Courtesy of Terry L. Jones
The Jones family at hog slaughtering time. The tilted barrel held the hot water to scald the pigs.
When I was a boy rambling around, I didn’t worry much about snakes and other critters, but I did have a healthy respect for the PWRs. PWR was an initialism for “Piney Woods Rooter” and is what we called the hogs that roamed free.
Pork was an essential food item for rural people, and families ran hogs in the woods for generations. PWRs were so important in Winn Parish that it was said you were better off fooling around with a man’s wife than his hogs.
Hog owners identified their herd by cutting a unique combination of slices and notches in the pigs’ ears, which were registered in the court house just like cattle brands.
Catching and marking hogs could be dangerous. A large, angry sow protecting her piglets or an enraged boar was a force to be reckoned with, and my father and uncles told stories of being chased up trees by charging hogs.
I vividly remember sitting in Winnfield’s Collins Barbershop when I was about ten years old, listening to the barber and an elderly man discussing how a sow once chomped down on the old man’s leg. He rolled up his pants to show the wound, and it looked like half his calf was missing.
When I got old enough to hunt by myself, such stories weighed on my mind, and I tried to give the PWRs a wide berth whenever I saw them in Dugdemona swamp. It turned out they were not as dangerous as I thought, although things sometimes got dicey when my squirrel dogs started harassing the pigs. There were a few times when a mad sow charged me, popping her jaws and I had to shoot the ground in front of her to turn her back. But at least I was never chased up a tree.
Hog dogs were used to catch and hold the hogs for marking, and men took great pride in them. One of the big events at the annual parish fair in the 1960s was a hog baying contest.
A large hog would be turned loose in the rodeo arena with a man and his dogs. The objective was for the dogs to catch and hold the hog while the man marked its ears. Judges decided how well the man and dogs worked together and picked the winners.
Men on horseback tried to separate the hog from the man and dogs if things got too dangerous, but it sometimes turned into a bloody mess with the hog ripping up men, dogs, and horses with its tusks.
Backlash against the violence finally caused the fair to drop the hog marking contest, but in 1994 the Uncle Earl Hog Dog Trials began in Winnfield. Named for Governor Earl K. “Uncle Earl” Long of Winnfield, who greatly enjoyed hog hunting, the event promotes hog dogs but without the bloodshed. Dogs simply bring the hog to bay without biting them, and there is no ear marking.
My family was among those who ran hogs, and our mark was a crop and a split in the left ear and an under hack in the right. Uncle Durwood was the last of the Joneses who took care of our PWRs and when he died, they gradually were abandoned in the woods.
One of my fond childhood memories is of our annual hog slaughtering day that took place after the first big frost.
A couple of suitable hogs would be trapped several weeks beforehand and penned up in my grandparents’ barn to be fattened up on corn. On the big day, my father and uncles, accompanied by me and a passel of cousins, would go to the barn, shoot the hog between the eyes with a .22 rifle and cut its jugular to bleed it out. Water was then boiled in a big black kettle over an open fire and poured into a barrel set up on an incline.
The hog was dipped into the hot water to scald and loosen the hair, and knives were used to scrape off the hair. Scraping was the one part of the process that my cousins and I were allowed to participate in.
The hog was then strung up on our iron swing set, gutted, butchered, and hung up in the smokehouse to cure.
The downside of having open range was the menace hogs posed on the highway and their tearing up yards and gardens. My family had a terrible time dealing with Uncle Durwood’s hogs after my parents built our house in the rural community that was appropriately known as Hog Hair. Whenever we found hogs rooting up the yard, we sprinkled them with squirrel shot from a distance to run them off.
One day my brother Larry and I saw some hogs in the corner of the yard and Larry got my single shot .410 shotgun and fired at a big one that was quite some distance away. Instead of squealing and running off, however, it fell over dead as a door nail! Larry and I both were shocked and hurriedly dragged the carcass into the woods behind the house. Uncle Durwood was very protective of his hogs, so we kept that secret for the rest of his life.
Dr. Terry L. Jones is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. An autographed copy of “Louisiana Pastimes,” a collection of the author’s stories, costs $25. Contact him at tljones505@gmail.com
