Transcript
HH_-_Pig_War_SJNP_11.28.22.RX
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[00:00:00] Have you ever had a fight with a family member over something stupid? Better yet, have you ever had that fight? Only to realize it wasn't so stupid after all that behind that excuse for a fight was a real fight, just waiting to be had. That's basically the story of the pig war. Yes, the pig war. Which happened between the pork and beans war and the Fian war, of course.
[00:00:35] And yes, those are all real wars. They all took place around the American border of modern day Canada. The pork and beans War was a border dispute in the state of Maine involving Canadian and American lumberjacks feuding over jurisdiction in 1839. The Fian War was basically a five year raid in which the US government armed Irish [00:01:00] immigrants to attack Canadian forts.
[00:01:02] As payback for having supported the Confederacy during the Civil War that ended in 1871, but the pig war was not really about a pig, just like the pork and beans war was not about a side dish.
[00:01:21] The pig was merely the match, uh, of a dispute that had been ongoing since 1846. That was Mike Vorge, former chief of interpretation and historian for the San Juan Islands National Historic Park. He has written multiple books on the war and remains the acknowledged world's expert on the subject, the name of the pig war.
[00:01:44] He. It was added by 19th century historians with a flare for headlines during the time it was known as the San Juan in Broo, or the San Juan difficulty. You can read about it, the New [00:02:00] York Times. You can read about it in the Times of London. It was definitely a world event. Part of what attracted Mike to this story is the fact that it represents the rare case in which the most memorable thing about a war is that it never actually happened.
[00:02:16] The death of a pig triggered that crisis, and by the time it was over, that pig represented 100% of all the casualties. This story is one of peaceful resolution where cooler heads prevailed and countless lives were. As a veteran, Mike has no illusions over the glories of war. That was a Vietnam vet and I didn't have a very good time in that war.
[00:02:43] I don't think much of war as a method of solving anyone's problems. The war in the Ukraine right now is deeply distressing and uh, so this was an opportunity to work at a national. [00:03:00] To interpret your passion to talk about. The peaceful resolution of a conflict every single day to people that came into the park, not only from around the country, but from around the world.
[00:03:15] Talking about peaceful arbitration as a means of resolving a difference. As with those intense arguments we have with family members over things that are trivial. The pig war was really about something quite significant that had happened in the past. The United States had declared independence from Britain in 1776 and then fought an eight year war against its former king.
[00:03:40] The two countries fought again in the war of 1812 and would spend the next few years trying to figure out who owned what along the new Canadian American border. After the war of 1812, the border was set between the United States and the British possessions, and it [00:04:00] went to the lake of the woods in Minnesota.
[00:04:03] We think of Great Britain today as America's most natural ally, but for the most part of American history. They were our most natural enemy. As you can imagine, the United States and Great Britain did not enjoy terribly great relations in the post American Revolution period, and anti English sentiment was rife in the United States in the 19th century was really common.
[00:04:26] That was Cyrus Foreman, who is currently working Mike's old job with the National Park Service in the San Juan Island National Historic Park. You see a lot of people, we've been such great allies with Great Britain throughout the 20th century. People don't realize the tensions that were still at work between Great Britain and the United States.
[00:04:49] In the 1850s, there were still people who had living memory of the British burning our capital in 1814, during the war of 1812, [00:05:00] and there were many tensions. There were intrigues over Central America. There were a lot of factors at work, and the fact that the two countries. Actually go to the table and work this out.
[00:05:14] Diplomatically, to me, was quite an achievement and a story worth telling. But by the 1850s, most of the Canadian American border was firmly established, and the opportunities for another war between the countries was steadily diminishing. In 1848, they thought that they had pretty much settled the boundary.
[00:05:35] With the Treaty of Oregon, the Treaty of Oregon drew a firm boundary. Between modern day Canada and the United States, where there had once been a kind of a shared territory that was open to people from either country who were willing to live there because of how remote the region was and relatively inconsequential relative to their previous conflicts.
[00:05:56] The two countries were willing to cohabitate for [00:06:00] decades after the war of 1812, in a prior treaty in 18. It's worth noting that this area, the entire Pacific Northwest, up until that treaty was signed, had been legally a part of both Great Britain and the United States of America. They couldn't decide and they didn't want to argue, and so they had what was known as joint occupation.
