Duarte's Twelve Dollars in Gold

In eighteen ninety-four, a Portuguese immigrant named Frank Duarte paid twelve dollars in gold for a saloon and the land around it in the town of Pescadero. He then ordered a barrel of whiskey from Santa Cruz. He was in business.

Twelve dollars in gold is the most precise number in the settlement history of this coast. It is also, in its specificity, a kind of portrait. Duarte was not a wealthy man buying a property. He was a working man buying an opportunity with everything he had, in a community of people like himself.

Pescadero in eighteen ninety-four was a Portuguese town. The families who had built it came from the Azores and from Madeira, from fishing villages on the Portuguese coast, arriving by way of the whaling ships that worked California waters from the eighteen fifties onward. When the whaling ended, many stayed. They planted artichokes and Brussels sprouts in the coastal soil. They kept fishing. They raised families and named streets.

Duarte's Tavern survived as a saloon, then a gathering place, then a restaurant that became regionally famous for two dishes: artichoke soup and cream of green chile, both products of the agricultural coast it has always served. Four generations of the Duarte family ran it. NPR told the story in two thousand and nine and described it as a hundred and fifteen years in operation. The family has been cooking the same soup since before the century turned.

The artichoke fields visible from this road are the same fields that put the artichokes in the soup.