Hernando de Soto (1469-1542), a Spanish explorer and wealthy captain, introduced hogs to North America when he brought a small herd of 13 pigs to Florida in 1538. In the spring of 1540, DeSoto’s forces left Florida with their herd of hogs, and headed into Georgia. Upon his death, his estate auctioned off 700 hogs, all the descendants from the original, not including the ones his troops had consumed.
Later, pigs were brought to the colonies from England and Bermuda to raise for food and the sport of wild boar hunting. These wild pigs were the principal food for new settlers, because they were available all the year and more easily caught than wild game and fish. Since the Native Americans had been curing venison by smoking long before the settlers arrived, they taught them to cure meat with salt or “magic white sand.” Their methods of salting and smoking and cooking meat over a slow-burning hardwood fire were adapted by the white man and BBQ was born.
The BBQ method spread to the west in the 1800s, when the vallequeros on the range discovered that inexpensive cuts of beef could taste declicious, when cooked for a long period of time, over a low fire of mesquite or other hardwood.
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