The US-Canada border fight over a pig

With tensions between Donald Trump and Mark Carney heating up, it's the perfect excuse to revisit another time things got tense on the US-Canadian border… back before Canada was Canada. In June 1859, on a small island wedged between what's now Washington State and Vancouver Island, an American farmer raised his rifle at a pig that kept eating his potatoes, and pulled the trigger. Within weeks, that one dead pig had brought the United States and the British Empire to the brink of war. It became known as the Pig War. No One Saw It Coming host Marc Fennell tells Matt how it all played out, and why it took the German Kaiser to settle it. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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  Hi, it's Sam Hawley from ABC News Daily, the podcast that brings you one big story affecting your world each weekday in just 15 minutes.

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• 0:46Speaker 03

  G'day, Matt Bevan here. This is if you're listening. With tensions between Donald Trump and Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, heating up, I thought it was a great excuse to bring you a story about another time that things got tense on the US-Canadian border, back when Canada was still part of the British Empire. In the summer of 1859, on a small island wedged between Washington State and Vancouver Island, an American farmer raised his rifle at a pig and pulled the trigger. Within six weeks, that one dead pig had brought the United States and the British Empire to the brink of war. Mark Fennell from No One Saw It Coming has been digging through 19th century border disputes, and he's here to walk through how one shot pig nearly started a war. G'day, Mark.

• 1:30Speaker 04

  God, I do come on for the weirdest things, don't I?

• 1:39Speaker 04

  When you read it out like that, it's just like, I sound proper odd, don't I?

• 1:44Speaker 03

  This is why we get you on. Okay, so I need to figure out exactly where this is happening first. So I'm going to pull up a map and we can figure out where this is together and then we can understand what we're talking about.

• 1:56Speaker 04

  Map of the United States of America.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:01Speaker 04

  So what I want you to do is I want you to zoom to the top left-hand corner. It's the exact corner between modern day Canada and the United States. And if you go right to the very left hand of the map, you will see that it actually isn't a straight line. It's a straight line across most of it, the 49th parallel, but you go all the way across and then suddenly at the very, very end, it dips and it dips around an island.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  I've never really thought about this before, but yeah, it's very odd that there are places in America that you can live in a town. And if you go due west of there, the next country that you get to is Canada.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  What's even more confusing is there's a Vancouver and then you go further down into the US and there's another.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  Of course there is. They love doing that. And this is also Vancouver Island as well, which Vancouver is not on.

• 2:50Speaker 04

  No, the big island there is Vancouver. And then in between those is sort of like a Jackson Pollock painting of mottled land masses. Inside there is an archipelago.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Wow, there's so many weird little islands there, aren't there?

• 3:02Speaker 04

  So here's the thing, if we go back to the sort of time when the British Empire and the United Kingdom were kind of jostling for control over this area, they did something very weird where they drew a line as part of a treaty and they got to this part of the world. They drew a line around Vancouver Island, they're like Vancouver Island, that can be part of the British Empire, which of course is now modern day Canada. But when it came to these islands here, they couldn't decide whether the border should go over the islands or under the islands. And so they ended up with this weird situation in the 1800s where they kind of just agreed to disagree over who owned this particular part of the world. And that, that was fine.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:45Speaker 04

  Actually, for quite a while. As far as 19th century border disputes, this was not the highest order.

• 3:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. This sort of thing has happened a fair bit with Canada because Canada has so many islands and is so big. Like my understanding is that there's also like a separate border dispute over an island between Canada and Denmark, because it's like between Canada and Greenland.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  It's also basically a worthless rock. It's called Hans Island. And what would happen is each country would occasionally send a couple of soldiers over there to put a flag up and they would leave a bottle of whiskey there for the other country because the other country would come over soon afterwards. And they'd put a flag there and they'd take the bottle of wine and leave their own bottle of wine for the Danish to come and get. When they put the flag back up, they would just do this backwards and forwards as kind of a fun little game.

