Hogs at Cold Harbor

The shapes are boulders. While the photographer probably placed the rifle on the body, I doubt he moved it from where it fell.

And yes, the free-ranging hog was not just a southern thing. In those days, it didn't make much sense to keep hogs penned up when there was plenty for them to eat in the nearby forests and you didn't have to feed them all summer. In the more remote areas, it was likely that not all were rounded up and those that weren't turned feral.

The hog is a strange animal; it doesn't stop growing until it dies -- often from its own excess weight. And no fence ever built can keep a grown hog in or out of anything it really wants; but all it really wants is food -- if it's eating well outside of your garden, it will stay out.

As Border mentioned, a hog, like a cat and few other animals, will go feral almost immediately when turned loose. Few animals are smarter than a hog.

Here's a website about the moved body.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/cwpcam/cwcam3c.html
 
Never tried wild boar. I hear it has a different flavor than domestic pork. Like venison in Georgia tastes nothing like venison in Texas. Depends on the primary food, I guess.
 
Am familiar with that spat, dvrmte. Looks like the photos were of the same rearranged body. However, moving a disembowelled body doesn't sound like something someone would care to do, no matter how dramatic the picture would be.
 
Never tried wild boar. I hear it has a different flavor than domestic pork. Like venison in Georgia tastes nothing like venison in Texas. Depends on the primary food, I guess.

The wild boar we had was very clean tasting and had a slight flavor almost like herbs--they were shot around Snyder, way in the boonies, so I'm suspecting a heavy diet of weeds and mesquite beans.
 
It's the "not thinking about it" part that would be my downfall, as I sat there eyeing what I knew to be a plate of dead worms.
 
Am familiar with that spat, dvrmte. Looks like the photos were of the same rearranged body. However, moving a disembowelled body doesn't sound like something someone would care to do, no matter how dramatic the picture would be.

I didn't mean that they moved that body. Gawd, I hope not. Gardner was trying to put a story with the pictures and evidently ran short of bodies in the right place.
 
It has been shown to my satisfaction that the sharpshooter's den photo and the one in the field are the same soldier and one of the photos had been staged. My point was that no one was going to move a disembowelled body. Placing a bayoneted rifle on it was one thing. Moving it was another.
 
I went on a wild hog hunt at the Savannah Wildlife Refuge with my cousin about ten years ago. I brought my treestand thinking I'd climb a tree since I'd be hunting with a bow. You could use a shotgun or bow.

Well it turned out there weren't many trees because we were hunting on islands in the river that were once antebellum rice fields. We went by boat and I dropped my cousin and brother off on individual islands so we could cover the most territory. I learned real quick I didn't need a treestand and I needed a shotgun. Some of the grass was head high and visibility was less than ten feet in some places. Quicksand or quickmud, whatever you want to call it, was everywhere. I went in up to my waist several times. In some areas you could walk on the old rice field dikes. They were about two feet higher than the surrounding muck. That was where the hogs liked to travel and after my cousin showed me his scar where a hog cut him on one of those dikes, I was on edge. The next day I borrowed my cousins shotgun. Bows aren't the thing to use to defend yourself in close quarters, I had a big knife though.

I only saw a bunch of baby hogs the whole time I was there. They weighed about five pounds each. My cousin shot two the first day. Imagine a sixteen foot aluminum boat with a 25hp motor trying to move three men about 200 lbs. each and two hogs weighing 275 and 325 lbs.

It barely floated. Two more inches and we would have sunk. We were nearly out of gas and the tide was going out. The boat ramp was behind an island that was about one mile long. To get behind it the shortest way meant going across a shallow sandbar that was about to be above water due to the rapidly dropping tide. We had to get out and push the boat to get over it. Going downstream of the island and going around the other side of it would have run me out of gas. If I ran out of gas I'd probably have ended up somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean because of the strong tidal current. I should mention the alligators and that it was dark also while we were pushing the boat.

Well we made it back that day. The next day we planned on hunting half a day. You have to anchor your boat off the bank because if the tide goes out it can leave your boat high and dry. We all hunted the same island that day. When we came back the tide had dropped about six feet and my boat was sitting on top of an old rice trunk. That's a wooden contraption used to adust the water level in the rice fields. My boat was a good two feet out of the water and perfectly balanced on the structure. The half day hunt turned into an all day one, due to waiting for the tide to come back in.

Where was I going with this story??? Oh yeah, in the muck wild onions grew in thick mats and the hogs loved them. The meat tasted of onion. Not bad tasting though if you trimmed the fat.

My cousin is a hired killer of sorts. He is often hired to capture or kill hogs and deer that depredate the farms in the area. He usually traps the hogs and fatten them up for a few weeks before he slaughters them. He has a small processing place set up behind his house. What he doesn't eat he gives to charity.

Wild hogs done that way are excellent eating. They won't have the huge hams and their shoulders are much larger than domestic hogs. As someone said earlier, hogs revert to their wild state quickly.

dvrmte

This is what the area looked like, alligators included.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3553/3357597390_a00516005e.jpg&imgrefurl=http://flickr.com/photos/28975966%40N07/3357597390/&usg=__HbnW0p145FPQoFTDLHByPd_1zKU=&h=187&w=500&sz=128&hl=en&start=34&zoom=0&tbnid=RyVwFapdiX4VAM:&tbnh=49&tbnw=130&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsavannah%2Briver%2Brice%2Bfields%26start%3D20%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1
 
Could well have been the hogs. The puzzling thing to me about this photo is that there appears to be a line of automobiles in the background.

Hogwash?

Will


There are two images of this poor soldier, one with the background whited out, and the image posted here are llinks

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92504626/resource/

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/91732547/resource/

The image is supposedly a Federal soldier, and the location is listed as he Wheatfield.

But yeah, sure, its a totally faked modern image i found and just slaped up there...
 
Cold Harbor

There are fifty seven post about this question and I have learn more about what Hogs is and not but what about Cold Harbor? Were soldiers eaten or is that a question that no one seems to know.
Hell, I have hunted Wild hogs all my adult life and know well their habits but what I was hoping that someone whom might know of confirmed reports. I inuderstand what some history indicates. I had in my pocession a book called Hogs at Cold Harbor very well written by someone named Richard MA but it has been misplaced. He went into details of who was there and how men encountered the tusks. It was a cruel way to face death while lieing needing water and suffering from wounds. :hmmm:
 
If you see a wild pig, shoot it. They reproduce at the speed of light and are a real problem here in Texas. I remember seeing a book online that Charles Dale mentioned in post #79.
 
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