What happened
In 1846, Britain and the United States agreed to split the Pacific Northwest along the 49th parallel. The treaty said the border would run “to the middle of the channel” that separates the mainland from Vancouver Island, then south to the Pacific. The trouble was that there were two channels, with the San Juan Islands sitting between them. Both countries claimed the islands.
By 1859, San Juan Island had a sheep farm run by the British Hudson’s Bay Company and 18 American settlers who had staked claims on its grazing land. The British saw the settlers as squatters. On June 15, one of them, Lyman Cutlar, found a pig rooting in his garden and shot it. The pig belonged to the Hudson’s Bay Company.
When British authorities threatened to arrest Cutlar, the settlers asked the U.S. Army for protection. Brig. Gen. William Harney sent Captain George Pickett and 64 soldiers, who landed on July 27. The British governor, James Douglas, answered with warships.
By the end of August, 461 American soldiers were dug in with 14 field cannons and eight more guns taken off a navy ship. Facing them were British warships carrying 52 guns between them. The British admiral, Lambert Baynes, refused to attack. He said he would not “involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig.”
The standoff got oddly friendly. Tourists came over from Victoria on excursion boats to watch the British gunnery drills, and officers from both sides went to church together and shared whisky and cigars.
That fall, General Winfield Scott arrived and talked both sides down. They agreed to a joint military occupation while the diplomats sorted it out, with American soldiers at one end of the island and British Royal Marines at the other. That arrangement lasted 12 years. In 1872 an arbitration commission, ruling through Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany, drew the border through Haro Strait and gave the islands to the United States.
The twist
The only casualty of the Pig War was the pig.
Sources
- National Park Service, The Pig War. San Juan Island National Historical Park
- HistoryLink.org, San Juan Island Pig War, Part 1. Free online encyclopedia of Washington State history
- HistoryLink.org, San Juan Island Pig War, Part 2