I found a wonderful little book written about life in the hills of eastern Kentucky in the early 1900s. It all takes place in an area very near Pure Water Hollow. The author, Rufus Mitchell Reed, was born in 1895 and was raised in country very similar to the land we find here. His book, Conquerors of the Dark Hills, was published in 1979.
It is time for us to have the hogs we have raised from birth butchered for meat (the ones that we didn’t sell). I loved reading about Reed’s memories of raising hogs back when he was a boy in these hills, and I decided it would be nice to record his recollections of hogs here on the blog as a bit of historical perspective. I will post about our hogs sometime in the future and how it has all worked out, but for now I just want to quote Reed.
The following is from pages 28, 29 and 30 of the book Conquerors of the Dark Hills in the chapter entitled “Hogs: The Most Important Animals”:
“In these dark and isolated hills, the men rated hogs above all other animals in importance. They used every part of a hog except its squeal. Hogs and corn went together, and you’d think to hear them talk that their very existence depended on hogs and corn. They rated hog-stealing as the worst of crimes, equally as bad as murder. There were some who said these hillmen took better care of their hogs than they took of their kids.
To show you how terribly bad they rated hog-stealing, they once lynched a man for stealing the hogs of the settlers. They banded together, caught him, tied him to a tree, and almost beat him to death with hickory wythes. But that is a tragic story I shall tell fully in a later chapter.
Early in the fall, Dad would castrate three of his finest male shoats and put them in a floored pen to fatten for early butchering, about the first of November. Then he would get together with the other men of the valley and they would round up their other hogs. That is, they would get as many of their hogs together in some big fenced lot as they could in three or four days of herding hogs. In the lot there would be several sows with litters of pigs, and many shoats.
These men had a way of marking their hogs, a system somewhat like the cattlemen of the West use to brand their cattle. Each settler had his own peculiar mark, which he placed on the ears of his hogs. I remember watching Dad help the other men mark their hogs’ ears. Dad marked his hogs by cutting two “smooth craps” in the ears and then splitting the right ear. Lige Jordan marked his hogs with a “swallow fork” in the right ear and a round hole in the left ear. Jody Sartains’s mark was two splits in the right ear and a smooth crap in the left, and so on. Each man had his own hogs marked and each knew the markings of the other. So there was never any danger of any settler claiming the other man’s hogs.
Now why did they go to all this trouble to mark their hogs? Because it was now time for the men to drive their hogs far into the deep woods, to eat the “mast.” In those days of virgin oaks and chestnuts bearing bounteous crops of acorns and nuts, there was no use wasting corn to raise hogs. Let Mother Nature take over the feeding for a time. So the men drove their hogs far into the woods and left them there to feast on the abundant mast. By Christmas time they wound be squint-eyed with fat.
Some of these hogs would soon find other hogs which had reverted to the wild state. Many of those turned out to eat the mast would go wild as bucks. But all would eventually be found and brought in to be butchered for late meat. The valley men had dogs they had especially trained to catch and hold a wild hog until the owner came to tie it fast with a rope. These trained dogs would catch a wild hog by its hock and sink their teeth behind the hock bone. It was then impossible for the hog to get free. The owner would come, tie a rope around the hind leg, and drive him in from the forest.
When the snows of January came and covered the ground, that was the time the men got together and went in search of their hogs. They would usually find them denning under an overhanging mountain cliff. It was some hullabaloo when the dogs found these half-wild hogs and began to bay them until the owners came.”
I just thought that piece was so classic. I guess it really struck home as I thought of our own hogs. At one time we had a total of 18 pigs together in a big fenced lot, maybe something like he mentioned. There was the big boar, two mama sows, and 15 piglets/shoats. And last fall, when the piglets were still little, we let them run around in our hills every day and eat the mast. They seemed to love all the acorns, hickory nuts, and beech nuts and even came down near the house several times to feast on the chestnuts all over the ground. Our dogs Luna and Mammoo are not trained pig herders, but we have laughed (and yelled) at them many times as they chased the escaped pigs back to their lots! And now that the January snows have come, the pigs are all just about big enough to slaughter.
We are trying to get back in touch with the past, but didn’t realize there were so many parallels to how things really used to be around here. I thank God for all He has allowed us to take part in!
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1 comment
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2gramsroses on January 8, 2008 at 4:09 am
I really enjoyed reading this. I think there is something very special about linking with our past, and I can remember my granddad, doing his hogs ears and my hubbys dad notched his hogs ears years back. thanks for bringing me a smile this morning. sherry
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