ABSTRACT
In antebellum Cincinnati, locals were making fortunes in hog slaughtering and meat packing, and escapees from their operations roamed the streets. In 1851, Emmeline Stuart-Wortley designated Cincinnati "The Empire City of Pigs," and thought its residents "fortunate that the pigs condescendingly allow human beings to share that truly magnificent location with them." Stuart-Wortley found her view of the pigs' social dominance corroborated in the local newspaper, which admitted that "the pigs are becoming masters of the place: they push the two-legged citizens into the streets, and they occupy the sidewalks. So things begin to look serious here, and we are prepared any day for a pronunciamento of the pigs, they carry their snouts so high already, and seem so bristling with importance." In 1856, Cincinnati pigs struck Isabella Bird as "lean, gaunt, and vicious-looking"; even after shopping in the most splendid stores, Bird stumbled over pigs—"disgusting intruders," she called them—on her way out the door. Charles Weld, who claimed that Ohio farmers calculated their pigs by the acre, visited no Cincinnati street that did not hold at least a dozen pigs "poking their noses into the dirt-heaps, or acting as dams to the gutters, in which they repose during the heat of the day." 124Weld pointed out that the pigs, however, "performed an important duty in the social economy of the city, as scavengers," and relieved residents of the burden of paying for garbage collection. Pigs were correspondingly repaid by social protection: Aleksandr Lakier stepped off the boat at Cincinnati to confront a "huge sow with a full litter of suckling pigs," and learned that she was not to be disturbed by humans: "No one drove her away; on the contrary, everyone stepped around her," wrote Lakier. 1
