The Pig War: How One Dead Pig Nearly Started a War Between Britain and the US in 1859

On the morning of June 15, 1859, an American settler named Lyman Cutlar stepped out of his cabin on San Juan Island and found a large black pig rooting through his potato patch. It was not the first time. Furious, he picked up his rifle and shot it dead.

The pig belonged to the Hudson’s Bay Company, the British trading giant that ran a sheep farm nearby. Within six weeks, that dead animal had drawn a company of United States infantry onto the island, three Royal Navy warships into the harbor below them, and two of the most powerful nations on earth to within a few nervous decisions of a shooting war.

Nobody fired. The standoff remembered as the Pig War ended with diplomacy, a twelve-year joint occupation, and a ruling by a German emperor. The pig was the only casualty.

A border drawn through fog

The trouble began with a single sentence. In June 1846 the Oregon Treaty settled a long quarrel between Britain and the United States over the Pacific Northwest. The border would follow the 49th parallel west from the Rocky Mountains "to the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver’s Island," then run south through that channel and the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Pacific.

The diplomats who wrote those words in Washington did not deal with an awkward fact of geography. Between Vancouver Island and the mainland sits a scatter of islands, the San Juans, and there is not one channel through them but several. Haro Strait runs along the western side, close to Vancouver Island. Rosario Strait runs along the eastern side, nearer the mainland. Americans read the treaty as meaning Haro, which would put the islands in the United States. The British read it as meaning Rosario, which would make them British.

In 1846 few outsiders lived on the islands, long home to Coast Salish peoples, and settling the main border without a fight seemed worth more than a few rocky islands. The same sort of map-room quarrel over remote land played out again and again in that era, from the Pacific Northwest to Clipperton Island, a speck of coral that France and Mexico argued over for decades.

For a decade the question simmered. A joint boundary commission met in 1857, with Royal Navy captain James Prevost speaking for Britain and Archibald Campbell for the United States. Prevost argued that only Rosario Strait fit the treaty’s wording. Campbell insisted on Haro. Prevost then offered a compromise line down San Juan Channel, which would have given the Americans every major island except San Juan itself. Campbell refused. San Juan, facing Victoria across Haro Strait, was the island the British cared about most.

Sheep, squatters and a boar with a habit

While the commissioners argued, the Hudson’s Bay Company moved in. It set up a salmon-curing station on San Juan Island in 1851, and in December 1853, at the direction of James Douglas, the company’s chief officer in the region and the governor of the colony of Vancouver Island, it founded Belle Vue Sheep Farm on the island’s southern end. The farm planted a British claim on the ground, and it thrived. In six years the flock grew from 1,369 sheep to more than 4,500.

The farm’s manager, Charles Griffin, kept several Berkshire boars, which were allowed to roam. American officials on the mainland saw the farm as British property on American soil. A customs collector demanded duty on its animals, and one night in 1855 a Whatcom County sheriff landed with a party of bidders, rounded up dozens of company rams and auctioned them off on the beach to cover unpaid county taxes.

Then came the settlers. After the short-lived Fraser River gold rush in British Columbia, a few dozen disappointed miners drifted onto San Juan Island in 1858 and early 1859, staking claims on the company’s best grazing land. The National Park Service counts 18 Americans on the island by the spring of 1859. Douglas regarded them as squatters.

One of them was Lyman Cutlar, who arrived in April 1859 and began scratching out a farm near Belle Vue. His potato patch was not fully fenced, and one of Griffin’s boars kept getting in. When he shot it, Cutlar went to Griffin, admitted what he had done and offered $10 to make it right. Griffin said the animal was worth $100. Cutlar refused. A party of senior company officials then confronted him, and Cutlar came away convinced that the British meant to arrest him and take him to Victoria for trial.

