Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig

by Mark Essig

  Pigs, with their shorter life cycle and omnivorous appetite, found free food closer to home. In spring and summer they gleaned fields, foraged for roots and nuts in scattered plots of woodland, and ate whey at dairies or spent grains at whiskey distilleries. In the fall, they gorged on corn before slaughter. Nearly all beef cattlemen kept hogs to clean up after the cattle, but other farmers stuck to hogs only. In the most basic form of fattening, pigs were simply turned loose into a field of standing corn, where they knocked over the stalks and harvested the ears themselves. This was known as “hogging down” a field.

  In histories of midwestern agriculture, cows get most of the attention. A book on the early years of the Corn Belt observes, “We would have difficulty saying whether the Ohio Valley was more of a beef-cattle empire than a hog empire.” That book, nonetheless, is titled Cattle Kingdom in the Ohio Valley. Farmers who fattened more hogs than cattle still referred to themselves as cattlemen. The ancient prejudice in favor of cows and against pigs persisted, and perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us: when one creature eats the feces of another, it’s not difficult to guess which will garner more respect.

  Though less prestigious, hogs were more profitable. “Hogs don’t always carry the prestige of cattle, but you can’t live on prestige,” one farmer explained. The hog earned the nickname “mortgage lifter” because it freed so many Corn Belt farms from debt. If farmers wanted to turn corn into meat and meat into money, pigs did the job two or three times more efficiently than cows.

  “What is a hog, but fifteen or twenty bushels of corn on four legs?” a visitor to Chicago asked in 1867. Farmers hoped that figure would be closer to fifteen than twenty: the less corn they used to fatten a hog, the more money they made. The key measure was the feed-conversion rate: the number of pounds of corn required to produce one pound of pork. The tighter the ratio, the higher the profit. Feed conversion hadn’t much mattered when hogs fed themselves in the woods, but a grain diet changed the equation. American farmers in 1820 faced the same situation their English counterparts had a century or two before: woods and wastes had been plowed under to grow crops, and the age of the forest pig came to an end. British farmers fed their pigs the wastes from distilleries and dairies, as well as surplus peas and beans grown as part of rotation schemes. American farmers fattened hogs almost exclusively on corn. But American and English farmers had one thing in common: both needed a hog that fattened quickly while confined to a pen.

  After 1700 English farmers started importing Chinese hogs and crossing them with local types to create new breeds that could convert feed efficiently while weathering chilly English winters. The pig’s quick reproductive cycle made it easy to select for these desirable traits. A single sow could produce, in one year, five to ten female piglets, and each of those female piglets reached reproductive age in less than a year. By carefully choosing which animals to breed, a farmer could produce rapid changes in his herd, especially if he stuck to the common practice of inbreeding. In 1790 an English agriculture writer noted that one farmer had used a single boar to breed all of his sows, including the boar’s “daughters, and his daughters’ daughters,” and that the herd had been “highly improved, by this incestuous intercourse.” By 1850 English farmers had created most of the popular modern English breeds—the types now known as “heritage”—including Yorkshire, Berkshire, Hampshire, Leicester, Woburn, and Suffolk. A swine expert noted that the new types were “indebted to the Asiatic swine for their present compactness of form, the readiness with which they fatten on a small quantity of food, and their early maturity.”

  Those English breeds made their way to America, where farmers used them as breeding stock to create types suitable for New World conditions. George Washington acquired some pigs of the Woburn breed in the 1790s, and before long importers had brought in most of the improved British breeds, as well as pigs from South America, Italy, Spain, Russia, China, and Southeast Asia. All were put to use in shaping new American breeds such as the Chester White and Duroc Jersey. In the Corn Belt, the key hog was the Poland China, developed in Ohio’s Miami Valley. Only the second half of the breed’s name is accurate: it is thought to be a cross of local wood hogs with Chinese, Berkshire, and Irish Grazier pigs, with no Polish types entering the mix. Although American breeders followed the English lead, they soon far outstripped the motherland. In 1840 there were more than 26 million hogs in the United States, compared to about 2 million in Great Britain.

