Salt (42 page)

When John Hayes settled in Petite Anse in 1791, salt had been made there for a very long time. In a slight variation on the Saliesde-Béarn and Lüneburg pig-in-the-marsh story, Hayes was supposedly hunting deer, not boar, and it was he, not his prey, who discovered the brine, when he stopped to drink some water.

Soon after Hayes found this natural brine spring in Petite Anse, a man named Jesse McCaul bought nineteen acres there and began making salt. He dug several wells, and at a depth of three to six inches, he found pottery fragments. Later it would be discovered that these fragments were spread over a five-acre area, the site of a prehistoric saltworks in the manner of the early Romans, where brine was evaporated in pottery and then the pots were broken. Piles of ancient shards are occasionally still found on the island. Archaeologists believe these saltworks are 1,000 years old. But recently a mound was found on the island in a place called Banana Bayou that was carbon-dated to about 2500
B.C.
, which would make it one of the oldest man-made structures ever found in the United States.

Neither Hayes nor McCaul did much with the salt of Petite Anse, the island in the swamp with invisible shores. McCaul tried, digging several wells, but failing to make a profit, he abandoned the project. When the War of 1812 drove salt prices up, sending entrepreneurs looking for brine, a man named John Marsh turned Petite Anse into a profitable saltworks.

In 1841, New Orleans was the third largest city in the United States, a leading port, and an obvious destination for Edmund McIlhenny of Maryland, seeking his fortune in banking. In Creole New Orleans, dominated by the descendants of French and Spanish settlers, people like McIlhenny were immigrants called “Americans.” Working his way up from bookkeeper in this cosmopolitan city, already famous for its local cuisine and foreign restaurants, by 1857 McIlhenny had five banks in Louisiana and was a wealthy man enjoying the luxuries of his adopted metropolis. He befriended a Baton Rouge judge, Daniel Dudley Avery, who was only five years older. Avery had married a Marsh and come into possession of Petite Anse, which he used as a sugar plantation.

In 1859, to the shock of some, the middle-aged McIlhenny married his friend’s young daughter, Mary Eliza Avery. Wishing to escape the war and continue their sumptuous Louisiana lives, both the McIlhenny and Avery families moved to the sheltering dark bayous of Petite Anse. There they might have lived out the war quietly, had it not been for the discovery that Thomassy, the French geologist, had been right.

Edmund McIlhenny.
McIlhenny Company, Avery Island, Louisiana

On May 4, 1862, a slave at the bottom of a sixteen-foot hole, while attempting to clean and deepen a brine well, said he had hit a log that he could not remove. Upon investigation, it was found that the obstruction was solid salt. Petite Anse was sitting on a bed of solid, remarkably pure salt, estimated to be about forty feet deep, with 7 million tons of salt. Generations later, it would be realized that this estimate had been far too modest.

The discovery, although it was exactly what Thomassy had predicted, came as a great surprise. The salt was especially valuable because it was much purer and drier than most rock salt. It was extremely hard and had to be blasted with dynamite, which yielded great jagged chunks of white crystal. To transport the salt, the two families built a two-mile-long causeway across the bayou and swampland to the town of New Iberia.

Suddenly the genteel McIlhennys and Averys found themselves sitting on a strategic war target. They began producing salt for the South. Judge Avery was flooded with offers for contracts. Governor Pettus wrote fellow Mississippian Jefferson Davis that there was at Petite Anse “salt for all the Confederacy.” Newspapers ran reports of similar salt finds, but most were false rumors.

Union forces made several attempts to take Petite Anse, and the families fled to Texas. In January 1863, the Union sent a steamer and two gunboats to Vermilion Bay, two miles from the island salt-works. That night, the wind shifted to the north and drove the water from the bayou, and by morning the two gunboats were aground in mud, where they remained stuck for the next twenty days. But on April 17, 1863, a Union colonel took his troops south of New Iberia and attacked the saltworks, destroying eighteen buildings with their steam engines, boiling and mining equipment, as well as 600 barrels of urgently needed salt that was about to be shipped throughout the Confederacy.

