The Pig War

 

I. Two Hungry Houses

Here is a thing about empires: they are never content. Give an empire a coast and it wants the interior. Give it the interior and it starts eyeing the next ocean over. By the middle of the nineteenth century, two of the hungriest empires in the history of the world had arrived, from opposite directions, at the same wet and beautiful corner of the continent. Neither had any intention of leaving.

The Americans had a phrase for what they felt. Manifest Destiny. It sounds like something carved over the door of a bank, and in a way it was. It meant that God Himself had drawn the map, that the continent had been set aside for them like a plate at a family dinner, and that the only question was how long it would take to eat. In Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History, Frederick Merk put the whole creed in a single sentence: expansion was ordained by Heaven. Once you believe that, you don’t have to feel bad about much. They even gave the idea a face, a stately goddess in flowing robes called Columbia, who looked out over the western horizon with the serene expression of a woman who has never once been told no.

The British were not serene. They were irritated, which is worse. Britain had circled the globe more than once. Her ships had mapped half the world’s coastlines, and her trading posts and her colonies were the stitching that held the whole ragged quilt together. She was not about to hand a piece of it to a bunch of upstarts, however heavenly their credentials.

So there was Oregon Country. It was a huge, green, rain-drenched place that would one day be Washington and Oregon and Idaho and a piece of British Columbia, and for the moment nobody could say whose it was. In 1818 the two powers had signed a treaty of Joint Occupation, which is a diplomat’s way of saying we’ll both pretend to share until one of us doesn’t feel like pretending anymore.

Mostly it was Britain doing the real occupying, and she did it through the Hudson’s Bay Company. The HBC was a fur monopoly in the same way the Roman army was a neighborhood watch. From its headquarters at Fort Vancouver it ran the country like a private estate, and it was the Crown’s arm in everything but name.

II. The Wagons

Then the wagons started coming.

They came along the Oregon Trail through the 1840s, first a trickle and then a flood. Thousands of Americans walked two thousand miles on blistered feet, burying their children in shallow graves along the Platte, until they reached the end of the road with nothing left but their stubbornness and a deed to a parcel of land. They didn’t think of themselves as soldiers of empire. They thought of themselves as farmers who wanted a better life. But there were a great many of them, and they all sang the same song, and one by one the Company’s neat commercial arrangement stopped being a commercial arrangement at all. It was now a question of who rules here, and when that question comes up, someone eventually has to answer it.

In 1846, in Washington and London, men in good coats answered it on paper. The Oregon Treaty was signed on the fifteenth of June, and it drew a line across the continent. President Polk had won election two years earlier by roaring “Fifty-four forty or fight!”, a slogan that referred to a line of latitude so far north it would have swallowed Oregon Country whole. (Politicians will promise you anything in an election year. It is, in fact, almost all they do.) What he got was the forty-ninth parallel, and it was good enough. Nobody had to fight. Everyone went home pleased with themselves.

They shouldn’t have been.

III. The Channel

Somewhere in that treaty, in the part where the line left the mainland and went out to sea, the negotiators wrote that the boundary would run down “the middle of the channel.”

Read that sentence again, slowly. The channel. As if there were only one.

There were two.

Between the mainland and Vancouver Island lay a scatter of islands like crumbs on a tablecloth. Orcas, Lopez, San Juan, and a hundred smaller ones, green and rocky and wrapped in fog, with eagles circling over the tide-rips and seals watching from the rocks. The men who wrote the treaty had not studied those islands closely. They had maps, of course, but the maps were bad. Captain George Vancouver had charted the area for the Royal Navy back in 1798, and the American Charles Wilkes had produced his own version in 1845. Derek Hayes, in his Historical Atlas of the Pacific Northwest, notes how vague and inconsistent the charts of that era were, and the two disagreed with each other the way two witnesses to the same car accident will disagree.

