Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  p.s. To make salt requires a little patience, as it is of slow formation.—John Commins, Charleston tannery, Charleston Mercury, June 11, 1862

  JUST BEFORE THE war began, French geologist M. J. Raymond Thomassy wrote that Louisiana, with its sugar and cotton, needed only to add salt production to its economy to become truly wealthy. He warned:

  Just as this element of future prosperity, this vital food, almost as necessary to their economic independence as gunpowder has been to the national independence, is furnished them exclusively by strangers, and is found in hands, which, in spite of all the dreams of perpetual peace, could easily some day become those of an enemy, and be made into an instrument, if not of domination, at least of famine and internal trouble.—Géologie Pratique de la Louisiane, 1860

  Thomassy had a theory, dismissed by most people in Louisiana at the time, that certain areas in the southern part of the state—in particular, a swampy area once known as Petite Anse, meaning “little harbor”—were sitting on beds of rock salt. Petite Anse was covered with ferns and long-rooted trees dripping in moss and broad-leafed growths so thick, only a skilled local would be able to see it was an island, a raised area of 2,200 acres, surrounded by dark waterways connecting bayous that ran into the Mississippi and the nearby Gulf of Mexico at a harbor called Vermilion Bay.

  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

  AFTER 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.

  THE 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.

  McIlhenny’s wife, Mary Eliza Avery, left a handwritten collection of recipes. Since she used her maiden name on the front page, the collection can be dated before 1859, the year of her marriage. In this collection of Cajun and southern Louisiana recipes, numerous dishes call for “red pepper and salt.”

  SHRIMP GUMBO

  Take a chicken and cut it up as for a fricassee. Put in your soup pot a spoon full of lard, when hot stir in two table spoons full of flour until it becomes a lite brown color; chop fine a large onion, and throw into the flour and lard with the chicken, stirring it until the chicken becomes slightly cooked. Add boiling water as [appropriate?] for a soup stirring well. Put in red pepper and salt to your taste, with a bunch of parsley and thyme (this preparation can be made of shrimp as well as chicken). Take 4 or 5 pints of shrimps and pour boiling water on them when they first come from market. Take the meat and the roe from the shells. Put the heads and shells into a stirr-pan, covering them with boiling water. Mash them so as to extract the juice—strain it and add the liquid to the soup. About 15 minutes before sending to table throw in the Shrimps. When ready to serve the soup, stir in a large tablespoonful of fresh Fillet and turn immediately into the tureen.—Mary Eliza Avery

  McIlhenny started his pepper sauce experiments with a variation on a sauerkraut recipe, using salt to ferment and extract juices from fresh crushed peppers. He quickly learned that he had to use the ripest peppers, picking each of the fruits of his annual plant at its optimum moment, when it was the brightest red. Stirring half a cup of his own Avery Island salt into each gallon, he aged the mixture, trying pickling jars and then pork barrels. He covered the lids with salt, which, when mixed with the juices of the fermenting peppers, sealed the barrel with a hard crust, by chance the same way the Chinese had been aging bean mash for soy sauce for thousands of years.

  Up to this point, it was an all-Avery-Island product, made with the island’s salt and peppers. In much of the South, the Caribbean, and Mexico, this would constitute a hot sauce. But the New Orleans tradition called for vinegar. McIlhenny strained the mash after it had aged for one month, and mixed it with French white wine vinegar. Then he put it in small cologne bottles, which he sealed with green wax. Each bottle came with a little sprinkler attachment that could be placed in the opening after the seal was broken.

  McIlhenny had a shed on Avery Island that he called his laboratory, a place with a sweet pungent smell that tickled the nostrils and made passersby want to sneeze. He would let his children leave school early to help him in the laboratory.

  In 1869, he produced 658 bottles and sold them for the handsome price of one dollar each wholesale in New Orleans and along the Gulf. People used the sauce as a seasoning in recipes that called for red pepper and salt. In 1870, he obtained a patent and named the concoction Petite Anse Sauce. His family was appalled that he was commercializing the historic family name for his eccentric project. So he settled for Tabasco sauce, after the Mexican state on the Gulf known for hot peppers, possibly even the area where the mysterious Gleason had obtained the original peppers.

