Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (11 page)

TEN

“A Great Unkindness for Our Swine”

T
he English arrived late to the game of empire. By the time Sir Walter Raleigh landed on Roanoke Island in 1585, Spain had ruled the Caribbean for nearly a century. Back home in England, many suggested that New World colonists should concentrate on farming, but Raleigh treated agriculture with contempt.
Spain derived its power from “Indian gold,” he explained, not from “sacks of Seville oranges.” Raleigh planned to follow the example of the Spanish, who colonized with the single-minded purpose of mining gold and silver.

Raleigh, however, found no precious metals along the eastern seaboard of North America; nor did other English explorers. So they chose to make a virtue of necessity.
The English began to describe the New World’s gold and silver mines as a “poisoned chalice” that had corrupted the Spanish soul. Under cover of
papal authority, the Spanish had stolen the land and riches of the native peoples. The English, good Protestants, vowed to operate differently. They would be the anti-Spanish—farmers rather than soldiers. Instead of mining for gold, they would grow crops. Instead of killing Indians, they would convert them to Christianity and train them as farmers.

This posture nicely suited the Englishman’s idea of himself. Neat fields, tidy hedgerows, healthy animals—all spoke to his virtue and godliness. Farmers needed to follow daily and seasonal schedules, plan for the future, and save against the unknown. They maintained fences and hedgerows to show that their land had been wrested from a state of nature and brought under human control. The best symbol of the connection between agriculture and virtue, however, was the domestic animal, a creature that had been civilized and made to serve man’s needs.
The English saw themselves as fulfilling God’s decree in Genesis: “Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth.”

In one sense, the plan worked.
Britain built an empire to rival Spain’s, and its colonies in North America became among the wealthiest societies the world has ever known, with an economy built almost entirely on agricultural goods.

Other aspects of the plan met with less success. Rather than becoming tidy farmers on the English model, the colonists raised crops and livestock under such sloppy conditions that visitors from England were appalled.
And Indians ultimately fared little better in England’s colonies than they had in Spain’s: those who didn’t die of disease were forced off their land to make way for settlers, crops, and livestock. In this sense, pigs became agents of empire in their own right: they wandered the woods, devouring all available wild foods, and thereby helped destroy the Indians’ way of life.

B
efore Europeans arrived, the native peoples of North America had changed the landscape to suit their needs.
Some sixty years before Raleigh founded his colony at Roanoke, Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano explored the coastal areas of North America and discovered a forest so clear of undergrowth that it could be traversed “even by a large army.” He didn’t understand that Indians had burned the shrubs and small trees to encourage the growth of grasses to feed deer. Native Americans had also cultivated the trees they liked best, including chestnut, white oak, pecan, walnut, beech, butternut, honey locust, mulberry, persimmon, and plum. They made milk from hickory nuts and flour from acorns and ate many other types of nuts raw or roasted.
Europeans marveled at the productivity of the American forest; they had no idea it was really an orchard.

In the river valleys, Native Americans planted corn, the most important crop throughout the Americas.
Columbus had been the first European to describe a tall grass with seeds “affixed by nature in a wondrous manner and in form and size like garden peas.” First domesticated in Mexico,
Zea mays
was grown by Native Americans as far north as Montreal and as far south as Santiago. Tisquantum, a member of the Patuxet tribe who was better known as Squanto, taught the English to plant corn in 1621, and both the Pilgrims and later colonists would have starved without it.

The English settlers admired some of the Indians’ agricultural habits.
William Wood, in Massachusetts, praised the Indian women for keeping corn “so clear with their clamshell hoes as if it were a garden rather than a corn field.” Mostly, though, the British criticized the Indians because they built no fences, raised no barns, and abandoned exhausted fields rather than fertilizing the soil.
The Indians, wrote John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, “inclose no land”; nor did they have “
tame cattle to improve the land by.”
Robert Gray wrote that in Virginia the “savages have no particular propriety in any part or parcel of that Country, but only a general residency there, as wild beasts have in the forest.” As the Englishmen saw it, the Indians had no true ownership of the lands they had inhabited for thousands of years.

To justify seizing native land, the English adopted a Roman legal principal known as
res nullius
, “empty things,” in which all land was common property until it was “improved,” generally through agriculture—and agriculture of the European, not the Native American, variety. Winthrop noted that the colonists “appropriated certain parcels of ground by inclosing and peculiar manurance.” That is, they fenced the land, fertilized it with manure, and therefore came to own it. In this way, the English set themselves apart from their imperial rivals. The Spanish claimed ownership over their American land because the pope had given it to them. The English, by contrast, would earn their possessions by bringing unused ground under cultivation. And, as they saw it, America was nothing but unused ground.

There was a good reason America seemed so untended, so empty: most of the native people had died of diseases brought by Hernando De Soto, Sir Francis Drake, and others. In New England an epidemic—perhaps hepatitis A—that started in 1616 killed nearly all of the coastal Indians. The Pilgrims, arriving in 1621 and seeing signs of the recent die-off, assumed that divine providence had removed the Indians to clear the path for Christians.

The colonists at first vowed to bring surviving Indians within the circle of society. They would do so, in part, by turning them into cattle herders.
According to Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island, keeping livestock would help Indians advance “from barbarism to civility.”
In 1656, Virginia’s legislators offered
Native Americans a bounty of one cow in exchange for eight wolves’ heads, explaining that owning livestock was “a step to civilizing them and making them Christians.”

