The Pig War
(This column was first published in the June 18, 2001 Buffalo News.)
In early June I made my
first foray into Washington state where I spent a week at the University of
Washington Marine Laboratory on San Juan Island. It was a wonderful experience
and I will write more about it in upcoming columns, but this week I review
briefly the time when this remote island captured headlines across the
civilized world.
This column then is
about what came to be known as our "Pig War" with Great Britain. I doubt
that you studied this episode in your history classes.
In the early 1800s the
vast but largely unpopulated region now divided between Canada and the United
States -- the so-called Oregon Country -- was open to settlement by both
British and Americans, an arrangement that would obviously lead to
difficulties.
Finally and despite
President Polk's belligerent "54-40 or Fight" claim to the whole
region, an 1846 treaty set the western U.S.-Canada boundary where it is today,
at the 49th parallel. But with an exception: the British were ceded all of
Vancouver Island.
Unfortunately this left
a small group of islands between Vancouver Island and mainland Washington still
undetermined. Both countries laid claim to San Juan and other nearby islands.
In the early 1850s the
British Hudson's Bay Company established a salmon-curing station and a sheep
ranch on San Juan where some two dozen Americans were already established. This
placed the rival claimants only a few yards apart. (The whole island is only
about fifteen miles long.)
No love was lost
between the two groups, recollections of the Revolutionary War and the War of
1812 still lingering, so it didn't take much to precipitate a crisis.
That confrontation came
when on June 15, 1859, an American settler named Lyman Cutlar killed a pig that
was rooting in his garden. That pig belonged to the Hudson's Bay Company.
British authorities
threatened to arrest Cutlar and the Americans sent for help.
Enter the first of the
famous Americans to take part in this odd little adventure. Captain George
Pickett -- later as a Confederate Major General to lead the unsuccessful uphill
charge at Gettysburg -- arrived with a small command of soldiers.
In response to this
tiny force the British dispatched three warships. But Pickett, outnumbered 2140
to 461 and undergunned with cannons 14 to 167, refused to budge.
Fortunately for both
sides, the British senior officer, Rear Admiral Robert Baynes, advised the
governor of British Columbia that he would not "involve two great nations
in a war over a squabble about a pig."
Next to appear on the
scene was Commanding General Winfield Scott. Scott had recently led our forces
to remarkable victories in the Mexican War. Here, however, he acted solely as a
statesman. He and Baynes agreed to a reduction in forces and the temporary
establishment of separate army posts. Those outposts, the English Camp near the
north end of the island and the American Camp near the south end, now
constitute San Juan Island National Historical Park.
And so the island
remained divided until the Treaty of Washington was signed by Great Britain and
the United States in 1871. Remarkably, that treaty assigned the decision about
ownership of the islands to Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany. On October 21, 1872,
he ruled in favor of the U.S., establishing the international boundary between
the San Juan Islands and Vancouver. A month later the British peacefully
departed.
The Pig War stands in
stark contrast to most confrontations as an episode that, despite the early
threat of military action, was settled through negotiations between reasonable
leaders.
And happily -- except
for the animal itself -- the only casualty was a
pig.-- Gerry Rising