On San Juan Island in the disputed waters between Vancouver Island and Washington Territory, American settler Lyman Cutlar shot a pig belonging to the Hudson's Bay Company after it dug up his potatoes. The killing escalated into a tense standoff involving hundreds of American and British troops, resolved without bloodshed through arbitration that eventually awarded the island to the United States.
The pig belonged to Charles Griffin, an Irishman managing a Hudson's Bay Company sheep farm, and it had a habit of raiding Cutlar's potato patch. When Cutlar finally shot it, he offered $10 in compensation; Griffin demanded $100. The dispute snowballed because ownership of San Juan Island itself was unresolved under the 1846 Oregon Treaty, which vaguely split territory along a channel that could be interpreted two different ways.
British authorities threatened to arrest Cutlar, prompting American military commander George Pickett (later famous for Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg) to land troops on the island. Within weeks, 461 American soldiers faced off against five British warships carrying over 2,000 men and 167 guns. Remarkably, both sides' commanders had secret orders to avoid firing the first shot.
The crisis cooled into a twelve-year joint military occupation, with British and American camps peacefully sharing the small island. Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany, brought in as arbitrator, ruled in 1872 that San Juan Island belonged to the United States. The only casualty of the entire affair was the pig.
Key people: Lyman Cutlar, George Pickett