How a Pig Nearly Started a War: The Bizarre Tale of the Pig War

On June fifteenth, 1859, an American farmer named Lyman Cutlar shot a pig. That one act, over a potato patch on a tiny island you've never heard of, brought the United States and the British Empire—the two great global powers of the day—to the absolute brink of war. It's a different kind of historical madness than the Strasbourg Dancing Plague we talked about in the last episode. With the dancing, nobody could figure out why hundreds of people were compelled to move. Here, everyone knew exactly why, and it was still completely, utterly insane. So here's the setup. The San Juan Islands, a beautiful little archipelago between what's now Washington state and Vancouver Island.

The problem was, a treaty from 1846 was… vague. It set the border in the channel, but there are two channels. So both the U.S. and Britain claimed the islands. American settlers, like our farmer Lyman Cutlar, started moving in. And so did the British, mostly employees of the massive Hudson's Bay Company, like Charles Griffin, the owner of the pig. The pig, a large black boar, had a bad habit of rooting around in Cutlar's potato patch. On June fifteenth, Cutlar had enough. He shot it. He went to Griffin to apologize, offered him ten dollars for the pig. Griffin, furious, demanded a hundred. That's over three thousand dollars today.

Cutlar told him to get lost. Griffin went to the British authorities. Cutlar and the other Americans went to the U.S. military. And this is where a squabble becomes a crisis. The American commander in the region sends in troops to "protect" the settlers. He sends Captain George Pickett. Yes, that George Pickett, the one who’d later lead the disastrous charge at Gettysburg. Pickett lands with sixty-six soldiers and declares, dramatically, "We'll make a Bunker Hill of it." The British, understandably, are not impressed. The local governor, James Douglas, dispatches three warships. Then five. By August, you have five British warships with over two thousand men and seventy cannons staring down four hundred and sixty-one American soldiers with fourteen cannons.

All because of a dead pig. This is the moment where we've seen the pattern before, right? A small, localized incident—an assassination, a ship sinking, a border skirmish—becomes a pretext. It's the spark that lights the fuse of a much bigger powder keg of nationalism and imperial ambition. Think Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. A single shot that rewrites the map of the world. But here’s where the analogy breaks down, and where the story gets really good. Because in 1914, the system was built to escalate. All the treaties and alliances were tripwires. In 1859, two key people decided to cut the wire. The first was the British commander on the scene, Rear Admiral Robert Baynes.

He arrives, sees the massive fleet, sees Pickett's little encampment, and gets his orders: land the marines and start a fight. And he refuses. He looks at the whole absurd situation and says—and this is a direct quote—he will not "involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig." An admiral who chose sanity over orders. Meanwhile, word finally reaches Washington D.C., and President James Buchanan panics. The U.S. is already fracturing over slavery and is just a couple of years from civil war. The absolute LAST thing he needs is a full-blown war with the British Empire. So he sends his top general, Winfield Scott, to go fix it.

Scott gets there, and he and the British governor work out maybe the most civilized solution to a military standoff ever. They agree to a joint occupation. Each country would be allowed to maintain a camp on the island with no more than one hundred men. For the next twelve years, the U.S. Army and the Royal Marines shared an island. They had separate camps, but reports say they got along famously, visiting each other's messes and celebrating each other's national holidays. Imagine that. Finally, in 1872, everyone decided it was time to settle the border for good. And they didn't go to war. They went to an arbitrator.

They asked a neutral third party, German Emperor Wilhelm the First, to look at the original treaty and make a final ruling. He studied the maps, listened to the arguments, and in October 1872, he awarded the San Juan Islands to the United States. The British flag was lowered for the last time, and the Royal Marines sailed away. The only casualty of the entire twelve-year conflict remained the pig. It's so easy to laugh at this story. A war over a pig. But the point isn't how absurdly it started. The point is how sanely it ended. In a century of empires and armies looking for a fight, this is a story about commanders and presidents actively looking for an off-ramp.

It’s a reminder that escalation feels inevitable, but it’s always, always a choice.