Only cattle, the English believed, served this civilizing function. Horses encouraged mobility and were useful in warfare, which ran counter to the British desire to render Indians peaceful and sedentary. Pigs were self-sufficient, requiring little care. The keeper of a cow, on the other hand, had to secure pasture in summer and save hay for winter. Dairy cows performed this civilizing function even more dramatically, because daily milking required owners to maintain steady habits. For these reasons, cows became a symbol of civilization. On early maps of New England, the English used a cow icon to represent areas that had been brought under their control.
As historian Virginia DeJohn Anderson has phrased it, colonists hoped that the Indians would be “domesticated by their own cows.” That plan failed spectacularly. In fact, the English began to farm like barbarians.

I
n the New World even the English couldn’t maintain English standards. The British Isles were land poor and labor rich, whereas the American colonies had the opposite problem. Europe in the seventeenth century had no shortage of people willing to work for room, board, and modest wages. American farmers, by contrast, found few laborers for hire as they undertook the work of clearing forests, planting crops, building homes, and repairing roads. Back home, the English practiced intensive agriculture, squeezing enormous production from tiny plots. In America, colonists had no choice but to turn to extensive farming, relying on vast tracts of land to supply their needs. Rather than tending their cows and pigs, they turned the animals loose to fend for themselves. Rather than fertilize
exhausted soil, they cleared new fields. In other words, they began to farm like Indians.

A few New England towns looked like the mother country, with cows grazing on town commons, overseen by communally hired herders. But most farms told a different story: with no herders available, animals roamed the woods, finding food where they could and defending themselves against predators—or not—when the necessity arose. The same held true in Virginia, where colonists single-mindedly grew tobacco and treated food production as an afterthought. Indentured servants and slaves earned their keep by tending the cash crop, not by herding animals. The barns, cowsheds, pigsties, and dairies considered a necessity for a proper English farm were extravagances in Virginia, so the animals lived without shelter even in the winter.

Not all livestock fared equally well. Goats had the toughness to survive but also had the unfortunate habit of eating the bark off young fruit trees—a capital offense at a time when homemade cider and brandy provided the only sources of alcohol.
Sheep, because of what one colonist called the “humility of their nature,” made easy prey for wolves. Tending dairy cows was considered women’s work, and more than 80 percent of servants were men. In any case, the available forage was low in quality, so a cow that would give two gallons in England might give two quarts in Virginia, making it hardly worth the trouble. Beef cattle enjoyed more success: given enough space, they found sufficient forage in forests and marshes, though they had a tendency to become mired in swamps.

Only hogs truly thrived—but conditions required a particular type. Back in England, farmers had imported Chinese stock and developed a fat pig suitable for life in the sty. But there were few sties in America. Colonists imported pigs from the Caribbean rather than England, which meant lower transport costs
and animals better suited to American conditions, descended as they were from the wily forest pigs of Spain. England’s agricultural elite lamented the “degeneracy of the American pig,” but the colonists got exactly the swine they needed.
“The real American hog,” one observer said, is “long in the leg, narrow on the back, short in the body, flat on the sides, with a long snout. You may as well think of stopping a crow as those hogs.”

The American pig was the same beast that had ranged Europe for thousands of years and helped Spain conquer Latin America. Roger Williams once saw a wolf kill a deer, then watched as two sows drove off the wolf and ate the deer themselves.
That was the toughness needed to settle a continent.

Williams’s story notwithstanding, venison formed a relatively small portion of the swine diet. On the ocean shores pigs raided oyster banks and clam beds. In the woods they found wild peas, vetches, roots, and mushrooms. In Carolina and Virginia they roamed the orchards for windfall peaches, devouring the flesh, then deftly cracking the stone to get at the kernel inside. Pigs were said to be particularly fond of snakes, holding them down with one hoof, administering a killing bite, then sucking them down like noodles. Most of all, pigs ate nuts that fell from trees. The chestnut and oak trees once cultivated by Native Americans now provided food for pigs, a bounty unimagined in the forests of Eurasia.

Pigs and cows had the run of the land because North America remained mostly “unimproved,” despite colonists’ best efforts to claim land through the
res nullius
principle. We associate open-range ranching with the American West, but at one time or another it was standard practice from coast to coast. England had operated under a similar system before 1000
ad
, when populations were small and forests vast, but the landscape had long since been tamed. Not so in America.

As English farmers turned to Chinese-European hybrids suited to life in the sty, Americans stuck with pigs (above) similar to those that had thrived in European forests for centuries—tough creatures that fought off wolves, fed on acorns and roots, and provided a nearly free source of meat for colonists and pioneers too busy for careful methods of farming.

Legal principles in America took shape around these new arrangements. If a pig in England rooted up a wheat field, then the animal’s owner paid damages. In America, the law demanded that crops, rather than animals, be fenced in, and animals could wander wherever they pleased. Custom demanded that a fence be “horse high, bull strong, and pig tight”: four or five feet tall to keep a horse from jumping it, strong enough to prevent a bull from knocking it down, and solid near the bottom to keep pigs from going under or through it. If a farmer built fences to these standards and kept them in good repair, then he could seek payment from the owner of a beast that breached his barriers
and damaged his crops. Keepers of inferior fences had no redress at all.
Livestock had the legal right to all land, public or private, not protected by a proper fence.