California: Agriculture and Canning

During the gold rush, the main problem confronting early agriculture in northern California was how to grow food fast enough to meet the demands of miners and immigrants. Supplying the growing population was a difficult task. Flour and canned goods had to be shipped from the East Coast, unloaded at Panama, carted over the isthmus, reloaded onto ships on the Pacific side, and then shipped north to San Francisco. The only alternative was the arduous and much longer trip around the tip of South America. This was an expensive venture, and it was not financially feasible for many products to be shipped this way. Beans and dried fruits were imported from Chile and yams from the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). Turtle eggs and seagull eggs from the Farallon Islands in the Pacific off the San Francisco coast were collected and sold. Hunters supplied snipes, plover, cranes, ducks, curlews, and other wildfowl, as well as elks, black-tailed deer, and grizzly bears. Salmon and salmon trout were caught in California rivers. Vegetables were extremely hard to obtain during the first years and their price extremely high (a one-and-one-half-acre vegetable plot was estimated by one source to generate the equivalent of eighteen thousand dollars in income). As a result, scurvy and other diseases caused serious problems for the miners.