[00:06:23] The idea that it would be both British jurisdiction in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Idaho, and US jurisdiction, and both parties had rights, but no one really had decision making or governing authority, which was no big deal. Part of what changed was the election of an American president with an appetite for expansion and for war.
[00:06:45] In 1846, president PO was elected on a, uh, campaign slogan of 54 40 or fight. Literally, we will go to war with Great Britain unless they give us all of the Pacific Northwest, all the way to Alaska facing a [00:07:00] president who had vowed war with Great Britain for the entire Oregon territory. And the same president who had just finished waging war with Mexico in order to seize numerous parts of Mexico, right?
[00:07:12] All of the states of California, Texas, Nevada, uh, New Mexico, Arizona, parts of Colorado, parts of Wyoming, right? Hope had clearly demonstrate in his willingness to engage in violent conquest against other Euro-American empires in order to expand US territory. And so the British. Tried to make as generous a settlement as possible because they did not want a war with the United States originally.
[00:07:40] Everyone thought that the state of Washington, what is now, the state of Washington, was going to be a part of Great Britain. They had more forces on the ground. They had massive amounts of capital invested at Fort Vancouver in Vancouver, Washington, on the other side of the Columbia River. From Portland, Oregon, and it was a more equitable state, but facing [00:08:00] the threat of violence from a president who had demonstrated the use of violence and willingness to start a war for illegitimate reasons or in order to claim land.
[00:08:10] They said, we will give you. Most of what you want. And so they drew a straight line across the northern boundary, but when it hit the sea, the British demanded that they get to keep all of Vancouver Island and which dipped below that line. The British were eager for peace and conceded to most every American demand.
[00:08:30] They only asked to keep their command center in the. Which happened to fall just south of that line, the Royal Navy had already put its major command center for the entire Pacific into Esquimalt Harbor, which is in Victoria. So that would've been below that line. And so that the decision makers in Washington DC said that the boundary at sea will be the straight that divides the Vancouver from the mainland.
[00:08:59] The [00:09:00] problem is that these men in Washington DC who'd never been to the Pacific Northwest, did not know that there were two straights. Really, we are a result of the imprecise nature of cartography and treaty decisions in the 19th century and a direct result of what happens when you have imperial officials who have no experience with the area that they're making decisions for, making decisions.
[00:09:27] So much drama over determining which straight was, which might sound overblown, but this was a big deal. Not only did it determine the ownership of those 400 islands, but it also threatened to pin down American shipping and sea power all along Washington's and the country's northernmost coast. If the British Empire had these islands, it would've made it very hard for Americans to have capable navigation in the Puget Sound area.
[00:09:55] It would've basically boxed the United States in all the way down to the [00:10:00] Columbia River in order to improve their case for winning. The Stal mate, the royal governor of the region truly decided to maximize the British presence and the disputed territories. James Douglas, an Afro Scottish official of both the Hudson's Bay Company and the Royal Governor, a position that combined corporate and governmental powers in a unique way, decided to put facts on the ground in order to make this both in order to profit.
[00:10:27] And in order to make sure that the British Empire could claim these strategically valuable islands. So Douglas had his men land about 1300, uh, sheep, or thousand plus I guess sheep and other farm animals here, along with 17 Hawaiian Shepherds in December of 1853. And they set about turning San Juan Island into a massive corporate sheet farm.
[00:10:53] That sheep farm flourished, and by 1859 there were over 4,000 sheep living on San Juan [00:11:00] Island. And in that year, Americans began to arrive while the British had been populating the islands through a corporate takeover by the Hudsons Bay Company. The American population had grown more organically.
[00:11:13] Settlers and pioneers had steadily migrated west looking for land and new opportunities. The American approach, as we all know, took place over the Oregon Trail, which really warmed up and became red hot by the early 1840s, and you had Americans flooding into Oregon. So many Americans move north of the Columbia River, which divides Oregon and Washington.