• 4:38Speaker 04

  Is that also like the weather station that was allegedly built in Canada by the Nazis? And they covered it with Canadian flags so that any passing Canadian would be like, well, it's obviously one of ours. But in the 1970s, they went and checked with the Canadian Armed Forces and they're like, we didn't build a weather station there. And they eventually went back and worked out it was probably the Nazis that built it there, the weather station.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  That's fantastic. But yeah, I mean, there's just so much Canada and so few Canadians that I think this sort of thing happens pretty frequently. There's just these weird little things that happen on the edges of Canada.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so they have a treaty between Great Britain and the United States and they kind of decide to both claim the islands.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  It's only when people start to bring, I guess, a form of industry into the island where suddenly it becomes an issue. So there's a very famous company called the Hudson's Bay Company, which ultimately grew into one of like the most iconic retail brands.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  I think it was the biggest company in the world for like quite some period of time, something like that.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, massively, massively profitable. And its origins is like, it started in the 1600s. It had a royal charter from King Charles the Second, the other King Charles. It has deep connections into British history. Hudson's Bay Company expanded into San Juan Island and their plan was not much here, let's put some sheep here.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  And that made sense until the Americans who were on the island, because it always had people on it, right? The Americans saw the sheep and suddenly got very, very territorial. Because both parties, the British viewed the island as theirs and the Americans viewed the island as theirs. And when they got territorial, the Americans were like, well, you brought sheep here and you owe us tax for those sheep. And if you don't pay it, we're going to have a sheriff come and impound your sheep. And so it started to become a more complicated dynamic. It became enough of a problem that it went all the way up to the Prime Minister of Great Britain and the President of the United States. The heads of government were so like, can we not make this into a thing? Please. The US officials would have a letter saying, please do not harass the British over the

• 6:38Speaker 04

  island. We're not saying the island is theirs, but like, just don't start shit.

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  They would literally have a letter saying, hey, your president says leave us alone.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  I have a letter from the president. Chill out, it says.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  Quite literally.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  That's so funny.

• 6:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was what existed.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  The US president is 4,000 kilometres away and the British King is 7,000 kilometres away. And at this stage of history, that is like months of travel.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  I just realised you've still got Google Maps open, haven't you?

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  Or did you just happen to know the distance?

• 7:09Speaker 03

  No, no, I just, I pulled up, I used the little measuring thing.

• 7:13Speaker 04

  Right, so we have the world's weirdest tiny island where sheep have become the source of much consternation and one needs to walk around with a permission slip from your president saying, don't start shit. Which is fine, except there's this guy called Charles Griffin. He has been described to me by historians as a nepo baby because his father had already been an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company. And he rose up through the Hudson's Bay Company.

• 7:39Speaker 03

  1840s, far distant, remote Canada nepo baby.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  So the guy who told me this, he's on this island, he's a historian, but he also used to be park ranger, he actually called him a nepo baby.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Nah, good, good.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  And I was like, I'm not going to correct you because I love you, you're amazing.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  Nepotism.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  So Charles Griffin, nepo baby. I'm going to commit to it now because it's fun.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, lean in, lean in.

• 8:00Speaker 04

  His job was to expand the interests of the Hudson's Bay Company. So he's on the side of the British, right? And he had a bunch of pigs. And of those pigs, Charles Griffin was very protective. He loved his pigs. And the Hudson's Bay collection of sheep is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And they're generally taking a bit more space than the Americans are generally comfortable with. Meanwhile, on the island, you've always had this group of Americans there who do regard it as an American territory.

• 8:33Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 8:33Speaker 04

  Lyman Cutler, he's originally from Kentucky, he's got this nice garden and he's mad for potatoes.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  All right.

• 8:41Speaker 04

  He just loves his crop of potatoes. And he's got a problem. There's a pig that just seems to keep wandering into Lyman Cutler's garden. And rooting up his crops.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  This sounds like a Beatrix Potter story.

• 8:55Speaker 04

  Can you tell? I've got small children and I've read a lot of children's books.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Old man Cutler had a beautiful garden.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  So we have potato Cutler.

• 9:03Speaker 03

  Potato Cutler and pig Griffin.

