Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (12 page)

Lackadaisical farming was a rational response to prevailing conditions.
America’s farmers were “the most negligent, ignorant set of men in the world,” according to one English visitor.
A more acute observer explained that the farmers had little incentive to improve their practices because “nature has been so profusely bountiful in bestowing the mediums of makeshift.” When makeshift solutions proved so effective—when pigs fed themselves and multiplied beyond reckoning—why trouble with fussy English practices?

The quality of the animals suffered from this hands-off approach, but the quantity did not. Reports from North America echoed those from the Caribbean two hundred years before.
One man in Virginia reported “infinite hogs in herds all over the woods.”
A planter in Georgia explained why farmers celebrated the pig: “They who begin only with a sow or two, in a few years are masters of fourscore, or a hundred head.”
Virginian Robert Beverley noted, “Hogs swarm like vermin upon the earth [and] find their own support in the woods, without any care of the owner.”

There was money in all those hogs.
In 1660, Samuel Maverick reported that “many thousand” cows and hogs were being killed “to supply Newfoundland, Barbados, Jamaica.” William Pynchon of Springfield, Massachusetts, also packed huge numbers of hogs to supply the lucrative West Indian market.
As a Barbados planter explained to John Winthrop, Caribbean plantation owners “had rather buy food at very dear rates than produce it by labor, so infinite is the profit of sugar works.” Cured meat
became New England’s second-most important commodity for export, trailing only fish.

Salt pork, along with salt cod, provided New England with what it so desperately needed: a cash crop for export. The region’s economy expanded quickly as a result of agricultural assets, and in this New England was not alone. By the second half of the eighteenth century, North America had become an economic powerhouse. While northern ports exported protein by the barrel, Virginia sold tobacco, and the Carolinas and Georgia grew cotton and rice.
On the eve of the American Revolution, colonists enjoyed the highest standard of living in the world.

Native Americans did not share in the prosperity. Not surprisingly, they resisted British attempts to “civilize” them. They rejected cows for the same reasons the British recommended them: the beasts demanded too much attention. (Indians also tended to be lactose intolerant, which rendered dairy cows unappealing.) They didn’t want to transform their lifestyle to meet British expectations; they wanted to maintain their own cultures. And they embraced only those aspects of European farming that conformed to their own ways. What they wanted was meat and fat, easily acquired. What they wanted, in other words, was pigs.

B
y the 1660s many Indian tribes both in New England and in the Chesapeake region had acquired hogs. A Choptico chief described a method of stock acquisition that was likely standard for Indians and Europeans alike: he came across a semiferal sow that had recently farrowed, killed her, and claimed the piglets as his own. Free-ranging pigs could be tracked and killed in the woods just like deer. In their villages, Indians threw scraps and garbage to pigs, much as they did with their dogs.

As deer and other wild animals began to disappear, pigs took their place—both in the North American wilderness and in the diets of Native Americans. Indians boiled hog carcasses
to render fat just as they had once done with bears, and they used lard in place of bear grease to oil their hair and skin. When deerskins for making moccasins were in short supply, pig hides sufficed.

Whereas colonists had encouraged Indians to keep cows, hoping the savages would adopt British culture, the Indians had embraced pigs in an attempt to preserve their own ways. In the 1650s an Indian sachem, accused of stealing an Englishman’s hogs, countered with the charge that the colonists had killed the Indians’ deer. The colonists told him that the hogs had been marked as private property by notches cut into their ears, while the deer had no similar marks.
“Tis true indeed, none of my deer are marked,” the chief responded, “and by that [you] may know them to be mine: and when you meet with any that are marked, you may do with them what you please; for they are none of mine.” The story, perhaps apocryphal, points to a truth: North America had originally belonged to the Indians, but the colonists had claimed it as their own.

In the early years, coexistence seemed possible between colonists and Indians. Just as they negotiated the trade of animal skins and military alliances, colonists and Indians found ways to use the land together. Colonists helped Indians build fences around their fields and sometimes paid restitution for damage done by English livestock to Indian crops. Many laws mandated that free-ranging pigs be yoked—fitted with a large wooden collar to prevent their crawling under fences—or ringed, with a holly sprig or metal wire twisted through the nose to discourage rooting. Even these laws, however, were ignored or weakly enforced.
Often pigs were simply pushed further away from colonial settlements; New Haven, for instance, exiled pigs to five miles outside town, where they could hurt only the crops of the Indians.

