Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [53]
So Twain’s fire probably left the trees of the timber claim mostly untouched, even if the ground was charred and smoking. Still, cutting the wood down, then milling and transporting it, was harder than Twain had guessed, and he decided to return to Nevada and take up something he was sure would be easier: milling quartz to find trace amounts of silver. After a week he asked his employer for a raise: “He said he was paying me ten dollars a week, and thought it a good round sum. How much did I want? I said about four hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was about all I could reasonably ask, considering the hard times.” That disappointment (and several prospecting failures) would lead to something momentous: his first regular writing job, at the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.
But for now that was in the future. Twain and Kinney packed up their surviving belongings, rowed across a wide cove, and began trudging back to Carson City. On the way to Washoe, Twain had dropped a leaf on either side of the Continental Divide, imagining the eastern-most going on a long, familiar journey, past the wharves of St. Louis and the canefields of Louisiana and finally into “the bosom of the tropic sea.” Now, as he walked toward the tumultuous silver towns, another divide lay behind him, behind Tahoe and its necklace of stream-cut mountains. A leaf dropped on the Sierras’ western face would drift through the ponderosa pines and sugar pines, the balsam and yellow firs, past the prospectors with their pans and rockers and sluices and wing dams, down and down and into a maze of wetland delta—until, at last, it reached a blue bay, and San Francisco, and the roar of the world-spanning Pacific.
Four
HEAVEN ON THE HALF SHELL
Oysters and Mussels in San Francisco
NORMA’S RESTAURANT, in New York’s Le Parker Meridien Hotel, will, if you desire, sell you an omelet for a thousand dollars. Possibly to distract from the actual price, Norma’s calls the omelet the Zillion Dollar Lobster Frittata. Now, expensive though lobster is, a thousand dollars will get you a mighty pile, even in New York, even at Norma’s (the standard lobster omelet costs twenty-eight bucks); the real cost of the Zillion Dollar Frittata is in the ten ounces of sevruga caviar cupped within the folded eggs.
Hangtown fry was the Zillion Dollar Frittata of Gold Rush California. Though it consisted of a humble-sounding scramble of eggs, bacon, and fried oysters, the real point of the fry was the price; all the stories about its invention stress the rarity and expense of the ingredients. One version says that a newly wealthy prospector strutted into a restaurant in Hangtown (now, disappointingly, called Placerville) and demanded the most expensive meal they could cook. Another claims that a condemned man ordered the rarest ingredients possible in order to delay his execution.
Today oysters are by far the most expensive part of a Hangtown fry. But in the early Gold Rush days, though oysters could be expensive in the mining country, the real cost was in the eggs. Oysters could be packed into barrels and hauled in wagons to the mining towns, but there just weren’t many chickens in California yet—certainly not nearly enough to meet the demand for fresh, homey eggs. Soon a thriving business in seabird eggs developed; eggers would sail across thirty miles of dangerous currents to the rocky spires of the Farallon Islands, where hundreds of thousands of murres nested. Robbing murres’ nests for eggs to sell in San Francisco and the mining towns was so profitable that rival egging parties had bloody fights over the best grounds,