A flag, a general and a petition

No one ever tried to arrest Cutlar. But his neighbors decided to make a point anyway. On the Fourth of July, fourteen men, nearly the whole American population of the island, gathered at the cabin of the deputy customs inspector, Paul Hubbs, for speeches, toasts and the raising of the Stars and Stripes on a new 55-foot flagpole on a hill above the British farm.

On July 9, Brigadier General William S. Harney, commander of the U.S. Army’s Department of Oregon, visited the island. Harney was a hot-tempered veteran with no love for the British, and when the settlers told him about the pig and the threats, he suggested they put a request in writing.

The petition, drawn up on July 11 and signed by 22 settlers, did not mention the pig at all. Instead it asked for protection from raids by "Northern Indians," the canoe parties from farther up the coast that did sometimes strike settlements in the islands and around Puget Sound. On July 18, Harney ordered Captain George Pickett to take his company of the 9th Infantry from Fort Bellingham to San Juan Island.

Pickett lands

Pickett was a 34-year-old Virginian who had finished last in his class at West Point and served with distinction in the Mexican War. His company, 64 men by the National Park Service count, came ashore on July 27, 1859, and made camp on the hillside above the company’s wharf on Griffin Bay, just north of Belle Vue farm.

Pickett then posted a proclamation that turned a local grudge into an international crisis. "This being United States territory," it read in part, "no laws, other than those of the United States, nor courts, except such as are held by virtue of said laws, will be recognized or allowed on this island."

In Victoria, Governor Douglas was outraged. With the Royal Navy’s Pacific commander away, Douglas was also acting as vice admiral, and he sent Captain Geoffrey Phipps Hornby with the 31-gun steam frigate HMS Tribune to stop the Americans from landing more troops or building fortifications. Tribune anchored in Griffin Bay on July 29. HMS Plumper arrived with Royal Marines aboard, and Prevost brought the corvette HMS Satellite. Pickett, outgunned many times over, refused to leave and wrote to Harney for help. According to one widely repeated account, he promised to make a Bunker Hill of it.

The captain who waited

The man who did most to keep the Pig War bloodless was probably Hornby. Douglas pressed him to land marines alongside the Americans, a move that would have put British and American soldiers face to face on a small island. Royal Navy policy at the time favored restraint, and the captains at Victoria knew their admiral believed in it. On August 3 the three British captains met Pickett at his camp. Hornby came away convinced that the American was not bluffing, and he decided, against the governor’s wishes, to do nothing more until the admiral returned.

That admiral was Robert Lambert Baynes, commander of British naval forces in the Pacific. When he reached Victoria and took in the situation, he was appalled. He told Douglas that he would not "involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig."

He would not "involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig."

The Americans, meanwhile, kept arriving. On August 10, Lieutenant Colonel Silas Casey landed with 171 more men and took command. When Casey went to Victoria to talk with Baynes, the old admiral, a veteran of the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, declined to leave his 84-gun ship of the line, HMS Ganges, to meet him.

Dig in, and invite the tourists

By August 31 there were 461 Americans camped in the woods north of Belle Vue, with 14 field cannons. Eight 32-pounder naval guns were hauled off the Massachusetts for a fortification dug under the supervision of a young engineer, Second Lieutenant Henry Martyn Robert. Seventeen years later Robert would publish a small guide to running meetings, Robert’s Rules of Order, which is still in print. His earthwork, known today as Robert’s Redoubt, survives remarkably intact.

Out in the bay, the British fleet grew to five warships. Estimates of its strength vary by source, from the 52 guns counted by the National Park Service to 70 guns and more than 2,000 men in other accounts.

And then the strangest part of the Pig War began. With both sides determined not to shoot first, the standoff settled into something close to a social season. Excursion boats brought sightseers over from Victoria to watch. Officers from both sides attended church services together aboard HMS Satellite, and shared whisky and cigars at Charles Griffin’s house at Belle Vue.

