Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig Page 13
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”
In 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.
In 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.
The 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.
Pioneers 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.
TWELVE
“Twenty Bushels of Corn on Four Legs”
Thaddeus Harris, a New Englander, traveled along the Ohio River around 1800 and noticed two types of settlers, one on each side of the river. “Here, in Ohio, they are intelligent, industrious, and thriving; there, on the back skirts of Virginia, ignorant, lazy, and poor,” he wrote. “Here, the buildings are neat, though small, and furnished in many instances with brick chimneys and glass windows; there the habitations are miserable cabins.” The Virginians’ problem, Harris believed, was that they lived off the land: “The great abundance of wild game allures them to the forest; and from it they obtain the greater part of their miserable subsistence. In consequence of this, they neglect the cultivation of their lands.”
These stereotypes contain a kernel of truth. Most backwoods farmers, preferring isolation, kept moving west or found isolated pockets in the hills where they could live untroubled by the likes of Thaddeus Harris. When these pioneers cleared out, another type of settler moved in. Unsatisfied with mere subsistence farming, this second wave had more ambitious plans. On the south side of the Ohio River, Thaddeus Harris saw the vestiges of a pioneer past. On the north side, in Ohio, he witnessed the birth of the Corn Belt.
The new farmers settled the best farmland, generally river-bottom lands that Native Americans had cultivated for centuries. They leapfrogged their way west, settling the valleys of the Scioto, Miami, Wabash, and other rivers. By the 1850s better plows made it possible to break up the prairie sod; wetlands were drained, more trees were cleared, and the Corn Belt—a continuous, five-hundred-mile region stretching from Ohio to Iowa—was formed. It became, and remains, the agricultural heartland of America and one of the most productive regions the world has ever known, thanks to rich soil and a remarkably bountiful grain.
Corn, paired with pigs, fueled the rapid settlement of the United States. An acre of corn produced three to six times as much grain as an acre of wheat. One sown seed of wheat might yield 50 at harvest; a single corn kernel produced 150 to 300. Only rice—a far more labor-intensive crop—produced at similar rates. One scholar estimates that if Americans had planted wheat instead of corn in their march across the country, it would have taken them an extra century to reach the Rockies.
The farmers grew breathtaking amounts of corn, but they didn’t eat it. They preferred wheat bread. In their minds, corn wasn’t food—it was feed. The practice of fattening livestock with grain dates back at least to ancient Mesopotamia, but North American farmers were the first to apply it on a vast scale. Whereas South America had become a major meat exporter by raising cattle on grassland, midwestern farmers turned grassland into cornfields and fed the corn to hogs and cattle. Compared to a field of grass, a field of corn produces far more calories and therefore far more livestock. Today the practice of feeding hogs on corn has become standard worldwide, with Brazil and China adopting it as the most efficient way to satisfy populations growing hungrier for meat. And it all started in the Corn Belt, when farmers figured out that an Old World animal and a New World crop made a perfect match.
The grain grown in America’s Corn Belt became food not for people but for livestock. “The hog is regarded as the most compact form in which the Indian corn crop of the States can be transported to market,” a British visitor said. (Courtesy Boston Public Library)
In nineteenth-century America, corn was too difficult to transport to become a cash crop, so farmers turned it into value-added products that were easier to sell: pigs and whiskey. Historians have often described feeding livestock and making whiskey as the “solution” to the problem of marketing the Midwest’s great corn crop. This suggests that farmers planted huge fields of corn, harvested it, and then sat around stroking their beards, trying to figure out what to do with all the stuff. In fact, the first Corn Belt farmers knew what they were doing right from the start: the lure of growing rich by fattening livestock on corn had drawn them west in the first place.
A family named Renick was among the first to perfect a new livestock system. Starting out along the south branch of the Potomac River in Virginia, the Renicks raised cattle and pigs and drove them to market in Baltimore and Philadelphia. By 1805 they had moved to Ohio’s Scioto Valley, near Chillicothe, where the land had three feet of rich, black soil that sprouted bumper crops of corn. Cows and hogs ate the grain, then walked to market in Philadelphia and Baltimore. In 1819, two members of the Renick family traveled west to scout out new farmland, pausing on a bluff overlooking the bottomlands of the Mississippi River opposite St. Louis, where the great Native American civilization at Cahokia once flourished. The land, the Renicks wrote, “wants nothing but industry and art to afford some of the finest farms that any country can boast of.” Within a decade or two, that land was thickly planted with corn.
One of the Renicks later described their system of f
attening cows and pigs together in the same fields: “The cattle were not housed or sheltered, but simply fed twice a day in the open lots of eight or ten acres each, with unhusked corn with the fodder, and followed by hogs to clean up the waste and offal.” There were no barns, which kept capital costs down, and the feeding method reduced labor costs as well: rather than harvesting ears of corn, they “shocked” the stalks—gathered them into large upright bundles—and left them in the fields. The cattle then ate the green roughage, or silage, as well as the corn kernels off the ear. After the cows had eaten, it was the pigs’ turn: they ate the kernels that had escaped the attention of the cows, as well as many that had not: cow digestive systems, adapted to cellulose, were inefficient at processing grains, and the pigs enjoyed a great deal of corn that had already made one trip through a cow. As historian Allan Bogue has explained, “For cattle-feeders the margin of profit was often represented by the nutriment that his hogs gleaned from the droppings of steers.”
Although hogs and cattle were fattened together, they took separate paths to the feedlot. With cows, the need for pasture placed the greatest demand on capital, but this was also the easiest part of the process to outsource. Ohio farmers traveled to buy lean cattle in the West, where young steers spent their first couple of years grazing on rangeland. As bones, organs, and other unprofitable parts of their bodies grew, the cattle ate grass, the food they had evolved to digest, which was cheap or free. Then, nearly grown, they were sold to feedlot operators who stuffed them with corn, so that this more expensive food went directly into producing meat and fat. Beef cattle were born in the Far West, eaten in the cities of the East Coast, and fattened on feedlots in between.