  April 28, 1883, Harper’s Weekly drawing of salt mining under Avery Island.

  These were not lucrative years on Avery Island. An attempt to return to salt mining was a failure. By 1890, when Edmund McIlhenny died at age seventy-five, he had built a modest family business with Tabasco sauce, though nothing compared to the fortune he had earned in useless currency from two years of wartime salt.

  AFTER THE CIVIL War, while pepper sauce was looking more lucrative than salt in Louisiana, the American West offered dramatic opportunities. The West was rich in precious minerals and in salt, which was still used to purify ore, especially silver.

  The most spectacular salt strike in North America was found in a shrinking glacial lake in Utah. In the eighteenth century, the Spanish, while searching Utah for gold and silver, had been told of a huge salt lake. But they never saw it. The first record of anyone of European origin seeing the Great Salt Lake was in 1824 by James Bridger, a hunter, trapper, and explorer who was the prototype of the legendary “mountain man.”

  In Carthage, Illinois, in 1846, an angry mob assassinated Joseph Smith, the leader of a new religious group known as the Mormons. Brigham Young, who took Smith’s place, wanted to find a new land where Mormons could set up their own community away from the scrutiny of other Americans. In search of a place with natural resources, so that his isolated group could have economic self-sufficiency, he chose this Great Salt Lake in the middle of a desert that at the time belonged to Mexico. The lake had no outlet and contained highly concentrated brine. Next to it was one of the largest sebkhas ever found—a flat, thick, 100-mile-long layer of salt, which became a mainstay of the Mormon economy.

  Other salt beds were found in the West, but none so large or with as pure a concentration of sodium chloride as the Great Salt Lake area, the remains of a far larger 20,000-square-mile prehistoric lake geologists call Lake Bonneville.

  But the real need for salt lay farther west in Nevada and California, where silver was found. Relatively close to these silver strikes was one of the oldest saltworks in the American West.

  The southern end of San Francisco Bay is an insalubrious marshland with ideal conditions for salt making. Not only does it have more sun and less rainfall than San Francisco and the north bay, but it has wind to help with evaporation. The intensely hot air from central California comes over the mountains, and the temperature difference sucks in the cool sea breeze.

  This is why centuries and perhaps millennia before the California and Nevada silver strikes, a people called the Ohlone made annual pilgrimages to this area for salt making. At the water’s edge, the brine slowly evaporated in the sun and wind and left a thick layer of salt crystals. They had only to scrape it. The first European to notice the local salt making was a Spanish priest, José Danti, who explored the eastern side of the bay in 1795. In the southern end of the east bay, he found marshes with thick layers of salt, and “the natives,” he reported, told him that it provided salt for much of the area.

  The Spanish were content to le
t the Ohlone produce salt. They only wanted a share—a very large one—of the profits. To this end, they forced the Ohlone to turn all their salt over to the Spanish missionaries who controlled distribution. The only technology added by the Spanish was to drive stakes into the ground at the water’s edge to offer additional evaporation surfaces.

  In 1827, Jedidiah Smith, one of the earliest U.S. citizens to settle in California, arrived in San Francisco Bay and noted that “from the Southeast extremity of the bay extends south a considerable salt marsh from which great quantities of salt are annually collected and the quantity might perhaps be much increased. It belongs to Mission San Jose.”

  After California became a state in 1850, a San Francisco dockworker named John Johnson became interested in this salt area. At age thirty-two, his life story was already a popular legend. Supposedly, he had lost both parents in a fire from which he was saved as a baby in Hamburg, Germany. He went to sea at thirteen and was one of two hands that survived on a sinking ship by perching on top of the highest two masts for twelve hours. He was said to have been a sealer, a whaler, and a slaver—a ruthless adventurer who would try anything to make money. When he learned about the southeast part of the bay, he decided to try salt.

  At first, Johnson was able to charge extremely high prices and make tremendous profits. But this was the time of the gold rush, and adventurers from all over the world were coming to the Bay area looking for quick profits. Many followed Johnson to the south bay. Soon abundance caused the price to crash.