As the English population grew, colonists proved even less accommodating to their native neighbors. Rather than contenting themselves to live alongside Indians, the British tried to drive them away—and sometimes used pigs as a weapon in this effort. By 1663 Connecticut farmers were burning the fences around Indian cornfields so livestock could enter and destroy the crops. At about the same time, Maryland farmers earned the right, codified in a treaty, to shoot on sight any Indian caught stealing cows or pigs. Accusations that Indians had stolen livestock provided a pretext for attacks on native villages.

Animals proved capable of forcing Indians off the land all by themselves. Livestock served as the vanguard of empire: the free-range husbandry practiced by settlers expanded the colonial footprint because a constellation of hungry animals orbited around each settlement. Pigs ravaged Indian crops in the field. They dug up the baskets of grain Indians buried for future use. They trampled and ate reeds and grasses used for weaving. They ate the nuts and berries that Indians gathered for their own food.
They devoured tuckahoe, a starchy root that Indians counted on when the corn crop failed. Along the coast, pigs despoiled oyster beds and clam banks.
Roger Williams observed that pigs lingered near the ocean shore to “watch the low water (as the Indian women do)” and then rushed out onto the mud flats to “dig and root” for clams. Cotton Mather, addressing the theory that Indians might be descendants of the lost tribe of Israel, noted that Indians had “a great unkindness for our swine,” the result perhaps of a dim cultural memory of the Levitical pork prohibition.
A more likely reason Indians disliked swine, Mather admitted, was the animals’ tendency to “devour the clams which are a dainty with them.”

Native Americans initially had embraced the pig because it substituted for disappearing deer and bears and offered a
chance at preserving some semblance of their way of life. At heart, though, the pig was their enemy: it helped destroy the landscape they relied on for sustenance.

Indians quickly came to understand this. “Our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkeys, and our coves full of fish and fowl,” a Narragansett sachem named Miantonomi explained in 1641.
“But these English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved.”
Mattagund, an Indian leader in Maryland, made a similar plea: “You come too near us to live & drive us from place to place,” he wrote to the British in 1666. “We can fly no farther. Let us know where to live & how to be secured for the future from the hogs & cattle.”

There was no place to flee. European settlers moved west with their livestock, driving native peoples from their land and claiming new territory for the American empire. Cows became the iconic animal of the American West, but in truth they arrived late to the scene. As the West was being won, it was pigs that gave pioneers the edge.

ELEVEN

“The Benevolent Tyranny of the Pig”

I
n March 1854 an Indian superintendent named Joel Palmer grew concerned about the Calapooya tribe living in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. The Indians’ “principal means of subsistence,” he wrote, was a type of marsh lily with “nutritious roots, once produced abundantly in the area.”
But European settlers had arrived with livestock, and because of the “increase in swine,” which foraged for food in the marshes, the roots had disappeared. As a result, the Indians faced starvation.

And so it went from coast to coast. Britain had controlled all North American territory east of the Mississippi River since 1763, but for the rest of the colonial era, the Crown had banned settlers from crossing the Appalachian Mountains. After the Revolutionary War, citizens of the new United States celebrated their independence by striking out for the West. Over the next
century, backwoods farmers cleared and settled far more land than the Germanic peoples of northern Europe had managed in a millennium.
The American settlers did so using what geographer Terry Jordan-Bychkov has called “the four essential elements of backwoods farming”: corn, axes, fire, and pigs.

I
n 1823 New England traveler Timothy Dwight defined pioneers as those who “begin the cultivation of the wilderness”: they “cut down trees, build log-houses, lay open forested grounds to cultivation, and prepare the way for those who come after them,” he explained. They practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, clearing fields with axes and fire and then planting corn amid the stumps. They ate corn as bread or drank it as moonshine. They hunted and trapped deer and smaller animals, fished in streams, and gathered wild nuts, berries, and greens. And they kept pigs by the dozen.