Old Fuss and Feathers goes west

It took weeks for word of the standoff to reach Washington and London, and both capitals were alarmed. President James Buchanan, already facing a country sliding toward civil war, sent the Army’s commanding general, Winfield Scott, to calm things down. Scott, nicknamed Old Fuss and Feathers for his love of military ceremony, had defused two earlier border crises with Britain in the late 1830s.

After a six-week voyage from New York by way of the Isthmus of Panama, Scott reached the San Juans in October. Corresponding with Douglas, he got both sides to pull back their reinforcements to token forces, and proposed a joint military occupation until the boundary could be settled, and both governments approved it in November. Harney was rebuked and later reassigned.

On March 21, 1860, a detachment of Royal Marines landed on the island’s northwest coast and built a camp on Garrison Bay, as far from the Americans as they could get. It became known as English Camp. The marines found the ground covered by an enormous shell midden, generations of discarded clam shells left by the Coast Salish people who had lived on the bay long before any European arrived.

Twelve years of neighbors

The joint occupation was supposed to be temporary. It lasted twelve years. The Americans stayed on their windswept prairie at the south end of the island; the British built a tidy camp on the sheltered bay, with a blockhouse, barracks, a commissary and a formal flower garden meant to remind them of home.

Relations between the two camps were famously friendly. The garrisons visited each other for national holidays and held athletic contests. On the Fourth of July in 1867, the American camp hosted British troops and the families from English Camp for a day of picnics, horse races and sack races. Park rangers like to say that the biggest threat to peace on the island in those years was the amount of alcohol available.

Elsewhere, history moved on. The American Civil War came and went. Pickett resigned his commission in 1861, joined the Confederacy and gave his name to the doomed charge at Gettysburg in July 1863. Hornby rose to become Admiral of the Fleet, the highest rank in the Royal Navy. In 1866 Vancouver Island merged with British Columbia, and in 1871 British Columbia joined the new Dominion of Canada.

The emperor decides

That same year, Britain and the United States signed the Treaty of Washington to settle a list of disputes left over from the Civil War era, and they agreed to hand the San Juan question to an outside arbiter: Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany. The kaiser referred it to a commission of three experts, who studied the arguments in Geneva for nearly a year. On October 21, 1872, the commission ruled for the United States. The border would run through Haro Strait, and the San Juan Islands would be American.

On November 25, 1872, the Royal Marines lowered their flag and left English Camp. The last American troops followed by July 1874. The only blood shed in the whole affair had come from Griffin’s boar.

It is tempting to treat the Pig War as a punch line, and it does belong on the short list of history’s most absurd conflicts, alongside the Great Emu War, in which Australian soldiers with machine guns lost a campaign against flightless birds. But it is also a genuine case study in how wars do not start. At several points a single officer could have escalated, and each time someone chose to wait.

What the island remembers

Today both camps are part of San Juan Island National Historical Park, created by Congress in 1966. At English Camp, the blockhouse, barracks, commissary and formal garden still stand on Garrison Bay, and park rangers raise and lower a British Union Jack there every day as a gesture to history.

At American Camp, only a handful of buildings remain, among them an officers’ quarters, but Robert’s Redoubt is still there on the ridge, looking out over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. A visitor center that opened in June 2022 tells the story of the dispute alongside the much longer history of the Coast Salish peoples, whose land both empires were claiming.

The open prairie around the camp holds a quieter survivor. The island marble butterfly, a small white butterfly with green marbling under its wings, was thought to be extinct for about 90 years before it was rediscovered there in 1998. American Camp is home to its only known viable population, and it was listed as endangered in 2020.

Other places once used by soldiers, like Kahoʻolawe, the Hawaiian island that served as a Navy bombing range before it was returned to Hawaii, now carry their military past alongside slow efforts at restoration. You can find the Pig War, and many other turning points, on our interactive History Globe.

For a war that never happened, the Pig War left a surprising amount behind: a border, a county, a famous book of parliamentary rules, a rare butterfly’s last refuge, and a British flag flying every day over American soil. Not bad for one pig in a potato patch.

Further reading