[00:11:42] Washington Territory became a separate entity, and when it. In 1853 at the end of the year, the new territorial governor, a guy by the name of Isaac Stevens, declared that the San Juan Islands were really part of Washington territory. In [00:12:00] 1858, gold was discovered in the Fraser River Valley of British Columbia.
[00:12:04] And that when news reached San Francisco, what was known as the floating population of San Francisco, the group of men who were looking for any gold rush to try and make themselves as wealthy as earlier, gold rushers showed up in British Columbia. That scared. Governor Douglas who imagined this could be a way through the United States to begin to seize territory if these guys were successful.
[00:12:27] Luckily, these guys didn't understand the environmental history and specifics of the Fraser River Valley, so they showed up in the summer. You can't mind gold there really until winter because of, uh, river depth. And consequently, they spent all their money in the boom towns that they created, and almost all of them went home, uh, except for 22 men who, as patriotic Americans, viewed San Juan Island as their territory and didn't want to go home failure.
[00:12:55] So they decided to homestead in the improved pastures that the Hudson's Bay Company was [00:13:00] using. Needless to say. Five or six months of having Americans putting farms down in Hudson's Bay Company land. There was a lot of tension between Hudson's Bay company officials and these Americans that boiled over on the morning of June 15th, 1859, when one of the pigs belonging to the Bellevue Sheep Farm of the Hudson's Bay Company got into the potato ca patch of a failed gold miner named Lyman Cutler.
[00:13:30] Now listening to this story today, most of us will be inclined to blame the owner of the pig for failing to control his property. When our dogs go on someone else's property, for example, and wreck something or hurt someone, it's our fault. But at that time on the frontier, the responsibility of keeping the pig away from colter's potatoes was entirely on him.
[00:13:54] Pigs had free range. If the pig was in your potato patch, that meant you failed as a [00:14:00] farmer, right? It was your responsibility to keep animals out, not the animals' responsibility to stay out. And so he had incorrectly or poorly fenced his crops, but Lyman Colter wasn't having it. He began warning people.
[00:14:15] The next American potato, this pig eight, would be his last. He had warned the chief trader. Of Bellevue Sheep Farm, a guy named Charles Griffin that this rail back pig that belonged to the company was rooting in his potato patch. Charles Griffin just told the American, you're nothing but a trespass. We thought the whole island was their colony or their plantation, that the Americans had no business there.
[00:14:41] The Americans, of course, saw it differently and so. The Americans saw the pig in his potato patch. He lost his T. He chased the pig out of the garden to the edge of the woods and shot it. And that's when the trouble really started. You didn't kill people's [00:15:00] livestock on the frontier. That's a given. That's a given from the Appalachian mountains all the way west.
[00:15:06] That's not something you did. You ended up having to pay a price, and that's what. But the price in this case was too high, as in so high. It was basically an insult intended to end the possibility of easy reconciliation. Cutler knew he was in the wrong, he went to apologize. But Charles Griffin, the head of the sheep farm, saw this as an opportunity.
[00:15:31] Uh, he wanted an incident or excuse to be in kicking Americans out of his island and reclaiming his entire sheep farm. So when Cutler offered to pay him for the pig, Griffin demanded far more than a pig was worth about 10 times the price of a pig, which Cutler rightly viewed as an insult. Griffin just says, oh, you scruffy little man.
[00:15:52] That is a valuable animal. It's gonna cost you a hundred dollars. Well, Cutler flamed on a hundred dollars in [00:16:00] in 1859 funds was pretty, that's a pretty steep price to pay for a Berkshire. And he said, a hundred dollars. I'm gonna pay a hundred dollars for a pig. That ain't worth. He yelled at Griffin and told him if any animal you included, Mr.
[00:16:17] Griffin gets in my land, I will shoot them debt just like I did that pick. Cutler told his neighbor, Paul K Hubs, the collector of customs, a job basically that meant to annoy the British and try and get them to pay taxes in a place that they regard as their own land hubs. Went and told the commander of American Forces and Bellingham that an American had been attacked on American soil.
[00:16:40] Ultimately Word made its way up the military ladder and reached the commanding General of the American Armed Forces in Oregon. A man named Brigadier General William s Harney. Harney had a reputation. He had a pretty nasty background. He was Ara Bull as all get out, and [00:17:00] because he had grown up in the orbit of Andrew Jackson, he hated anything British.