The settlers’ stock-herding practices determined many of their other living arrangements. They lived not in villages but in homesteads scattered through the forest.
One German observer noted in the 1780s that the likelihood of these settlers moving further west was “always increased by the preaching of the gospel.” But in general they fled not so much from preachers as from people in general. To live off the land, they required a population density of two or fewer people per square mile. More than that cut into their hunting grounds and the rangeland for their pigs.

Early nineteenth-century travel diaries trace the spread of the pig across America.
“Of all the domestic animals, hogs are the most numerous,” François André Michaux reported from Kentucky in 1802.
A traveler in Ohio in 1817 reported that pork could be had “in any quantity you please” because hogs “
run in the woods in great droves.” In Illinois a year later, an English visitor named Elias Pym Fordham commented on the fecundity of both humans and swine: “Every log cabin is swarming with half-naked children. Boys of 18 build huts, marry, and raise hogs and children at about the same expense.” The children provided free farm labor; the pigs, free meat to sell at market.
Fordham encouraged Englishmen to seek their fortunes in the New World: “If the industrious farmer invest his capital in land and hogs in Illinois, these will pay him 50 percent” annually as return on investment.

Pigs didn’t linger much in the Great Plains—too few trees, too little water—but they had made it to the Pacific by the 1830s. By 1850 there were 30,000 in the Willamette Valley—about twenty-five per household—plus uncounted more roaming feral in the woods. During the California Gold Rush, these hogs were driven south to feed the miners.

The western poet Charles Badger Clark captured the importance of pork on the frontier in a bit of doggerel titled “Bacon”:

You’re friendly to miner or puncher or priest;

You’re as good in December as May;

You always came in when the fresh meat had ceased

And the rough course of empire to westward was greased

By the bacon we fried on the way.

A pioneer couldn’t have asked for a better friend.

Travelers’ accounts explain how those hogs were kept.
In early Ohio, one man observed, “Hogs were almost as easily raised as the deer, and thousands were never seen by their owner until with his gun he went out and killed them.” More often, farmers occasionally tossed out a little corn or salt to keep the pigs accustomed to being around people. Some pioneers, when
they provided their animals with corn, also blew a horn or conch shell, thereby training the pigs, in Pavlovian style, to come running on command. In the spring, farmers roamed the woods to find new piglets and notch their ears as a mark of ownership. In the fall, one pioneer explained, he would build a pen and leave a gate open.
“We put shelled corn in the pen and dribbled out a few long streaks through the woods,” he explained. “Them half-wild hogs would foller the traces of corn up to the pen,” and then he “would rush up and trap ’em.” The pigs could then be fattened on surplus corn before slaughter.

Such swine exemplify an important fact about the species in general: although all pigs in the early United States were domestic,
Sus scrofa domesticus
was only a tiny bit removed from its wild ancestor,
Sus scrofa
. By raising their pigs in a semicontrolled manner, frontiersmen practically guaranteed that some of the animals would disappear into the woods to do what pigs do best: take care of themselves. Beginning in the colonial era, escapees like these turned feral: they reverted to their ancient ways and, within a few generations, lost the comparative docility of their domestic cousins.
*

In North Carolina, California, and elsewhere, the feral swine later interbred with pure-bred Eurasian wild boars that had escaped from exotic game parks. These swine, fecund as ever, created an enormous population of wild pigs that would haunt the backwoods—and eventually the suburbs—of the United States for decades to come.

T
he semiwild forest pig lay at the center of American pioneer culture.
Abraham Lincoln described himself as “a mast-fed lawyer,” meaning that he picked up an education in backwoods districts, just as the local pigs fed themselves among the oaks and chestnuts. The pioneers had as many names for pigs as the Romans had for pork, most of them reflecting the animals’ agility, toughness, and destructiveness.
Woods pigs were called razorbacks, painters, rovers, thistle-diggers, prairie sharks, land sharks, land pikes, wind-splitters, hazel-splitters, sapling-splitters, rail-splitters, stump suckers, elm peelers, piney woods rooters, and—puzzlingly, but perhaps because they were so hard to get a grip on—cucumber seeds.

