by Mark Essig
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.
Before 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.
In 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.
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.
By 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 li
vestock 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.”