[00:17:06] So there was no British We're not gonna threaten Lyman Cutler for shooting a pig on his watch. Now, when Mike says Harney had a reputation, he's being. William Harney was a terrible, terrible person. A racist, sexist, war criminal. Harney was a man who, according to the Ohio newspapers in the 1830s, he was described as an inhuman monster.
[00:17:33] Harney was a man who, amongst the cruelties that he committed over the course of his life were the murder. Of Seminole civilians during the Seminole War and the destruction of Seminole Villages most famously. One night in, I think it was 1835, he came home drunk to his mansion in St. Louis, probably drunk.
[00:17:52] He does the record. Doesn't say he was drunk, but likely, and he couldn't find his keys. And he decided that it was the result [00:18:00] of an enslaved young mother, and he began to brutally beat her a torture session that lasted for three days that left her dead. And that was so shocking that the white slaveholders of St.
[00:18:11] Louis nearly lynched him and burnt his house down and he had to go a wall until his military buddies could find him a sympathetic judge and get a change of. So that he could be acquitted for this murder. He was one of only two people to be tried for murdering a slave in the history of St. Louis. He also was responsible for the first major massacre of, uh, Lakota people at the, um, battle of Ash Hollow in Nebraska, where basically a group of blee sue people who'd been in a previous conflict with the United States, he surrounded their village on multiple sides.
[00:18:48] He asked the, they came with a white flag and tried to surrender. Hardy told them he would not accept their surrender. They had to fight, and he came in and killed at least 150 civilians who were trying to surrender [00:19:00] to him. He was court marshaled on four different occasions. He would beat his soldiers. He one time famously a dog, was in his camp, vegetable host when he was at a fort in the Midwest.
[00:19:10] And he ran out and chased the dog down for a mile and then beat the dog. It was one of his soldier's dogs. He beat the dog to death. That was actually one of two dogs that he murdered in uniform. He also was holding a peace negotiation and he wanted to show that white technology was superior to native technology.
[00:19:28] So he announced to the tribes that he dissembled that we can now bring people back from the dead. And we are that superior. And so he had his post surgeon anesthetize a dog and he made everybody poke its ribs. And then the dog died in anesthesia. So he wasn't able to bring the dog back from the dead. He was, he was, uh, court marsh, four different court marshals.
[00:19:51] But he always used. His close personal links to Andrew Jackson who he had, uh, been an aid to when he was a young man [00:20:00] to escape punishment. He always claimed that his superiors in the army were wigs who hated him for being a Jackson man, and they're just trying to punish me for being a Democrat and a real Jackson man.
[00:20:11] And that was sort of Harney's thing. This is the last person you want involved in this kind of crisis or really anything of its kind. But Harney was at the forefront of the pig. Which only made violent escalation that much more likely. Harney dispatched a company of United States infantry to the island under the command of Captain George Edward Picket 1846 West Point, graduate of Virginian, who a few years later would resign his commission in the United States Army, throw in with the Confederacy and lead his.
[00:20:49] In the fateful charge on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg pickets charge, same guy. So pickets orders were to come to the aisle and to ensure that the British did [00:21:00] not assume jurisdiction over American citizens. And within a month of the pig's death, you had over 60 American soldiers landing on San Juan Island to begin claiming it and to build forts and protect American soldiers.
[00:21:15] That same day, that picket landed, of course, newspapers back in across the water in Victoria, within view put out, had lines announcing that Americans that invaded San Juan Island and the Royal Navy forces that were actually originally deployed. To Vancouver in order to protect British sovereignty from the gold miners, ended up confronting American military forces on San Juan Island, and so you had about 2000 Royal Marines on three ships in the harbor.
[00:21:46] And you had what grew to about 500 American soldiers, a little over 500, building a, uh, massive fortification. And luckily though, there were times when they got close to it over the summer of 1859, the two [00:22:00] forces just looked at each other and didn't fire a shock picket was to put his camp in a secure location.