The Union troops were surprised at how easily they took this major saltworks and interpreted the inability of the Confederates to defend this strategic point as a sign that the South was crumbling.

But some of the bloodiest battles of the war were yet to come. With the help of liberated slaves, the Union continued to cripple the southern war effort by attacking saltworks—Darien, Georgia, and Back Bay, Virginia, in September, and Bear Inlet, North Carolina, on Christmas Day. The following year, it destroyed saltworks at Goose Creek, Florida; Masonborough Inlet, North Carolina; Cane Patch, South Carolina; Tampa and Rocky Point, on Tampa Bay; and Salt House Point, Alabama. On December 10, the day Sherman completed his march of destruction through Georgia, troops under George Stoneman marched from Knoxville, Tennessee, with the objective of destroying saltworks and supply depots in eastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia. On December 20, Stoneman’s troops destroyed the saltworks at Saltville, Virginia. On February 1, 1865, one last time, the Union navy destroyed the saltworks in St. Andrews Bay on the Florida panhandle.

Even civil wars produce occasional acts of kindness. Eighteen days after the final attack on St. Andrews Bay, General Oliver Otis Howard, having taken Columbia, South Carolina, ordered that before the storehouses were destroyed, the Columbia hospital was to be furnished with as much salt as it needed and that more salt be saved for the poor who had been burned out of their homes.

TO KEEP MEAT FROM SPOILING IN SUMMER

Eat it early in the Spring.—Confederate States Almanac,
Macon, Georgia, 1865

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Red Salt

A
FTER THE WAR
ended, with more than 1 million Americans dead, Dudley Avery returned to Petite Anse. He had fought for the Confederacy and survived such battles as Shiloh, Tennessee, where 1,723 Confederates and 1,754 Union soldiers were killed in a standoff. Not only did Judge Avery’s son survive, but the Judge’s finances remained sound enough that he could buy the remaining third of the 2,200-acre island, and Petite Anse became Avery Island, a single-family property for the first time in history.

Edmund McIlhenny and his wife returned from Texas, where he had offered his business skills in the service of the Confederate army’s commissary and paymaster’s office. Before he had fled, McIlhenny had earned a considerable fortune from salt. But he had accepted payment in Confederate bills. Knowing that the salt prices on which he had earned this mountain of useless money were not going to come again, he went to New Orleans in search of new business opportunities.

Capsicum frutescens

Postwar New Orleans offered few opportunities for an out-of-work banker. At this critical moment, McIlhenny’s story becomes uncertain because he left no record of the events. All that remains are the recollections of various relatives who had been told parts of the story. Apparently, a man came up to McIlhenny on the street. In one version he was an old veteran of the 1846 Mexican-American War. In a more probable version, he was a Confederate veteran who had fled to Mexico to avoid being taken by the Union army. This man, whose name was Gleason, was very excited about a certain Mexican seasoning, small red chili peppers.

In 1866, unsuccessful in resurrecting his business career, McIlhenny returned to Avery Island and resolved to become a gentlemen farmer, experimenting with hot peppers.

T
HE BURN OF
a pepper comes from a substance called capsaicin, which is a natural poison designed to protect the plant by making it inedible. But Mexicans, Caribbeans, and a great number of other people have not been deterred. Capsaicin develops in sunlight and certain soils. With peppers, as with wine grapes, the place where they are grown makes all the difference. The peppers that Edmund McIlhenny brought home, subsequently labeled
Capsicum frutescens,
when grown on the fertile soil on the edges of Avery Island, were extremely hot.

The idea of a pepper sauce was not new to southern Louisiana. The Cajuns, French refugees who fled Nova Scotia after it fell to the British in the eighteenth century, had settled along the bayous in the Avery Island area, and they, like the Creoles of New Orleans, had learned to use hot peppers brought by the Caribbean and Mexican people who came through the port. Before the Civil War, New Orleans cooks dried hot peppers and marinated them in sherry and vinegar. Red pepper and salt were already a common seasoning blend in Cajun cooking.