project that should be I think that's its forces
Speaker 1: should be joined. Yeah, I've talked to actually we've yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we've talked a little bit about that idea. It's just
Speaker 1: a matter of people's schedules. And also, like, do you
Speaker 1: have any idea how hard it is to write an
Speaker 1: actual episode about Henry Kissinger? And it's it's when you
Speaker 1: said it too, was like I got excited, and then
Speaker 1: you get a little scared too, because you're like, he's
Speaker 1: still alive. I don't know. I've read to two books already,
Speaker 1: and I think I'm gonna need to read two more
Speaker 1: to be able to like realistically write a nice, succinct,
Speaker 1: four part episode about the man. He's still doing stuff.
Speaker 1: He's never going to stop. He's always he should be dead, Yes,
Speaker 1: he should. If you take nothing else out of this
Speaker 1: episode about eggs, it's that Henry Kissinger ought to be dead.
Speaker 1: He may be eating those island eggs. That's a secret.
Speaker 1: I think he eats islands and hope, Well, Billy, I'm
Speaker 1: a fan of him. If he's listening, I'm yeah, same here, Bill,
Speaker 1: you got anything you want a pluggety pluggety plug. I
Speaker 1: wasn't bored too. That was really fun. Um see if
Speaker 1: you can find me, uh and oh, I have a
Speaker 1: cannabis podcast. We interview the growers and the movers and
Speaker 1: shakers in that make up communities. Were season two. We're
Speaker 1: in Humboldt County right now, and they have opened our doors,
Speaker 1: I mean their arms in their doors to us in
Speaker 1: a way that we didn't foresee. So this season keeps
Speaker 1: getting longer. It's really cool. Now, Billy, one last question
Speaker 1: before we go out. If you were a strain of
Speaker 1: cannabis number one sativa or indica and number or hybrid
Speaker 1: I guess, and number two, what's going to be the
Speaker 1: ratio of th HC to cb D and the Billy
Speaker 1: Wayne Davis. Well, here's the thing, oh h they're having
Speaker 1: because of you know, legality, it's tough to get a strain.
Speaker 1: There's some strains that have the higher C B d UM.
Speaker 1: It's just hard to find because what happens. And this
Speaker 1: is just from knowing, this is from doing this podcast,
Speaker 1: and I know just a smidge of the knowledge. But
Speaker 1: because of capitalism, Uh, they bread a bunch of ships
Speaker 1: and ruined some of the strains, but jacking up the
Speaker 1: THHC because you don't because you've got so many different
Speaker 1: cannabinoid receptors that they're just now learning about. So my
Speaker 1: strain that I always go to is like I like
Speaker 1: a sativa. That's like it's it's one of the purest
Speaker 1: one is jack her air. Now most things are a
Speaker 1: hybrid now um because they've cross bread so much stuff
Speaker 1: that it's hard to find just a pure sativa or
Speaker 1: a pure endica. And again it's capitalism. And then you know,
Speaker 1: and some of the old land races are harder to
Speaker 1: grow because of capitalism. There's just no money in it. Well, Billy,
Speaker 1: I guess that's the same. I mean no, it was
Speaker 1: kind of the same story that I just told you,
Speaker 1: but with marijuana and instead of eggs and more gunfights,
Speaker 1: but they're less publicized. Are talking? Well, we didn't answer
Speaker 1: this question. What if you were a type of egg?
Speaker 1: What type of egg would you be? Like? How would
Speaker 1: you would you be? Oh? Fucking ostrich? Hell? Yeah, go bigger,
Speaker 1: go home, Billy. I like duck eggs. Yeah, And also
Speaker 1: I just had some dullard duck eggs. Always ordered duck
Speaker 1: if it's on the menu, and duck fat. Yeah. Recently,
Speaker 1: we went out and went mushrooming and picked a bunch
Speaker 1: of chantrells in the in the deep dark woods, and
Speaker 1: then had a fucking My friends brought over a duck
Speaker 1: they'd slaughtered, and we had and I kept the duck fat.
Speaker 1: So I was just every day for like the next week,
Speaker 1: I was just throwing duck fat, and every goddamn thing
Speaker 1: I made sounds awesome. Duck ship, duck fats amazing. Well,
Speaker 1: everybody eats some fucking duck fat. Destroy capitalism or at
Speaker 1: least eggs. I don't know. The episodes over