[00:22:09] Which in those days meant not on the shoreline where you were subject to being raped by the guns, by the warships, but on high ground picket lands. And, uh, post the proclamation that says this being United States territory, only the laws of the United States of America, or apply and leaves this camp on the beach.
[00:22:32] The British find out that there's US infantry on the island. They dispatch a war. HMS Tribune, a 31 gun Steam Frigo, Royal Navy Captain Jeffrey FIPs. Hornby is ordered to remove picket from the island, and if that meant using force and starting a war, so be it. Picket refuses to leave, and yet Hornby chooses not to attack.
[00:22:57] Hornby knows that if he takes military action [00:23:00] against him, He might prevail in an initial attack, but the American soldiers would run into the woodlands and then he'd have to root them all out. And very likely a war could Ensue was not the role of the British Navy to start wars. Their role was to ensure the safety of commerce on the high seas and ensure that Great Britain remained the, the great, uh, world power that she.
[00:23:30] Picket, believing that discretion is the better part of valor moves his camp about a half a mile over the hill to the opposite shoreline on the cattle point peninsula. You don't have to be an expert in military strategy to be puzzled by pickets decision making. He's simply moving from one vulnerable position to another.
[00:23:53] Hornby wrote a letter to his wife. He said This, George Picket, I, I really don't understand this man at all. [00:24:00] First, he puts his camp in an exposed location. Then he moves it to the opposite shoreline. All I need to do is steam around the point drop, anchor and shelling from there. Well, what he didn't under and know was that to pick a graduated dead last in his class at West Point, but even then, with a potentially easy victory, a hand Hornby does not attack.
[00:24:22] He doesn't want a war. And fortunately for Hornby, his superior backs him up. The admiral, the commander of the Pacific Station of Great Britain, our Lambert Banes, arrives a few days later and the governor is angry and storms, uh, up to and says, you're man was insubordinate all this stuff. But bans understands hornby's reasoning and backs him up a hundred.
[00:24:52] And says, you did the right thing. It's not our job to start a war. We need to consult with the [00:25:00] diplomats in Washington and London. We need to let them result the problems. We should hold fast. Only fire if you're fired upon, and thus it's settled in this standoff on Griffin. Which is the subtitle of my book, the Americans were reinforced, pickets reinforced, and the command is taken over by Lieutenant Colonel SS Casey.
[00:25:25] They. Unload naval guns from the US Gunboat, uss Massachusetts, and they start hauling these naval guns up to the top of an eminence and they start building an earthwork. These naval guns are 32 pounders. They can throw a shell or a solid shot, mild or mile and a. Hornby suddenly alarmed, oh my gosh, what are they doing?
[00:25:51] We weren't supposed to allow 'em to erect fortifications. Now they have the advantage of me. They can send a plunging fire. It looks like the [00:26:00] Americans are intending to stay no matter what. So Hornby sends a dispatch to Admirals and he said, should I land the Royal Marines and spike those guns? The aal.
[00:26:13] You will not. You will stand fast. We will wait to see what the diplomats do. One of the really striking things about 19th century negotiations is just how long it took information to travel each way. Each piece of correspondence in a dispute like this one could take weeks or even months to reach its audience.
[00:26:36] Well, it took six weeks to get word to Washington City. There were two ways that you. The first way you could take a steamer down to San Francisco, send a cable up the river to Sacramento and over the Sierras to Carson City, and then put the telegram on the overland stage, which would go [00:27:00] across the planes to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and then you could send another telegraph from Fort Leavenworth.
[00:27:08] The other way was to go to the Isma of Pana. And take the Panama Railroad across the Ismo. It had been completed in 1850. Remember on the IPOs of Panama, there'd been a real competition between Vanderbilt and his companies and the, uh, Pacific Mail, steamship Line, Pacific Mail, steam steamship line, it prevailed, and that's the way you did it.
[00:27:36] You took the rail across Panama and you took a steamer up to Washington. So messages were sent by two method. The telegram from Fort Leavenworth made it 24 hours ahead of the messenger by ship, and when the two nations found out about this, they just said, oh my God. When the British found out, [00:28:00] they immediately went to the United States Secretary of State and said, Hey, what's going on?
