Authors: Susan Casey
Sometimes the ejected gangs would hide in sea caves instead of sailing back to San Francisco, waiting for the authorities to leave so they could take another run at the eggs. One tenacious group steered their boat inside Great Murre Cave and remained there for two days, during which they were drizzled nonstop with guano. The ammonia buildup inside the cave killed several men. And the dangers didn’t stop once the cargo was collected; boats running eggs to the mainland were hijacked with regularity.
It was a larcenous, piratical world—and the four lighthouse keepers were stuck in the crossfire. On top of everything else, the pay was lousy. It occurred to the keepers that
they
should be the ones to profit from the egging. All along they’d dabbled in it, picking small batches of eggs, and taking kickbacks for discouraging outsiders from trying to land. But until 1858, when a new head keeper named Amos Clift arrived, none of the tenders had ever tried to make the Egg Company answer to them.
From the beginning of his tenure, Clift made it clear that he was only tolerating the Farallones so he could have at the eggs. He was an avid letter writer and corresponded to his brother Horace in a very fancy hand, with swirly
S
’s and florid
P
’s and calligraphic sweeps of a fountain pen. These letters are archived at the San Francisco Public Library, and as I read them I could see Clift in my mind’s eye, sitting at the lighthouse as the wind rattled against the door, bent over a sheet of paper with a long pen and an inkwell.
And a bottle of something 100-proof. In almost all of his letters, which tended to run several pages, Clift’s elegant penmanship starts off impressively and then morphs into a scrawling mess. As the handwriting degenerates, the complaints about his post become increasingly bitter, and his plans for total egg dominance grow larger in scale. In a letter to Horace, written on November 30, 1859, he outlined the situation: “Before I came here this Egg Company used to have things all their own way…but since I have been here things have taken a turn. And they have ascertained that I am not as easily bluffed…. I think it will now be settled and the Egg Company driven off the island. I shall not abate my efforts in the least. And if I succeed I may perhaps reap the benefits.” To Clift, this meant a chance at more cash than he would likely ever see again: “The egg season is the months of May and June, and the profits of the Company after all expenses are paid, is every year from five to six thousand dollars. Quite an item. And if this Island is Government property, I have a right to these eggs and I am bound to try and get it.” And after his fortune had been made, Clift added, “the Government might ‘kiss my foot’ and so up along.”
That same month, an article in San Francisco’s
Daily Alta
newspaper reported that the Egg Company was rampaging around Southeast Farallon, “breaking up the government roads” and that it had “drawn lines and pasted up notices warning the keepers not to pass them on pain of death.” As spring rolled around and the murres got down to business, the three other lighthouse keepers found themselves on the wrong side of a brutal power struggle. “We are now in the midst of the egg season,” Clift wrote, on June 14, 1860. “And the Egg Company and the Light Keepers are
at war.
” This was his last letter on record. Shortly thereafter, the
Daily Alta
reported that an armed group of eggers had tried to force the lighthouse keepers to leave the island. And then, in July, an assistant keeper was assaulted. U.S. Lighthouse Service records for that summer reveal that Amos Clift was removed from his post for “the undue…assumption to monopolize…the valuable privilege of collecting eggs.”
Even after Clift’s departure, the fighting continued. The ugly climax came on June 4, 1863, when three boats carrying a total of twenty-seven armed Italian fishermen sailed into Fisherman’s Bay and weighed anchor. The two egging parties spent the night drinking and yelling threats across the water at each other, and at daybreak the Italians got into rowboats and made for shore. As they neared North Landing, the Egg Company workers opened fire. After twenty minutes of shooting, an Egg Company man named Edward Perkins lay dead, several others had been hit with musket balls, and at least five in the rowboats were seriously wounded. The Italians retreated. “The Farallones War—Arrests for Murder,” read the
Daily Alta
’s headline two days later.
