The Pig War of 1859: How a Loose Boar Nearly Set Two Empires at War
On the morning of 15 June 1859, an American settler named Lyman Cutlar walked out to his garden on San Juan Island and found, for perhaps the last time in his patience, a large black pig rooting happily through his potatoes. The pig was not his. It belonged to the Hudson’s Bay Company, the vast British trading concern that ran a sheep ranch on the same small island. Cutlar raised his rifle and shot it dead. It was the only shot fired in what history would come to call the Pig War – a confrontation that within weeks put hundreds of soldiers, five warships, and more than two thousand men on a hair-trigger between the United States and the British Empire.
The whole affair reads like a farce. Underneath it, though, lay a genuine and dangerous ambiguity – a border nobody had ever properly drawn – and the astonishing truth that the only creature to die in the crisis was the pig.
An island nobody could agree on
The trouble began, as so much trouble does, with a vague line on a map. The Oregon Treaty of 1846 had settled the long boundary between British North America and the United States along the 49th parallel, then sent it out “to the middle of the channel” separating the mainland from Vancouver Island, and down through that channel to the sea. Whoever wrote those words had plainly never studied the water they described.
For there was not one channel but two, and between them sat the San Juan Islands. Run the border down the Haro Strait to the west, and the islands were American. Run it down the Rosario Strait to the east, and they were British. Both governments, unsurprisingly, read the sentence in their own favour. By the late 1850s the same rocky, fir-covered island held both a Hudson’s Bay Company sheep station and a scattering of American homesteaders, each side certain it was on home soil, each ignoring the laws of the other.
The shot in the potato patch
Into this quiet standoff wandered the pig. It was a Berkshire boar belonging to Charles Griffin, who ran the company’s sheep ranch, and it had a habit of crossing onto Cutlar’s claim to dig up his garden. On that June morning Cutlar’s patience finally broke and he shot it.
What happened next is the part that made the story immortal. Cutlar, feeling a pang of conscience, went to Griffin and offered to pay for the animal – by most accounts ten dollars. Griffin, insulted, demanded a hundred. When Cutlar refused, the company threatened to have him arrested and hauled before a British magistrate. And there, over a boar and a bag of potatoes, a squabble between two farmers began to climb the ladder toward two empires. The American settlers, alarmed at the idea of being tried under British law on land they believed was American, petitioned the United States Army for protection.
The general who wanted a war
Their petition landed on the desk of exactly the wrong man. Brigadier General William S. Harney, commander of the U.S. Army’s Department of Oregon, was famously belligerent and no friend of the British. He did not counsel calm. He ordered troops to the island.
The officer he sent was a young captain named George Pickett – the same Pickett who, four years later, would lead the doomed charge up Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg. Pickett landed on San Juan with some sixty-six men of the 9th Infantry and staked out a defiant position, reportedly declaring that he would make a “Bunker Hill of it.” It was a magnificent piece of bravado from a force that could have been swept into the sea by a single frigate.
And the frigates came. The British responded by dispatching warships from the Royal Navy’s Pacific station, among them HMS Tribune, to overawe the Americans and, if ordered, to land marines and clear them off. The Governor of Vancouver Island, James Douglas, was itching to do exactly that.
The admiral who refused
By late summer the numbers had become genuinely frightening. The Americans, reinforced again and again on Harney’s orders, had swelled to around 460 soldiers dug in behind earthworks with fourteen cannon. Arrayed against them in the channel were five British warships carrying some 70 guns and more than 2,000 men. A single nervous sentry, a single misheard order, and the two greatest English-speaking powers on earth might have blundered into a war – over a pig.
That it did not happen owes a great deal to one cool-headed man. Rear Admiral Robert L. Baynes, commander of the Royal Navy in the Pacific, arrived to find Governor Douglas demanding that he land his marines. Baynes flatly refused. He would not, he is remembered as saying, “involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig.” The local commanders on both sides, wiser than the politicians above them, quietly agreed to hold their fire. For weeks the soldiers and sailors glowered at one another across the water while nobody pulled a trigger. The men, by some accounts, even exchanged gifts and visited one another’s camps.
Peace, and a pair of camps
When word of the crisis finally reached Washington, the government was horrified to learn that a rogue general had nearly started a war on the far side of the continent. President Buchanan sent the aging hero of the age, General Winfield Scott, all the way to the Pacific to calm things down. Scott negotiated a sensible compromise: both nations would reduce their forces to a token company each and jointly occupy the island until the boundary could be settled by diplomacy.
So began one of the stranger arrangements in military history. For the next twelve years the British kept an “English Camp” at the north end of San Juan Island and the Americans an “American Camp” at the south. The two garrisons lived in easy peace, holding joint celebrations, sharing meals and holidays, and competing mostly at athletics and hospitality. The soldiers sent to fight a war spent it, instead, being neighbours.
Why the story still matters
The dispute finally ended not with a battle but with a referee. In 1871 Britain and the United States agreed to submit the boundary question to a neutral arbiter, and they chose Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany. In 1872 his commission ruled for the American line down the Haro Strait, and the San Juan Islands became, and remain, part of Washington State. The British struck their flag at the English Camp and sailed away. Not a shot had been fired in anger in thirteen years, and the war’s only casualty was still the pig.
It is tempting to keep the Pig War as a punchline, filed beside history’s other delightfully absurd episodes. But there is a quieter lesson underneath the comedy. The crisis was manufactured almost entirely by proud, headstrong men – a general who wanted a fight, a governor who wanted his island, a captain who wanted his Bunker Hill. What saved the day were the people who refused to be swept along: an admiral who would not spill blood over a boar, and two sets of ordinary soldiers who found it far easier to share an island than to kill for it. Great wars have been touched off by less than a shot in a potato patch. That this one was not is a small, stubborn monument to the men who chose, when every incentive pulled the other way, to simply keep the peace.
Sources & further reading:
- Pig War (1859) – Wikipedia
- Lyman Cutlar touches off Pig War between U.S. and Great Britain on June 15, 1859 – HistoryLink.org
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