[00:28:07] And there was some mistrust, but the Americans said we, we had no idea that this was going to happen. This was not part of the plan. Harney, general Harney is acting on his own. We had nothing to do, uh, with his landing, the infantry on the island. And to demonstrate our good faith, we will dispatch. Winfield Scott to work this out.
[00:28:31] The British were actually very pleased by that because Winfield Scott had solved two border crises in the 1830s. First over the border at Niagara Falls, and then at a RO stick in Maine. And had worked things out diplomatically in both those cases. Scott was a soldier, but he was also a lawyer. [00:29:00] Winfield Scott was a bre, Lieutenant General.
[00:29:03] He had led American forces in the invasion of Mexico during the Mexican American war. He was 72 years old. He was six five, three hundred and eighty five pounds. He had dropsy, he had gout, and he'd fallen off his horse and broken his collarbone. He wasn't a real happy guy. He had to be put in a basket and craned onto the ship, and every time he went from ship to shore, it was the same thing or ship to ship.
[00:29:34] So it took him six weeks to arrive here and it was not a. Real pleasant journey for him. But by the time that he arrived, he found that two sides here, while awaiting a diplomatic solution, had sort of settled in to this, uh, sort of bizarre joint occupation. Already there were citizens coming over from Victoria, visiting the American [00:30:00] camps.
[00:30:00] The American officers were attending church services on the British ships. It was sort of, Sort of a pleasant atmosphere. Everyone knew that it could be otherwise that the, the worm could turn, so to speak, anytime. But when Scott arrived, he found the British very willing to talk and negotiations opened between himself and Governor Douglas.
[00:30:26] Scott was diplomatically astute and was highly respected by the British. So the fact that the Americans were sending this elder. And infer man to the other side of the world to resolve this difficulty was a demonstration of good faith. It only took them a week, and by the end of the week they had agreed to a stand down.
[00:30:49] Winfield Scott came and he immediately worked out a solution, which was that we needed an international arbitrator because this was a bad treaty that was written in. Exactly. And we need [00:31:00] somebody who's neutral to negotiate. And in the meantime, the Americans and British should both station forces on the island and Americans would be in.
[00:31:08] Of law for American settlers and the British would be in charge of law for British settlers. That was late 1859. The British deployed in 1860, and of course, the United States quickly descended into Civil War, obviously during the Civil War. The San Juan Island border dispute was not something that decision makers in Washington DC had any bandwidth to deal with.
[00:31:31] The soldiers who were here had very poor supplies because they were the last priority of the US Army. And so what ended up happening was we settled into 12 years. Where this was both Britain and the United States, and both sides had a very active social life together. Many British soldiers ended up staying and becoming homesteaders.
[00:31:51] Many American soldiers did as well. And 12 years later, they held an arbitration panel in uh, [00:32:00] Switzerland, officiated by the Kaiser of the New Nation of Germany. Germany had recently defeated France and the Franco Freshen war ending the Carnival Empire of Napoleon and ii, and they were the eminent power, western power other than the United States and Great Britain.
[00:32:18] So they were the obvious choice to arbitrate between the two nations. Bismark who ran the country submitted the, uh, question to three adjudicators German adjudicators who met for a year in Geneva, Switzerland, the United States, and Great Britain submitted arguments and counter-arguments to this group.
[00:32:41] There was one adjudicator who thought it should be the middle channel that runs between San Juan Island, orcas and Orcas and Shaw Island. In the Archipelago, the Americans said, Nope, it's gotta be the Her Strait or the Rosario Stra, or we don't play. So the German. [00:33:00] In October of 1872 issued a decision.
[00:33:06] They voted two to one. That the HA stra to the west between Vancouver Island and San Juan Island was the boundary that was meant in the Treaty of Oregon. And so the ruling was issued on November 22nd, 1872. The British Royal Marines marched peacefully out of English. Within two months of the ruling, the British left.
[00:33:31] This became the United States, and this island, uh, has been the USA ever since.
[00:33:40] In the next episode, we'll be exploring more of the lasting significance of the pig war, as well as some of the ways in which things could have gone terribly wrong.[00:34:00]
