In the years leading up to the Farallon Egg War, Lincoln's Republican appointee to the Customs House in San Francisco was Ira Rankin, who in turn assigned Charles Melville Scammon to patrol the waters surrounding the profitable port of San Francisco. Scammon had a complicated history, to put it mildly, being first a killer and then a lover of marine mammals. Only after his death would his scholarly work be appreciated in full, and his role in the near extinction of gray whales thereby mitigated.
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But in the years that he was acting as a "boat cop", Scammon was largely distracted from policework...