The British said the channel meant Rosario Strait, to the east. The Americans said it meant Haro Strait, to the west. The islands lay between, claimed by both and belonging, for the moment, to no one. It was a crack in the foundation of a brand-new house, and it would be thirteen years before anyone put weight on it.

And the islands were worth having. That was the part that made it ugly. Whoever held them could put guns over the approaches to Victoria, the seat of British authority on the coast. A hostile fleet slipping into the inland waters would have to run that gauntlet, and no one in a uniform on either side missed the point. The soil was good for grazing, and the salmon came through the channels by the thousand. It was a small piece of land with a great deal of reasons to want it.

IV. Belle Vue

The British moved first, and they moved cleverly. With the fur trade sputtering, the Hudson’s Bay Company turned to something humbler and more solid. In 1853 it planted Belle Vue Sheep Farm on the southern end of San Juan Island, and nobody could have argued that a flock of sheep was a military operation. But sheep are a kind of flag. Wherever a man keeps sheep, he is saying this is mine, in a language that needs no translation.

Charles John Griffin ran the place. He brought over 1,369 sheep, along with cattle and horses and pigs, and he staffed the farm with an odd, wonderful crew: Kanaka shepherds from Hawai’i, Europeans, and Coast Salish people who had been living on those shores since before anyone had thought to put a line on a map. It was a small world, and for a few years it was a peaceful one.

Then came the Americans, a few at first and then more. By mid-1859, twenty-five or maybe twenty-nine of them had staked claims under the Donation Land Claim Act. They weren’t asking permission. They believed, as they believed in the weather, that the island was American soil, and they’d come to settle it.

You can imagine how it went. Fences went up in the wrong places. Animals wandered. Insults piled on top of old insults like cordwood, and every little quarrel dragged all the earlier ones along behind it. At one point the American authorities tried to seize thirty-four of the Company’s breeding rams for unpaid taxes. That got all the way to the desk of Secretary of State William Marcy, who sent word to the territorial governor, Isaac Stevens, that the peace was to be kept until the boundary was settled.

Keep the peace. Sure.

It was like stacking dry kindling in a closed room and telling everyone to be careful with their matches. The whole island was holding its breath. Everyone knew it, the way you know a storm is coming when the air goes thick and the birds go quiet. All it would take was a spark.

It was a pig.

V. The Pig

It was the fifteenth of June, 1859. Thirteen years to the day since the treaty. (Make of that what you like. I always have.)

Lyman Cutlar was an American, and he had a potato patch. It was about a hundred and sixty acres of claim, if you counted all of it, and he hadn’t gotten around to fencing it properly. That was a mistake, but a common one, the kind that every farmer makes. And on that morning, Cutlar looked out and saw a pig in his potatoes.

Not for the first time, either. That was the thing. The animal had been at them before. Cutlar had worked those rows with his own hands, and now he stood watching a fat black snout rooting through the crop that was supposed to feed him through winter. Something in him gave way. He had a gun, and he used it.

The pig dropped, and the island changed.

Because the pig belonged to Charles Griffin, and Griffin was no small man on San Juan. He came to Cutlar and asked for payment. Cutlar offered ten dollars. Griffin said a hundred. And Cutlar, who by his own lights had been wronged twice over, first by the rooting and then by the demand, dug in his heels. It was his land, his potatoes, and it had been the pig’s third visit, or maybe its fourth. What right had anyone to ask him to pay?

You can almost hear what each man was thinking. I won’t be pushed. Two men, two stubborn hearts, and one dead pig between them. It is the stupidest possible reason for an international crisis, and for that reason it is somehow the most human.

Emma Bland Smith retold the story with gentle humor in her illustrated children’s book The Pig War, wondering aloud whether Cutlar was short on sleep or short on coffee, or maybe just thinking about boiled potatoes for supper. Whatever the mood in Cutlar’s head, she says, he acted before thinking, and the pig paid for it. It’s a sweet little rhyme about a thing that nearly started a war.