  Though each of the modern breeds had distinctive qualities, they also had much in common: compared to woods hogs all had thinner bones, shorter legs, and smaller heads, and they turned grain into meat more efficiently. Feed conversion is a complex process, but one key is having lengthy intestines, the better to extract every bit of nutrition from food before it exits the body. In wild boars, the ratio of intestinal to body length was about 10:1. In the common woods hog, it was 13:1. In improved Corn Belt hogs like Berkshires and Poland Chinas, it was 18:1. Whereas woods hogs took two or three years to reach market size, the new types reached slaughter weight at eighteen months or less. American pigs became the envy of the world. The English prided themselves on their cattle and sheep, but they were forced to admit that America had created better pigs. “Nowhere in the world can such marvelous herds of swine be found as in the corn states of America,” a British official conceded. “Here the pig is monarch of all he surveys.”

  As intensive agriculture moved west, the razorback era came to an end. You could trace the advance of the frontier by the appearance of the pigs: the rangy forest hog became scarce in Pennsylvania by 1800, in Ohio by 1820, and in Illinois by 1840, pushed out by fatter hybrids.

  The new hogs that replaced the forest pigs were valued for their bulk—but they couldn’t be too fat. A pure Chinese type thrived as a backyard pig, slaughtered in the same place he was raised, but that didn’t suit Corn Belt conditions in the nineteenth century, when a more nimble pig was needed.

  Before trucks, the only way for pigs to leave the farm—for a rail depot, or a river port, or a slaughterhouse—was by walking. An agricultural newspaper explained that hogs “should have a straight hind leg” in order to “travel the required distance.” Often that distance was long, a hundred miles or more. The Poland China dominated the early Corn Belt because, even after growing hefty, it remained agile enough to make the journey.

  Nearly all livestock went to market on foot: cattle, horses, mules, sheep, goats, turkeys, ducks, and geese. (“That was the prettiest drive of anything they drove,” a Tennessee old-timer said of geese. “They’d just paddle along on them webbed feet.”) Hogs, though, ruled the road. Americans raised more pigs than any other type of animal, so naturally swine crowded out other beasts on the turnpikes. The best estimates suggest that in antebellum America, five times as many hogs were driven as all other animals combined. In 1847 one tollgate in North Carolina recorded 692 sheep, 898 cattle, 1,317 horses, and 51,753 hogs.

  As the United States grew, traveling hordes of pigs crisscrossed the country in all directions. The farmers who rushed to settle the West after the Revolutionary War soon returned east with pigs to sell. Around 1800 some of the very first Corn Belt hogs were driven from Ohio farms to Baltimore slaughterhouses. Other hogs walked from Kentucky to Virginia, from the Nashville basin to Alabama, and from southern Illinois to Chicago. By the 1840s and 1850s, a growing rail network mostly ended the era of long-distance droving, but the railroad builders were stymied by the Blue Ridge Mountains, which separated the hog-raising regions of Kentucky and Tennessee from the pork-eating slave South. A few farmers from Lexington, Kentucky, walked their hogs through the Cumberland Gap and all the way to Charleston, South Carolina, a distance of more than five hundred miles.

  Every winter hundreds of thousands of American pigs went to market on foot, many of them crossing mountain ranges and walking hundreds of miles. Long-distance hog droving, nearly forgotten today, was at least as significant—and
trickier to pull off—than the far more famous cattle drives.

  Pig drives followed fairly standard protocols. The drover, on horseback, rode at the front of a herd that might range from a few hundred to 1,000 or more hogs. Following behind, on foot, were his employees, called drivers, usually one for every one hundred pigs. The drivers shouted, “Soo-eey,” “Su-boy,” or “Ho-o-o-yuh”—this last, according to one witness, was pronounced thusly: “The first syllable is like a prolonged wail, while the last syllable is hurled out with a snap and a thud, much like the exclamation one might make if suddenly hit in the solar plexus.”