The government, realizing that official sanction was needed to bring to an end what was now referred to, wearily, as “the annual egg controversy,” finally granted the Egg Company the monopoly it had always sought. Egging, presumably more peaceable egging, continued until May 1881. But there was a more intractable problem: the eggs were becoming scarce. By now, some ten million eggs had been plucked and, after all, murres, like most seabirds, lay only one or two per year. No thought had ever been given to conserving the resource, and as a result the murre population was in free fall. By 1875, the seasonal haul had dropped from about a million eggs to less than a quarter that number. The price had dropped as well, down to twenty-six cents per dozen and falling fast, as chickens caught up to the rest of the mainland population.
In a characteristic burst of arrogance and hubris, the Egg Company diversified its operations at the Farallones, selling the rights to seal and sea lion rendering in 1879. The process of turning blubber into oil was a noxious one, involving furnaces and giant kettles and stinking piles of flayed carcasses. The stench overwhelmed the island dwellers; the billowing smoke was so sooty and greasy that it obscured the lighthouse beam. Once again, tensions between the company and the lighthouse staff flared. When eggers pushed a keeper named Henry Hess over an embankment and demanded that the lighthouse staff pay for any eggs they ate, government authorities decided they’d had enough.
On May 23, 1881, the cutter
Manzanita
sailed to the Farallones with a U.S. marshal and twenty-one soldiers and forcibly removed every last egger from the island. Only one man protested; he’d been the caretaker there for fourteen straight years and considered it his primary residence. The others were thrilled. As one of them wrote: “We steamed away from the windy rocks, the howling caverns, the seething waves, the frightful chasms…. Joyfully we bounded over the glassy waves, that grew beautiful as the Farallones faded in the misty distance, and, having been courteously escorted to the city dock, we were bidden farewell, and left to the diversions of the hour. Thus ended the last siege of the egg pickers of ‘Frisco.’”
WITH THE EGGERS BANISHED, THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPERS FACED ANOTHER
, equally daunting challenge: establishing a society of their own at this remote outpost. The merciless elements—wind, fog, corrosive seawater—conspired against anything man-made, and the humans on the island struggled to keep their toehold. Maintenance—and survival—was a full-time job. It hardly seemed like a place for families, but near the end of the nineteenth century, the Lighthouse Service began to encourage the keepers to bring out their wives and children. Perhaps it was simply too lonely for the men without them, or maybe, I thought, in the wake of Amos Clift, this was an attempt to keep the testosterone in check.
To accommodate family life, two identical houses—the two that stand today—were built on the marine terrace. They were duplexes, designed to hold a pair of families apiece. And so the women and children came, accepting an existence apart from the mainstream—no entertainment, no society, none of the conveniences or comforts of the city that lay only twenty-seven miles away. Their big excitement arrived every three months, weather permitting, when a supply boat called the
Madrono
pulled into Fisherman’s Bay to deliver mail, news, food, oil, supplies, medicine, the occasional toy.
By 1887, there were seventeen children living on Southeast Farallon. The four lighthouse families pooled what little money they had and set out to create a school. They outfitted the stone house, where the first lighthouse keepers had lived, with desks, books, and a blackboard. All that remained was to convince some young schoolteacher to ship out from happening San Francisco for less-than-competitive wages and settle into lunar isolation. The newspaper
San Francisco Call
pronounced the Farallones “the strangest school district in America.” Helpfully, the paper outlined a job description of sorts: “A teacher is wanted in this queer school district…. Here is a chance for anyone who can appreciate the everabiding majesty of the ocean and who covets a quiet place in which to read and reflect.” At least four teachers gave the situation a try—three women, one man—but an unfortunate pattern emerged. After their first shore leaves, the teachers all refused to return to the island, requesting that their belongings be sent back to San Francisco on the
Madron
o’s next trip.
For the keepers and their wives, providing an elementary-school education was the least of their worries. Where the conditions were hard for adults, they sometimes proved fatal for children. In 1890, a child died after falling into the frigid water at North Landing while being transferred to a boat. Two years later, a supply vessel capsized in the same place, nearly killing lighthouse keeper Thomas Winther’s wife and two children. And, on October 2, 1897, a six-year-old boy named Cecil Cain was washed off the landing and drowned. Cecil was just one of three Cain children who did not survive the Farallones; two brothers would succumb to diphtheria in 1901, as would a third island child. Several others barely escaped the same fate, and for weeks they lay in an improvised sick ward in the parlor of the easternmost house. While the lightkeepers blasted distress signals in the hope that a passing ship would provide medical assistance, brutal weather kept all traffic far from the islands. And when the supply ship finally arrived on its scheduled run and the diphtheria epidemic was made known to its crew, they refused to land, returning to San Francisco instead and dispatching a doctor and nurse.
