What do you think of this fact?
Some wars start with an assassination. This one started in a garden. On June 15, 1859, American settler Lyman Cutlar found a pig rooting in his garden on San Juan Island and shot it.
Whose island is it anyway?
The pig belonged to the Hudson’s Bay Company, a British trading company that ran a sheep farm on the island. The real problem was older than the pig. An 1846 treaty had set the border between the US and British territory at the 49th parallel and ran it through a channel. But there were actually two straits, Haro and Rosario, and both countries claimed the San Juan Islands sitting between them.
According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, Cutlar offered 10 dollars for the pig. Charles Griffin, a British employee of the company, wanted more and reported him. British authorities threatened to arrest Cutlar, and the Americans asked their army for protection.
From pig to warships
Things escalated fast. Captain George Pickett landed with 64 soldiers on July 27, 1859. The British sent warships. By August 31, according to the National Park Service, 461 Americans were camped on the island with 14 field cannons, plus eight naval guns. The British had 52 guns in total.
Then the grown-ups showed up. US General Winfield Scott arrived in October 1859 and negotiated with British Governor James Douglas. Both sides pulled back most of their troops and agreed to share the island. That joint military occupation lasted 12 years.
In 1871, the question went to German Kaiser Wilhelm I, who handed it to a three-man commission. After nearly a year of meetings in Geneva, it ruled on October 21, 1872 that the islands belonged to the United States.
Bonus fact: British Rear Admiral Lambert Baynes refused to escalate. He said he would not “involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig.”
No human died in the whole affair. The pig was the only casualty, and it gave its name to a border dispute between two world powers.