In my article, “California’s Vanishing Lakes and the Hunger of the Mines”, I made frequent reference to the one dollar eggs of the Gold Rush, a staple of 49’er anecdotes and 19th century California culinary history. In fact, while doing the research for what would turn into a 5,000-word article, I found more information about eggs and poultry than I could use in a single piece. I put much of this research aside for a later project, although, one question kept sticking in my mind:

Why hadn’t a sustainable poultry industry appeared in California earlier than 1880?

I cite 1880, three decades after the Gold Rush, because that’s when Petaluma, the self-proclaimed “Egg Capital of the World”, really got going, taking off after Canadian immigrant Lyman Byce invented the temperature-controlled incubator in 1879.

This evident slowness to capitalize on the demand for eggs and chickens is odd, because everyone in the Western Hemisphere, from the King of Hawa’ii to the hacienderos of Chile, cashed in on shipping food to California, while local farmers in the Bay Area made fortunes on fresh vegetables. In comparison to poultry, the demand for beef and the consequent high prices for cattle (whose per head value jumped nearly 2000% between 1848 and 1849) gave rise to the empire of Henry Miller, the cattle baron who by 1878 controlled a million acres of western land and the water rights to most of the San Joaquin Valley.

For eggs and chickens, however, the commercial explosion happened a generation later, after the Gold Rush had ended.