Because the British authorities threatened to arrest Cutlar, and when they did, the American settlers panicked. They sent word for soldiers.

VI. The Soldiers

The soldiers came.

General William S. Harney commanded the U.S. Army’s Department of Oregon, and he was a man who did not hesitate, which is a fine quality in a soldier and a dangerous one in a diplomat. He sent Lieutenant George Pickett with sixty men, and on the twenty-seventh of July they came ashore at the south end of the island and began to make camp.

Pickett posted a notice by the dock. It said, in the flat tone of men who’ve already decided: Inasmuch as this island is a portion of the United States, no laws other than those of the United States, and no courts other than those established under those laws, will be recognized or allowed on this island.

Think about that. Nobody had asked the Hudson’s Bay Company. Nobody had asked the Royal Navy. A lieutenant had nailed up a piece of paper and declared the matter closed.

The Royal Navy read it and began to move.

Over the next two weeks, ships arrived. Each one brought more guns, and each one was answered by more American soldiers. By the tenth of August the numbers stood like this: 461 Americans with fourteen guns on the beach, and in the water before them, five British warships carrying better than 2,140 men and seventy guns.

Do the arithmetic. Four and a half to one, and five to one in cannon. If the shooting started, it would be over in an afternoon, and the Americans on the shore would be wiped out where they stood. But it wouldn’t end there, would it? It would never end there. There would be Washington’s answer, and London’s, and the whole Pacific coast might have burned.

Captain Geoffrey Hornby went ashore. He walked up to the American lines, polite as a vicar, and he asked Pickett to withdraw so that nobody would have to die. Pickett, who would one day lead a very famous charge at a place called Gettysburg and who was not a man to be moved by politeness, refused. That was that. Both sides stood and stared at each other, each holding a thing that might at any moment become a catastrophe.

That same day, Pickett and Lieutenant Colonel Silas Casey crossed over to Victoria to confer with Rear Admiral Robert Baynes, a man who had fought in the War of 1812 and remembered what shooting at Americans was like. Baynes wouldn’t even come off his ship. The standoff went on.

VII. The Longest Quiet

But no one fired.

Both sides had orders not to. That’s the part I love, and the part I think you should hold on to. Somewhere up the chain of command, in London and in Washington, men who had never seen San Juan Island were saying do not shoot, and the soldiers on the ground, who surely wanted to, obeyed. Days went by. Weeks. American and British troops lay in their camps within shouting distance of each other and did what bored young men have always done. They called each other names. They jeered and mocked. They tried, in every way they could think of, to goad the other side into being the first to pull a trigger.

Nobody did.

The pig remained the only casualty of the Pig War. There was a lot of grim talk, and a lot of letters back and forth, and finally General Harney was relieved of his command, which was probably the first sensible thing anyone had done in months. President Buchanan sent General Winfield Scott to sort out the mess. Scott was old by then and wise, and he got the two sides to agree: no more than a hundred soldiers apiece on the island, until the matter could be settled for good.

It took twelve years.

VIII. The Kaiser Decides

In 1871 the two nations finally agreed to let someone else decide. They chose Wilhelm I, the German Emperor, a stern and distant man who had no stake at all in San Juan Island. He appointed three commissioners, who sat in Geneva for a full year and studied the maps and the treaties and the claims and counterclaims. Somewhere in a dusty room in Switzerland, men in dark suits were holding the fate of a patch of rocks and potato fields in their hands.

On the twenty-first of October, 1872, the answer came. Wilhelm I ruled that the boundary should follow Haro Strait, the American reading. All of the San Juan Islands went to the United States.

Britain accepted. She didn’t have to. Her navy still outgunned the world. But she took the verdict, and on the twenty-fifth of November her last soldiers marched down to the water and sailed away.

And that was the end of it. The Pig War had run for thirteen years, with armies on the beach and warships in the bay. It was settled with a pen, and not a single man had died.

Just the pig.

Poor pig.