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—DEPOSITION OF LYMAN CUTLER, SEPTEMBER 7, 18591

In 1859 Lyman Cutler affected a border in today’s state of Washington by shooting a pig. Because it was a particular pig, at a particular place, at a particular time, its demise brought the United States and Great Britain to the brink of war.

This particular pig lived on an island whose possession was disputed by the United States and Britain. The San Juan Islands, named by Spanish explorers prior to the arrival of British settlers, are a cluster of small islands between Canada’s Vancouver Island (then under British rule) and the state of Washington. Possession of the islands was unspecified in the 1846 treaty that divided the Oregon Country, a region mutually claimed by the United States and Britain. The land was divided by an extension of the 49th parallel from the crest of the Rocky Mountains “to the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver’s Island, and thence southerly through the middle of the said channel” (see “James K. Polk” in this book). Though the negotiators were informed that islands in the waterway could result in ambiguity regarding “the middle of the channel,” neither side knew the geography well enough, nor wanted to wait for information that might crack a fragile treaty that had taken decades to negotiate.2

The pig (image based on available data) (ca. 1856-1859) (photo credit 32.1)

Disputed San Juan Islands

As it turned out, there were two comparable channels. The Haro Strait passed between the San Juan Islands and Vancouver Island; the Rosario Strait passed between the San Juan Islands and the United States. A British-American boundary commission was formed, but its members were unable to agree as to which channel constituted the boundary and thus which nation possessed the islands. The reason they couldn’t agree was because the islands were of strategic value to both nations.

That the particular time was significant is borne out, first, by the fact that there had already been an event similar to that involving the pig—this one involving sheep—which did not escalate to the brink of war. It had occurred in 1853–54, when the Hudson’s Bay Company landed 1,300 sheep on San Juan Island to provision its personnel on the mainland and Vancouver Island. The company assumed that the island was part of Britain’s Canadian territory under its proprietorship. When the Hudson’s Bay Company was informed by the Territory of Washington that it had failed to pay the tariff for the sheep it had imported into the United States and that the company owed property tax for the land it used on the San Juan Islands, Britain disputed the Americans’ claim to jurisdiction. In response, the Washington Territory sent a sheriff, who seized thirty some sheep that were then sold to recover the unpaid taxes.

Not surprisingly, Britain’s regional governor, James Douglas, had some words for Isaac Stevens, the governor of the Washington Territory. “A person named Barnes, who styles himself Sheriff of Whatcomb County,” he wrote to Stevens, “did abstract a number of valuable sheep, which they put into boats, and were about to depart with the same when Mr. Griffin returned and, demanding restitution of his property, was menaced with violence.”3 Mr. Griffin turned up again in the 1859 dispute. Charles J. Griffin, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s manager of the livestock on San Juan Island, was the neighbor whose pig Lyman Cutler shot. Like the sheep, Griffin’s pig was the property of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The element that had prevented the sheep incident from spiraling out of control surfaced as Governor Douglas’s letter proceeded to calm down: “Wisdom and sound policy enjoin upon us the part of leaving the question to the decision of the supreme governments, and of abstaining from enforcing rights which neither party is disposed to acknowledge.”

Five years later, however, the parties involved did not calm down. This difference resulted in large part from the arrival, in 1858, of General William