The Pig War, A Bloodless Border Crisis

On the morning of June fifteenth, eighteen fifty-nine, an American farmer named Lyman Cutlar stepped outside his cabin on San Juan Island and found a large black pig rooting through his garden again. He had warned his neighbor before. This time, in a fit of irritation, he raised his rifle and shot it.

The pig belonged to Charles Griffin, an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company. Griffin demanded one hundred dollars in compensation. Cutlar offered ten. Words hardened into threats, and the dispute between two men over a destroyed garden escalated, in a matter of weeks, into a standoff between two nations that nearly became a shooting war.

San Juan Island sat in a geographic gray zone left over from the eighteen forty-six boundary treaty. Both Britain and the United States claimed it. The shooting of a Company pig became the flashpoint both governments had been nervously expecting. American settlers on the island called for military protection. Captain George Pickett, later infamous at Gettysburg, landed sixty-six American soldiers, a force that grew within weeks to more than four hundred soldiers backed by artillery. The British responded with five warships carrying upwards of two thousand men and dozens of guns. At its peak, well over two thousand armed men faced each other across the meadows of San Juan Island.

Cooler heads eventually intervened. General Winfield Scott arrived from Washington City and negotiated a joint military occupation: one hundred American soldiers on the island's south end, one hundred British marines on the north end. They shared the island in an entirely civil way for twelve years, reportedly exchanging dinners and toasting each other's sovereigns at holiday celebrations.

In eighteen seventy-two, Kaiser Wilhelm the First of Germany arbitrated the dispute and awarded the San Juan Islands to the United States. The joint occupation ended peacefully. The only casualty of the entire confrontation had been a pig, one well-documented, and much-discussed, British pig.