A farmer shoots a potato-eating pig

In an attempt to meet the insatiable demands of Britain’s pork-devouring carnivores, around ten million pigs are slaughtered each year in the UK alone – many of them returning to consciousness after they are stunned only to be knifed and cast into boiling water while still alive. Further millions destined for British plates meet their fate in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and other European countries. This might lead one to the conclusion that, as lives go, those of pigs are of little significance to the British (vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians, Jews, Muslims, Jains, Seventh Day Adventists, some Buddhists and Hindus, and sundry others notwithstanding). Given this, it makes it all the more remarkable that it was the fatal shooting of a single pig back in 1859 that all but caused a war between Britain and the United States, and pushed Canada further along the road to independence.

The dispute had its roots in an ambiguously worded agreement signed by Britain and the US in 1846. The Oregon Treaty was supposed to have set a definitive boundary between the United States and what was then known as British North America (today’s Canada). There had been particular friction over the path of the frontier at its western end. The treaty made it plain that the 49th parallel should be used to delineate the two territories.

That was all well and good on the mainland, but when it came to divvying up the islands off the west coast, it all became a bit more tenuous. Britain was to have the enormous Vancouver Island in its entirety, since very little of it actually extended south of the 49th parallel. However, the issue of who had sovereignty over a clutch of much smaller islands in the gulf waters between Vancouver and Vancouver Island proved harder to resolve, since legitimate arguments could be made by both sides as to their ownership. The situation was further complicated by the lack of an accurate map of the islands and the passages between them.

To get around this, the architects of the Oregon Treaty had fudged the issue, stating that the border should run through ‘the middle of the channel separating the continent from Vancouver’s Island’. Unfortunately, there are two channels to which this wording might be said to refer. If the border ran through the Rosario Strait – as the British maintained – then the island group that included San Juan, Orcas and Lopez belonged to Britain. However, if the wording was interpreted as indicating the Haro Strait, then those islands would become US territory. A commission was set up to settle the issue. Britain offered a compromise, in which she took San Juan and offered the remaining islands to the Americans. This was rejected. The commission was suspended.

As a result, an uneasy stand-off took place on San Juan, an island that measures just 55 square miles. By the time of the porcine-related incident, Britain was well represented on the island by a good many settlers as well as the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had substantial salmon-curing and sheep-farming interests there. The Americans, by contrast, had no more than thirty of their citizens established on San Juan. Somewhat surprisingly, relations between the two sets of incomers were reported to be highly cordial.

That all came to an abrupt end on 15 June 1859. An Irishman called Charles Griffin, who worked on the island for the Hudson’s Bay Company, kept some free-range black pigs. One of these, a hefty individual by all accounts, trotted happily onto the land of an American farmer called Lyman Cutlar and began digging up and eating his potatoes. Cutlar took exception to this. It was not the first occasion on which pigs had pillaged his crops and he had had enough of it. He raised his gun and shot the pig dead.

Naturally enough, Griffin was not at all happy about this turn of events and sought Cutlar out. An altercation ensued, the details of which are less than certain (the gist of Griffin’s argument was apparently that Cutlar should have done more to keep the potatoes out of his pig). We do know that Cutlar offered Griffin $10 in compensation. It was at this point that things began to escalate almost out of control and certainly out of proportion to the injury suffered (unless, of course, you were the pig). The Irishman turned down Cutlar’s offer, demanding $100 instead. Cutlar refused to pay what he felt was a wildly exaggerated sum, at which point Griffin reported him to the relevant authorities (those being the relevant British authorities). Cutlar suddenly found himself in danger of being arrested. His fellow countrymen rallied round and sent a petition to the commander of the Department of Oregon, Brigadier-General William S. Harney, calling upon him to protect them militarily.

Harney was no fan of the British, to say the least, and relished the opportunity to confront them. On 27 July, a company of 66 soldiers of the US 9th Infantry were sent to San Juan with orders to repulse any retaliatory landing by British forces. James Douglas, who was at the time the governor of both the Colony of Vancouver Island and the Colony of British Colombia, was told of the incursion and his response was to dispatch three warships to the island. It was the beginning of a build-up of forces on both sides. The British far outnumbered their opponents though the Americans had the advantage of actually occupying San Juan. By 10 August, the British had five warships bristling with 70 guns and carrying 2,140 troops facing the Americans’ 14 cannon and 461 soldiers. Both sides were simply waiting for the other to fire the first shot.

When the commander-in-chief of the British navy in the Pacific, Rear-Admiral Robert L. Baynes, arrived on the scene, Douglas ordered him to send marines onto the island to drive the American troops off it. It was at this late juncture that common sense prevailed, as well as a long-overdue sense of perspective.

Baynes refused point-blank to carry out Douglas’ command, declaring that he would not ‘involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig’.

It was only at this point that the governments of the two nations became aware of what was going on in their name. President James Buchanan and Prime Minister Lord Stanley, both of whom were keen to prevent military conflict, demanded that negotiations be set in motion. While these were established it was agreed that the British would station around 100 soldiers on the north coast of San Juan while the Americans had the same number in the far south. By all accounts, relations between the members of the opposing camps on the island returned to the genial state that had prevailed before Lyman Cutlar had lost his temper with the pig.

Like the mills of God, the mills of diplomacy grind slowly, and the dispute would not be resolved for another 13 years. The US and Britain signed the Treaty of Washington in 1871, one element of which was an agreement to settle the dispute by appointing international arbitrators. Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany (grandfather of Wilhelm II of World War I fame) was duly chosen to lead the commission. A year later, the three-man adjudication team he declared that the Haro Strait should be the designated frontier between British North America and the United States, meaning that San Juan fell entirely within US territory. Britain withdrew her troops on 25 November 1872. By that time, both the Colony of Vancouver Island and the Colony of British Colombia had joined the brand-new Dominion of Canada.

While the loss of an obscure island off the coast of one of their many colonies might have been a pill that caused the British a moment’s bitterness in swallowing, it was very hard indeed for their dominion’s politicians and populace to take. Although the dispute had the virtue of settling once and for all the frontier between the United States and Canada, the fiasco left the Canadians – already upset by some of the contents of the Oregon Treaty – feeling that their masters in London had not looked after their interests. The Pig War was thus another stepping stone towards Canadian independence from Britain, a journey that would eventually be completed in 1982.