| A Word Edgewise by Mary Joe Clendenin |
 |
| A Word Edgewise by Mary Joe Clendenin |
|
Last Updated 01/20/06
TEXAS OWES A DEBT AND PICTURESQUE SPEECH TO HOGS
If we chose names for years as the Chinese do, last year might have been the Year of the Pigs, because pigs were in the cities, pigs in the country, Miss Piggy was in the toy stores, and our own infestation of wild pigs was in the county. For some combinations of silly reasons, the porkers have come to the stage. Not just recently, but in several decades, even centuries, they have colored our language and changed our history. Here are a few examples of piggish language:
As independent as a hog on ice, happy as a dead pig in the sunshine, dirty as a pig, going whole hog for something, road hogs. I remember hearing, "You’re hogging all the covers."
Good advice was, "Don’t buy a pig in a poke," means you should look closely at the product before you buy. When you had the best food imaginable, you ate "high on the hog." As kids, when we tried to trick someone by telling a falsehood, we’d say, "In a pig’s eye."
Can you imagine dirty, smelly hogs being cleaning machines? In the nineteenth century, in big cities--Texas was saved this one because they had no big cities--hogs were the street cleaners. People put up with the porkers running free in the streets because of the garbage that clogged the streets in early America. How else to dispose of kitchen slops, viscera discarded from butchered animals, trash from markets and households, but to have thousands of determined, snuffling, snorting trash-disposal units on the hoof. One desperate mother in New York rescued her child from a hungry hog that had dragged its prey across the street and was about to dine.
Early on, the four-footed street sweepers were more effective than the human variety, and the poor supplemented their diet with the free running pigs. Imagine a city with over a million people and no means of disposing of trash. It was decades, 1896, before New York got human street cleaners. Under the authority of Col. George E. Warring, Jr., veteran of the Civil War, a crew of 1,450 workers patrolled about 433 miles of streets, some of which were swept by man-powered broom five times a day.
Texans are noted for picturesque figures of speech, many of them using pigs. In a book I’m reading Chile Death, by Susan Albert, Texas author, Texas setting, a figure of speech in a prayer at a chili cook off caught my fancy: The man was naming various countries that did not have chile on their menus: "The Rooshians don’t know no more ‘bout chile than a hawg knows about a sidesaddle." He was mentioning countries that were deprived of chile.
When we think of animals in Texas history, chances we think of horses and cattle.
Certainly they have been boon companions to pioneers and modern Texans. However, it wasn’t the longhorn that was once suggested as a fitting figure to adorn the state capitol. It was the pig.
According to some historians, had it not been for a swine family, Texas might have been the home of a French empire. In 1841, the Republic of Texas was in a financial bind--it was broke. Special envoy James Hamilton had gone to France to engotiate a $5 million loan. In the meantime, a French diplomat, Alphonse Duboies de Saligny, the only foreign legation in Austin, lived next door to Richard Bullock, who ran a Congress Avenue hotel.
Saligny was a gardener, when he wasn’t busy entertaining important politicialns at the embassy, who took great pride in growing fresh vegetables. On the other hand, neighbor Bullard prized his porkers which ran loose in the streets. When they got in the Frenchman’s garden and destroyed a big part of it, Saligny gave orders to his servant to shoot the hogs when they returned. After the shooting of one porker, the mater became a diplomatic incident.
The loan Saligny was promoting, and for which a bill was intorduced to the Texas Congress, would, in exchange for the loan, grant France three million acres of land. France would bring 8,000 immigrants, build a string of forts, be allowed to work all mines in Texas, and have the sole right of trade with Mexico. Oh yes, and Saligny would be impresario of the French land.
Though President Mirabeau Lamar and vice President David Burnet opposed the idea, Sam Houston and other prominent Texans supported the loan. The Fifth Congress defeated the bill. Five pigs cost the Republic a loan of $5 million.
So, perhaps, Texas owes its salvation to the pig----and it was suggested for the high place of honor, as a monument atop the capitol. Philadelphia banker Gouge, looking at the matter ten years after failure of the loan, made the suggestion. It might remind us that had the loan been approved, France would have been given eventual control of Texas.
Oh, well, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and even Miss Piggy would hardly be a Goddess of Liberty on top the capitol.