The Cains’ cousins, the Beemans, suffered an even more dramatic and public tragedy. Royal Beeman, the eleven-year-old son of lighthouse keeper William Beeman, became gravely ill on Christmas Day, 1898. A southern storm was lashing the island—it simply wouldn’t let up. Days went by. Roy got worse. No ship had any hope of landing; none were expected. By December 29, with the weather still howling, the Beemans knew that if they didn’t get the boy to a hospital immediately, he was going to die.
They had one long-shot chance—there was a boat on the island. It wasn’t much, a fourteen-foot dory used for fishing and puttering around on the calmest days. Having seen how the water rages at the Farallones, even in fair conditions, I was astonished as I studied the old newspaper clippings to read how William Beeman, his wife, Wilhemina (Minnie), and assistant keeper Louis Engelbrecht laid Royal on a mattress in the bottom of the boat, wrapped him in oilskins, jury-rigged a sail, and set off into the storm in a desperate gamble to reach the San Francisco lightship, a floating beacon stationed at the Golden Gate’s entrance. This would mean crossing fourteen miles of open ocean, through one of the most daunting passages known to sailors, without navigational equipment or even a radio, in an overloaded rowboat, in a gale. Also along on the journey was Isabel Beeman, aged two months. She was still breast-feeding; for this reason Minnie felt she could not leave her behind.
Miraculously, eight hours after they set out, the lightship’s pilot boat rushed Royal to San Francisco. Mainlanders were captivated by the dramatic story, and Minnie Beeman became a local hero. On December 31, 1898, the
San Francisco Examiner
ran a front-page feature titled “She Proved That There’s No Love Like a Mother’s Love.” “There are two kinds of American women,” the story read. “The fluffy kind that frivols its way from the cradle to the grave, and the other kind, and Mrs. Beeman is one of the other kind…. She is strong and straight and active and clear-skinned, thanks to the sea air, and she has the calm eyes and earnest, sweet face that peace and quiet and contentment bring. She is the reverse of chatty, and very quietly and modestly she told the story of how with a two-months-old baby in her arms and the sick boy to watch over she put to sea in a fourteen-foot rowboat to save her boy’s life.”
Four days later, a smaller piece tucked into a corner of the
Examiner
delivered the sad epilogue: “Death Claims Royal Beeman: A Mother’s Love All Unavailing Against the Grim Reaper.” “The little colonel of the Farallon Islands is dead,” the paper reported. “All that medical skill could devise was done for the boy but the angel of death carried him off.” Once again, the paper emphasized the perils of the crossing. “I didn’t give much thought to the danger,” Minnie was quoted as saying. “Of course I knew it was dangerous—but we had to do it.” The way she and her husband saw it, there was never a choice: “He could die a dozen times before a vessel came to us.”
THE MILITARY ARRIVED NEXT. IN 1905, THE NAVAL RADIO HEADQUARTERS
was erected near East Landing; during World War I, the Farallon signal would be among the most powerful in the Pacific. A plan was hatched, in 1916, to turn the islands into a battlement that would become the first point of defense in the event of an enemy attack on San Francisco. “Mighty Guns on Islands to Sweep the Ocean for Miles Around,” announced the
Examiner
. A government report enthused over the possibilities for what could be done with Southeast Farallon: “Leveled off for military purposes it would provide a serviceable area of more than a hundred acres; in other words, ample space for an aviation field and for all the needs and equipments of a modern fortress.” And this makeover needn’t be confined to land: “The indented coastline invites the construction of harbors for submarines and torpedo craft.” I imagined the scene: bazooka rocket launchers tucked behind the cormorant blind; armed personnel carriers lumbering up Lighthouse Hill. The report ended with the recommendation that the entire place be ringed with sixteen-inch guns.