Salt: A World History

After the Treaty of Paris, “The United States was embargoed from any British goods, and British colonies were not permitted to engage in U.S. trade” (238). The price of salt was affected: “In Cape Cod, the price of salt rose from fifty cents a bushel to eight dollars” (238).

A carpenter named Ruben Sears invented a rolling roof that could be fit over the top of salt vats, which extended the time of year during which salt could be made: “By 1800, a small initial investment in a Cape Cod saltworks would quickly yield returns of 30 percent” (239). Salt-making became more popular as people watched others become wealthy. The fishing industry grew to meet the great supply of salt.

Americans begin producing salt in Onondaga, New York, in 1787. The Onondaga tribe had sided with the British during the war. In 1788, they negotiated a reservation agreement and gave co-ownership of a 10,000-acre piece of land to the Americans in exchange for 150 bushels of salt per year.

American mistrust of the British was strong after the Revolution. British troops still in America took every opportunity to stoke anti-American sentiment among the Indians, and “[i]n 1807 a British warship fired on the American frigate Chesapeake” (242), prompting Thomas Jefferson to ban US ships from foreign trade.

Surveys attempting to find a way to connect Lake Erie and the Hudson River via canal were underway by 1810. Many people were skeptical of the motives of the commission employed to perform the survey, feeling that it was simply a way to make money and take a vacation at the taxpayers’ expense, but the War of 1812 forced the issue. When the war ended, what would be called the Erie Canal began construction. Part of the plan to finance the canal was a salt tax, which was not contested or resented.

The 363-mile Erie Canal was completed in October of 1825. Cape Cod now lost some of its competitive advantage, given that cities along the canal began to build saltworks. Kurlansky writes that “[o]n the northern bank of the Great Kanawha river was a huge salt lick known as the Great Buffalo Lick” (249). When Daniel Boone went to Kentucky in 1769, he had Kanawha salt with him. By 1809, Kanawha was bordered by upwards of fifty saltworks.

After the war, the pork and beef industries experienced a boom. Kanawha salt was especially well suited to curing meat and had little competition in the Midwestern market. The city of Kanawha was in Virginia, where the slave-based tobacco industry was beginning to dwindle; slave owners began renting their slaves to salt producers.

The invention of steamboats would give Kanawha its first competitive test. Steamboats had enough power to go upstream, against a river’s strong current. Foreign salt was heavily taxed at the time, which created the chance of a monopoly among American salt makers. 

As the Civil War approached, it became apparent that the South’s lack of salt was a shortcoming. Americans were using more salt per capita than Europeans, and most of the imports when to the South: “As generals from George Washington to Napoleon discovered, war without salt is a desperate situation” (257). The Union army was better provisioned, but still had less salt than was desirable. Four days into the war, Abraham Lincoln poured enormous resources into blockading southern ports, and the blockades were enforced for the next four years: “When the war finally ended, and Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee sat down to talk, Lee said that his men had not eaten in two days and asked Grant for food” (260). Without salt, they had had no cured meat, and they cheered when Grant’s food wagons rolled in.

During the war, the Union’s army destroyed southern saltworks whenever it found them. Sometimes the boilers and kettles were so thick that naval crews had to fire on them from their warships to penetrate them. But saltworks were relatively easy to rebuild and were often functional again three months after being destroyed. Working conditions in the hastily-rebuilt saltworks were awful, and plantation owners often rented their slaves to the army to man them, sometimes laboring twenty-four hours a day. They were usually supervised by wounded veterans.

The salt shortage presented opportunities for crafty—or unscrupulous—speculators. A fortune could be made by buying up salt and then selling it at a higher price point: “Salt workers wanted to be paid in salt rather than money so they too could profit from the inflated prices” (265). Some merchants improvised to increase their stores, selling salt that was cut with ashes or other substances that were never meant to be ingested.

There were rumors of new ways to cure meat and fish that did not require salt, including the use of acid, sugar, saltpeter, wood ash, and oil, but none of them worked well: “Newspapers were constantly revealing alternative techniques for curing, most of which were ineffective” (268).

Prior to the war, a French geologist named 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” (270). He warned that the constant need to import salt could be turned into a means by which Louisiana could be dominated financially by exporters. Thomassy believed that a region of Louisiana called Petite Anse had beds of rock salt beneath it.

In 1791, John Hayes had found a brine spring in Petite Anse. A man named Jesse McCaul then bought nineteen acres there and began making salt. While digging wells, he found pottery fragments that archaeologists believe were at least 1,000 years old, the vestiges of old saltworks.

In 1862, a slave digging at the bottom of a hole in Petite Anse found a deposit of hard salt that he could not budge. It was the top of a bed of salt that contained over 7 million tons; this salt “was especially valuable because it was much purer and drier than most rock salt” (273). The bed was owned by Edmund McIlhenny and Dudley Avery. Both fled to Texas with their families when Union forces began attempting to take Petite Anse. 

Dudley Avery returned to Petite Anse after the war. He bought a third of the 2,200-acre island, and Petite Anse was renamed Avery Island. In 1866, Edmund McIlhenny went to New Orleans, where he met a man who told him about a Mexican seasoning: red chili peppers. Edmund went to Petite Anse and began to experiment with peppers. His peppers were very hot, which lent itself well to Cajun cooking. He produced a pepper sauce that he was selling by 1869. In 1870 he patented the recipe and it was called Tabasco Sauce. Edmund died in 1890, having made a respectable amount of money with his new product, but his family never regained the fortune of their salt years.

The prospecting craze began to take hold of the west as men traveled to hunt for gold and silver, but there was also salt to discover, with “[t]he most spectacular salt strike in North America […] found in a shrinking glacial lake in Utah” (280). When the Mormon prophet Brigham Young brought his followers west and settled Salt Lake City, the lake—and the 100-mile-long layer of salt that extended to the west of it—became a pivotal aspect of the Mormon economy.

California became a state in 1850. A dock worker named John Johnson became interested in a salt marsh at the southeast tip of the San Francisco Bay and decided to try to go into production. He made exorbitant profits for a time, but as more people came to California and Nevada in search of gold, more people also became interested in salt production, and soon he had competition that lowered the price of salt.

The end of the San Francisco Bay has pink-and-brown ponds whose color was a mystery in the 19th century. Charles Darwin saw the same color in the water off of Patagonia. The salt makers of the day believed the dark red color came from insects in the brine: “Only in modern times has it been understood that once the brine reaches a certain level of salinity, it turns red. In addition, tiny, barely visible shrimp, brine shrimp, live in the brine at this density” (286). The saltworks of the Bay filled with the small reddish creatures, who could then be sold as well.