LITTLE ROCK — My patio is littered with acorns. We seem to have a good “mast” this year-that combination of acorns, persimmons, and other autumn nuts and fruits that traditionally fed our ancestors’ hogs before butchering time in early winter. Until recent times, no source of food was more important to Arkansans than pork.
Swine are not native to the Americas. The pigs came to Arkansas in 1541 when Hernando de Soto’s Spanish entrada crossed the Mississippi River during the long and fruitless search for riches in La Florida. De Soto brought along a herd of pigs, and since they were his personal property, he guarded them carefully. We know this because several of the chronicles written by survivors mention the pigs-including the fact that De Soto allowed only a few to be butchered.
When De Soto’s property was sold after his death in May 1542, his swine herd numbered in the hundreds. Many of the hogs were immediately eaten by the famished Spaniards, but others were taken along for future use. The chroniclers mention that the struggling survivors, as they backtracked across Arkansas on their return to the Mississippi River, encountered escaped hogs-and they also found swine among the Indians. So, it is quite possible that De Soto’s pigs formed the nucleus of a permanent feral-hog population in Arkansas and elsewhere.
Regardless of its origin, pork was consumed in large amounts by settlers. In 1789, the French commander at Arkansas Post hosted a visiting “Kaintuck” and provided a sumptuous meal, including “a fine ham.” The 1840 census counted 403 hogs for every 100 Arkansans. Some of those hogs were owned by the German traveler and writer Friedrich Gerstaecker, who was living near the Fourche La Fave River in modern Perry County.
In the winter of 1841, Gerstaecker butchered several of his pigs, providing one of the early accounts of a hog killing in Arkansas history. It is remarkable how little the butchering of hogs changed over the next century.
Due to a lack of refrigeration, hogs were butchered only after cold weather arrived. Tate C. Page, who grew up in rural Pope County, recalled a rhyme about the ideal weather for hog killing: “Clear as a bell/Cold as Hell/And the damnedest frost/That ever fell.”
Butchering a hog, which often weighed several hundred pounds, was hard labor and help was usually recruited from family and neighbors. Perry County resident Jim Young, in recalling hog killings in his family, said that Paw Paw Hugh, who lived at Nimrod, “was the fire tender and knife sharpener.” Another relative named Billy always helped out, but he “was bad about bringing along a bottle of ‘who shot John’ to keep the grown men warm.”
Some families dispatched hogs with a hammer blow to the head, but the Young family killed their hogs with a rifle shot to “that dime size spot that will drop one in its tracks . . .” Immediately after the hog was shot, a sharp knife was used to cut the throat. Some families collected the blood for making pies, but that seems to have been rare.
As soon as the hog was “bled out,” it was dipped into hot water so that the hair could be removed. Young recalled that one of the men in his family was very good at determining if the water was hot enough: “When he thought it was about right he’d dip his finger in it. He always knew it was just right when it was hot enough to make him want to cuss . . . anything less was too cold and anything more would set the hair.”
After dipping the hog in hot water, the scraping began. “The more experienced men,” Young recalled, “would start around the feet and head like a trained barber making a shave.”
Which internal organs were saved depended upon the family. The late J.H. Atkinson, who grew up in Howard County, recalled that his family only saved the liver and spleen. Many families saved the intestines for making sausage casings or for cooking as “chitterlings.” Some families also saved the head for making souse or “head cheese.” Even the feet and ankles were sometimes processed. Fat was rendered into lard. Various pieces of meat were ground into sausage, which was often preserved as patties in jars or crocks sealed in lard. Indeed, it was sometimes said that every bit of the hog was used “except for the squeal.”
The prime cuts were the hams, shoulders, tenderloins, and sides of bacon called “middlings.” These were usually rubbed down with salt and hung in the smokehouse above a smoldering hickory fire.
U.S. Judge Bill Wilson, who grew up in a sawmill town in Scott County, had a hog killing in 1997 to relive his youthful experience. In an email, Wilson recalled: “We did virtually everything you could do at a hog killing, and made hominy to boot.” The judge said the long day of work was grueling, and “my feet thought my rear end had gone on strike.”
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Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living in Farmington, Ark. Email [email protected].
Editorial, Pages 83 on 09/30/2012