The Gold Rush in Latvia Was Different

In a sudden burst, the crows took off leaving the dead pine-tree naked. Juris stopped the raised spade. Something had scared off the birds. His eyes were poking the darkness like needles going through a pillow, looking for something... someone. For several moments, he was frozen there, waiting, listening into the night. Slowly his sea hardened body came out of a standstill like an old locomotive leaving a station. The muscles regained life and the spade sank into the wet soil again. His movements were calculated and precise, but his mind was on fire like a dry haystack. He could not let them know he was searching here! Otherwise, they would come and take it! All the hard work would be for nothing! He was about to free-fall into the abyss of anxiety when it all was brushed away by a sharp cling. The spade had hit something. Gripped by a sudden fever, Juris started scooping the black soil as if he was underwater fighting for air, and every cut of the spade would bring him closer to the surface. There was nothing else on his mind now, but that one thing buried thousands of years ago right under his feet!

It was 1935 when it all started and it spread like butter on a red-hot pan. Our very own California Gold Rush! And just like 80 years prior on the other side of the world, people got excited. Just a tiny bit of excited though, not full-blown crazy like in the States. Well because, since it was Latvia, everything was more Latvian-sized, more moderate. In every sense. Hundreds of thousands of gold-seekers in California were just hundreds of diggers in Latvia. The nation-wide economy boost that drove forward the US was just a nudge for a few hundred locals. And if that has not disappointed you enough, the gold in Latvia was not even gold-coloured, but rather white. Really? Everything here paled in comparison? Even the gold itself? 

You see, the gold was not gold at all. Like so many other “golds” – the green gold, brown gold, black gold and, god knows, what other countless colours and shades that have been thrown at gold, it was just a metaphor. For something valuable. And this time that valuable something was seashells. 

So what’s the deal with seashells? Turns out, they are not just some extra crap you bring back from your Sunday at the beach to throw out the next day. They have a commercial value. Seashells can be eaten. By chicken. They are an essential additive to the chicken feed as they help with their ingestion grinding down bugs and grains. What’s even more – they are absolutely vital for laying hens because it’s a powerful source of calcium that strengthens eggshells. However, not every seashell does the trick. The ones that sea washes up on the coast are too hard. Birds can only eat them after they have been heat-processed. On the other hand, the shells that have been lying in the ground for thousands of years have already disintegrated to a degree that they are ready for consumption. The tricky part is that you can’t get this kind of seashells everywhere. Well, at least not in Latvia. So our poultry farmers had to import them from abroad. 

But not anymore! The seashell “ore” in Engure turned out to be a very rich one – half a meter thick. And if you got lucky, you could struck a particularly mouth-watering layer of even 2 meters. All this meant that now we could not only satisfy our own demand and cut out the imports, but also become seashell importers ourselves! The great news made a splash big enough to spark interest even among some business-minded people in the capital. Very soon the strip of land that separates the lake from the Baltic Sea – once the seabed and later lonely sand dunes where only wind played around – had turned into a busy hive with countless pyramids of excavated soil wherever you looked and people swarming around them like ants taking interest in a piece of a dropped candy. The men working day and night cutting through one meter of soil were not the Riga businessmen though. The entrepreneurs simply lacked the numbers for that. But they did not lack the business acumen – they decided to hire others to do the hard part. These others were not some famous treasure hunters or bored kids looking for a summer adventure. Most of the diggers were fishermen from the nearby villages. Their meagre income on the sea was no match for the fortune off the sea. And it got even juicier once they abandoned their employers to go on a treasure hunt on their own. 

Drying seashells

Once liberated from the contracts, they got quite masterful at this craft. If everything else in this story seems far from the scene of the famed California gold hunters, then one thing was as close as hand to a glove – their way of work and attention to detail. Like the gold hunters, the fishermen dried and sieved day and night. Like the gold hunters, they went the extra mile too. In order to make the process faster, the fishermen invented a completely new type of sieve to be able to sieve the wet sand without drying it. This sand-breaking invention was based on a rotating cylinder and even had wheels for mobility. The construction was so clever that it beat some patented models. But the extra mile did not end there. The fishermen stepped up their game by jointly organizing purchase and delivery of seashells to Riga, similar to how they used to get their fishery products to the big market.

The revolutionary sieve invented by the fishermen

So was the Engure Seashell Rush a big deal? It wasn’t. No writers spent sleepless nights on seashell hunting stories trying to come up with a name for the romantic protagonist. No timeless poems were written, no commemorative coins minted. It did not change anything for Latvia. But it made headlines and some fishermen made some extra cash. Digging up seashells was certainly a better way to earn the living than pulling in half-empty nets on the sea. It also beat the pay of most blue-collar jobs at the time. Being successful at hunting the “white gold”, meant earning 8-10 lats a day. For comparison, the average worker’s wage in Latvia back then was around 5 lats a day. And in the end, the fishermen did not really change their line of work. They were still there with the sea. Who cares that the tool had changed – they were still living off the gifts from the sea!