Mostly, though, pigs were called dinner.
Little House in the
Big Woods
, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s fictional account of her pioneer childhood, contains a loving description of roasting a pig tail after the fall slaughter. Pa skinned the tail and thrust a sharp stick into the wide end, Ma sprinkled it with salt, and the girls roasted it over hot coals.
“Drops of fat dripped off it and blazed on the coals,” Wilder writes. “It was nicely browned all over, and how good it smelled. They carried it into the yard to cool it, and even before it was cool enough they began tasting it and burned their tongues. They ate every little bit of meat off the bones.”

Most reports of backwoods food were not nearly so complimentary.
“In all my previous life I had never fallen in with any cooking so villainous,” one traveler reported, describing meals of “rusty salt pork, boiled or fried . . . musty corn-meal dodgers . . . and sometimes what was most slanderously called coffee.”
Frederick Law Olmsted, a journalist before he became a landscape architect, referred to bacon and corn bread as “the bane of my life” during six months of travel in Texas. English geologist George William Featherstonhaugh, eating supper in
Arkansas, encountered “little pieces of pork swimming in hog’s grease, some very badly made bread, and much worse coffee.”
Then he added a lament familiar to anyone who has traveled and eaten in remote places: “They knew very well that we had no other place to go to, and had prepared accordingly.”

English writer Frances Trollope was more charitable.
“The ordinary mode of living is abundant, if not delicate,” she observed in 1832 after returning home from America. “They consume an extraordinary quantity of bacon.” The archaeological record bears out those reports. When archaeologists dug up the bones from the Tennessee farmstead where Davy Crockett was born in 1786, more than 92 percent of the bones recovered came from pigs.
Sites in the Ozarks dating to a few decades later show similar patterns.

P
ioneers in the nineteenth-century United States relied heavily on pigs, but this was nothing new. A similar dynamic had also been at work at other times and places throughout history. In the Near East during the Iron Age, pig bones were exceedingly rare in nearly all communities. Then they make a sudden appearance in a few places around 1200
bc
, precisely the time that the Philistines first settled the area. A mysterious group of “sea peoples,” likely from the Aegean, the Philistines colonized new territory in Palestine and brought pigs with them.
They raised swine during the early years of settlement, then later turned to other sorts of livestock better suited to arid conditions.

More than 1,000 years later, in the fifth century
ad
, the Anglo-Saxons conquered Britain and settled the countryside. At the village of West Stow in Suffolk, pigs account for a high percentage of the bones dating from the years immediately after settlement, even though the area, mostly grassland with few
trees, was more appropriate for sheep and cattle. Only the pig could breed quickly enough to feed the new settlers.
In later centuries, once the herds of sheep had built up, the number of pigs declined.

The evidence from the ancient Near East, Anglo-Saxon England, the colonial Americas, and the early United States all point to the same conclusion: the pig is the perfect animal for colonization, breeding quickly and providing abundant meat in the difficult years when the land is being tamed. One writer explained that in pioneer-era Minnesota, only when farms were well established could settlers start to raise cattle and
“emancipate themselves from the benevolent tyranny of the pig.” Cows and sheep are animals for more settled times. When the West was being won, America counted on the pig.

In most instances, the pioneer pig enjoyed only a brief moment in the sun. The Anglo-Saxon settlement at West Stow, after its initial pig-heavy period, turned to sheep. The Spanish in Latin America, once the native peoples had been conquered, began raising both cattle and sheep. Farmers in the eastern United States, likewise, made a switch to cattle after workers—free and slave—became available to tend the herds.

Midwestern states might have made a similar transition after the pioneer phase. But they didn’t. The pig remained king for one reason: corn.

*
Some believe that America’s feral swine are descended from the herd that accompanied Hernando De Soto’s 1539 expedition. This is unlikely. Europeans who settled the South in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries made no mention of encountering feral hogs. Had De Soto’s hogs been breeding in the woods for hundreds of years, by 1800 they would have been more common than deer.