root hog or die: do the necessary work or suffer the consequences
This is one of several expressions introduced by Davy Crockett, who wrote in his autobiography, "We were therefore determined to go on the old saying, root hog or die." This adage was probably already well-known to people living in the frontier areas of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio before Crockett made it familiar to a wider audience. Western frontiersmen were often in dire economic straits and had to root around for whatever they needed to survive.
In early settlement days, hogs were commonly let loose to forage for themselves rather than being fed. Those who raised both pigs and corn sometimes turned the hogs loose in the cornfield to eat their way through the unharvested corn, a practice known as hogging down a cornfield. This system of feeding did away with the labor of harvesting and processing the corn before it went to the hogs anyway. Hogs were also sent out into the stubble of harvested fields to chew it down. Rooting for food among the stubble was much harder work for the pigs than chewing their way through full cornfields and seems more in keeping with the basic meaning of root hog or die—work or starve.
Although the phrase has become less common since the late twentieth century, it still appears occasionally in print, usually as a self-conscious regionalism. Root-hog-or-die is sometimes used as an adjective, for example in this sentence from the Toronto Globe and Mail for June 9, 1976: "Many of that generation . . . no longer put up with that root-hog-or-die kind of motivation." "Root Hog or Die" is also the title of a recent rockabilly album by Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper.
The opposite of root hog or die is live high on the hog.