  This was not easy work. Whenever a roadside creek or pond appeared, the pigs flopped into the mud and commenced wallowing. The secret, one drover said, lay in not exerting too much control: “Never let a hog know he’s being driven. Just let him take his way, and keep him going in the right direction.” The start of the journey was especially difficult, for during that stage loud noises could send pigs stampeding back toward their home farms. One solution was to sew up their eyelids: temporarily blinded, the pigs clumped together and kept to the road by feel. At their destination, the stitch was clipped and their vision restored. (The young Abraham Lincoln, charged with driving a recalcitrant drove of hogs aboard a riverboat, pulled out a needle and thread and started sewing eyelids.) After a few days on the road, the hogs settled into a routine, and the biggest problem became beasts who couldn’t keep up. Lame pigs were traded to innkeepers for room and board.

  Cows, sheep, and goats have been driven great distances for millennia because they move well in herds and require only grass or other greenery along the way. Driving pigs on such long journeys has been rare historically because it is more difficult: the animals not only needed shade and tended to scatter but also required provisions en route. Roman swineherds were among the few to take on such challenges. To fulfill the pork dole in the Roman Empire, tens of thousands of hogs walked well over a hundred miles to Rome from the forested regions of Campania, Samnium, and Lucania. We don’t know many details of their journey, but we do know that they lost weight.

  Weight loss on the road was known as “drift,” and in the United States an infrastructure grew up to ensure it didn’t happen. Because pigs could walk about ten miles a day, inns—often known as wagon stands—sprang up at ten-mile intervals along the roads, offering drovers and their pigs food and a place to sleep. At the taverns, the hogs were herded into corrals and given corn, usually eight bushels per one hundred hogs. One traveler described watching a drove of 1,000 hogs devour their evening meal: “The music made by this large number of hogs, in eating corn on a frosty night, I will never forget.”

  Because droving was a decentralized trade, it’s impossible to know its full scale. It is clear, however, that hog drives were at least as significant as the more celebrated cattle drives. The largest cattle drives, from Texas to Kansas, involved as many as 600,000 cattle a year, but they lasted just fifteen years or so. Hog droving, by comparison, involved hundreds of thousands of animals during peak years and on some routes lasted nearly a century. From Kentucky alone, as many as 100,000 hogs per year were driven east to Richmond, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. In 1855 more than 83,000 hogs walked along a little-known route through Mount Airy, North Carolina. And there were many other routes: through Asheville along the French Broad River, from the Nashville basin along the Natchez Trace into Alabama, through Knoxville into Georgia, and out of Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap or along the Kanawha River. The route through the Cumberland Gap in Kentucky, known as the Wilderness Road in the years immediately after Daniel Boone blazed it, later came to be called the “Kaintuck Hog Road” after its most frequent traveler.

  Once the drovers had crossed the mountains, they fanned out to sell their hogs, either at individual plantations or at local slaughterhouses. Such small-scale pork-packing plants operated all over the country, buying hogs from farmers or drovers and wholesaling the pork to merchants. With time, however, most of these small plants disappeared, forced out of business by a new phenomenon: centralized pork-packing operations that operated on a vast scale and with astonishing efficiency. As slaughterhouses grew larger and more highly mechanized, pigs—the freewheeling, self-sufficient creatures that had helped conquer a continent—took their first steps into a rigid, industrialized future.

  THIRTEEN

  “The Republic of Porkdom”

  Frances Trollope, wife of a struggling English barrister, moved to America with her young children in 1827. They spent some time in a utopian community in Tennessee, which soon failed, and then moved to Cincinnati, where she undertook business ventures that fared no better. In 1831 she moved back to England, became a writer, and found success with her first book, Domestic Manners of the Americans. Americans, she thought, were overconfident and undereducated, overly fond of spitting, and hypocritical: “You will see them with one hand hoisting the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves.”

