The notorious border dispute

On Washington’s San Juan Island, a national historical park harks back to a notorious 1859 border dispute when the British and Americans almost went to war over a pig.

Crisscrossed by pastoral fields and dotted with handsome wooden barns, San Juan Island – the second largest of the San Juan Islands in north-western Washington state – is a quiet, unhurried place. Orca whales breach in the surrounding waters and the southern shore of Canada’s Vancouver Island glimmers less than seven miles to the west. It’s hard to believe that in this isolated corner of the US, in 1859, the British and the Americans nearly went to war over a dead pig.

The trouble originated in a border dispute. In 1846, the Oregon Treaty established the 49th parallel as the official frontier between British and American territories in the Pacific Northwest, but made an exception for Vancouver Island, which, despite dipping below the 49th parallel, was allowed to remain British. This western kink in the border was, in the wording of the treaty, to be demarcated by the “middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver’s Island”. But as the waters of the Salish Sea contained scores of small islands and several different channels, no one could agree which one marked the true border.

Occupying a region claimed by both nations, San Juan Island suddenly found itself at the epicentre of a serious diplomatic crisis.

There was little to disturb the peace nearly two centuries later, as I pedalled south on a hired bicycle from the island’s only settlement, Friday Harbour. It was a warm, sultry day in July and I was heading for American Camp, part of a National Historical Park dedicated to the so-called “Pig War”. Several weeks previously, the park had opened a new visitor centre and I was curious to find out how the demise of a hapless boar had nearly sparked an international conflict. American Camp lies on the island’s southernmost point, six miles south of Friday Harbor, on a smooth and gently undulating road through mixed farmland lined with bushy hedgerows.

Farming was first established on San Juan Island in 1853 when the British-run Hudson’s Bay Company founded the Belle Vue Sheep Farm with the aim of gaining a foothold in the region and thwarting rival American claims in the San Juan archipelago. When the business became profitable, the Americans decided they too wanted a slice of the pie and, within five years, more than a dozen US settlers had sailed over from the mainland to claim grazing rights – applications the British deemed illegal.

Tensions simmered beneath the surface until 15 June 1859, when an American settler named Lyman Cutlar angrily shot a pig he found foraging in his garden. Fatefully, the offending animal belonged to the British, who were so incensed by the incident they threatened to evict American settlers en masse.

Undaunted, the Americans asked for military protection.

BBC