  Though she did find a few things to like in Cincinnati—the lovely hills, a twin-spired brick church, a school for girls—she never adjusted to the city’s principal industry. “I am sure I should have liked Cincinnati much better if the people had not dealt so very largely in hogs,” she wrote. As she was on a stroll one day, her feet “literally got entangled in pigs’ tails and jawbones.” Seeking an escape, she rented a cottage outside the city but soon noticed new buildings being constructed nearby. “’Tis to be a slaughter-house for hogs,” a man told her. Since there were nice homes nearby, Trollope asked if a slaughterhouse might be legally prohibited as a nuisance.

  “A what?”

  “A nuisance,” I repeated, and explained what I meant.

  “No, no,” was the reply, “that may do very well for your tyrannical country, where a rich man’s nose is more thought of than a poor man’s mouth; but hogs be profitable produce here, and we be too free for such a law as that.”

  Trollope had the ill fortune to live in Cincinnati at the start of a slaughterhouse boom. Hogs were indeed “profitable produce” in the Corn Belt, so much so that pork packing became one of America’s most innovative industries. To deal with the enormous volume of hogs, packers pioneered the factory assembly line that Henry Ford later adapted for automobiles. To squeeze every bit of value from pig carcasses, new industries sprang up to transform by-products into soap and chemicals. Above all, the industry produced a great deal of meat.

  Pork had been a favored food for millennia in part because it cured well. For the same reason, it became the key meat of global trade in the years before artificial refrigeration: unlike fresh beef, salted pork could be stored at room temperature for months as it was transported thousands of miles. By producing so much meat, Corn Belt packers transformed diets in America and around the world.

  The conversion of pigs to pork began each fall. Hogs, fattened on the latest corn crop, traveled by foot, barge, or railcar to a packinghouse, almost always located on a river. The packers bought and slaughtered the hogs, cured the meat in salt, then in the spring, when the rivers thawed, floated the pork downriver to market. The packers invested in pigs, salt, barrels, and labor in November and sold their product in March or April, which meant that they saw no return on investment for five or six months. There was good money to be made in pork, but the risks and capital requirements were considerable and the competition stiff. Dozens of midsized packers were scattered along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and their tributaries, each slaughtering about 8,000 hogs annually.

  In the 1820s the pigs and the money started to concentrate in Cincinnati, which became known as “Porkopolis.” The most important port on the Ohio River, the city lay south of Ohio’s Miami Valley, the first great center of Corn Belt hog raising and within droving distance of the corn-growing regions of Kentucky and Indiana. As the biggest city in the Corn Belt, Cincinnati offered enough skilled workers to fill the seasonal jobs of killing, cutting, and packing the swine that flooded th
e city each fall.

  Cincinnati’s fortunes rose and fell alongside those of New Orleans, another great port city. Nearly all of the Corn Belt’s output made its way down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans; from there it was shipped to plantations in the lower South or loaded onto oceangoing ships bound for Europe or America’s eastern seaboard. Just as importantly, the rivers allowed salt to be brought north by steamboat, supplementing the meager local supplies. With the transportation infrastructure in place, eastern merchants brought their money to Cincinnati, and pork packing exploded. Between 1832 and 1841—the decade just after Frances Trollope left town—Cincinnati packed about 500,000 hogs. During the 1850s, that figure rose to 2.3 million. By the 1870s, it had reached 6 million.

  By then, however, Cincinnati had been displaced: Chicago had become the new “hog butcher for the world,” slaughtering as many as 4 million hogs in a single season. Chicago benefited from the westward shift of the Corn Belt into Illinois and Iowa. Just as important were trains. By the early 1850s, good railroads linked the Corn Belt to eastern cities, and Chicago lay at the terminus of multiple rail lines. With the coming of the Civil War, Chicago’s triumph was complete: the city offered reliable transportation by rail just as fighting shut down river traffic and as the US Army began buying salt pork in quantity.