• 9:05Speaker 04

  Pig Griffin.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  We've got there, lock it in. Yep.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  So Cutler's got his garden, loves his garden, and he's got these pigs that keep coming into it. And he's like, you know what? Griffin, you keep your pigs out of my garden. Your pigs are trespassers. And one day, this pig, Bruton, just gets a bit much for Lyman Cutler.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Do you think there's any other possible way you could phrase that?

• 9:29Speaker 04

  I do not.

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Okay, let's lock it in.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  He goes outside. With a rifle in hand and he chases that pig and he shoots that pig.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 9:39Speaker 04

  Just like that, the Americans, they've got a situation on their hands, Matt.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 9:42Speaker 04

  You have killed the livestock of the Nepo baby, the Hudson's Bay Company. So the farmer potato guy, Cutler, calms down. He goes to Charles Griffin and actually to his great credit, the American Cutler, he apologises to Charles Griffin. He's like, look, I shot your pig. Tell you what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna find three guys, they're gonna look at the carcass, they're gonna cost it out and I will pay you whatever that pig is worth. Griffin turns him down. He says it's worth a hundred dollars, which is absurd.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 10:12Speaker 04

  I'll go to the authorities, they'll put you in irons, you're nothing but a trespasser. And of course, bear in mind, he also, because he's so entrenched in the Hudson's Bay Company, this enormously powerful company, it's got some weight, right? And that's really when this crisis starts. So we've had this pig that in any other moment in history, this would just be like a current affairs story, right? Two neighbours fighting, but it blows right up. Cutler's story makes it all the way to the commander of the US Army Department of Oregon.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  It's a very small thing that becomes a symbol of a much larger sense of injustice, much larger sense of imperial overreach. And so the US Army kind of use it as an excuse to escalate this. They write a petition, they ask for help from the army, the army comes through. At the same time, the British court wind of the Americans asking for backup and the governor of British Columbia decides to send, and this is no small escalation, three British warships to this teeny tiny island as a show of force.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  That's sort of like showing up with a US strike carrier group to deal with a minor insult by the Canadian Prime Minister or something like that.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  There's no modern equivalent of that playing out.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  I can't imagine that anybody would do that now. And you've got to remember, this is the 1840s, so the British are the superpower.

• 11:33Speaker 04

  They send in the HMS Satellite, which is a 21-gun steam convert. It's actually one of the biggest ones in the Royal Navy and it's a steamer too. So this thing's, it's fast. And they send it over to, like, very specifically to arrest Lyman Cutler, the pig killer, the American pig killer, and evict all 18 Americans that are on the island. And that's the thing, this is not a very packed island. There's 18 Americans on this island. So the Americans now have this huge show of force. The British are coming and so they decide, all right, we cannot let this aggression stand. And they bring in this American captain, who I'm reliably told by multiple sources is quote unquote swashbuckling.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Good.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  The word was used, okay? I don't know exactly what that means, but apparently he was swashbuckling. And he gets to the island, he gets there before the British get there and he sets up on the beach. He's got three pieces of artillery, he's got howitzers and a Napoleon gun and now 64 men.

• 12:27Speaker 03

  And presumably rum and a parrot on his shoulder and a hook for a hand, that kind of thing.

• 12:31Speaker 04

  I would certainly hope so.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  That's what I assume swashbuckling means, but yes, go on.

• 12:35Speaker 04

  Now, the problem with him setting up on the beach is by the time the British arrive, they can see that the Americans are already set up. You've got guns on the beach, guns in the ocean. And now by virtue of having sent 60 infantrymen to the beach, the makeup of the island has shifted, right?

• 12:50Speaker 03

  If we're talking about an island that only had, you know, a couple of dozen people on it and suddenly 64 American soldiers rock up, now it's an American dominant island, righto?

• 12:59Speaker 04

  So the British look at this and go, okay, well, this is different. We thought we were just gonna rock up, be big, be scary. We've done it for a quarter of the world's land and population before, why wouldn't it work here?

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Very confused, this worked in India.

• 13:12Speaker 04

  This worked everywhere else. So they go back to British territory and they're like, ah, we're gonna need more.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay.

• 13:20Speaker 04

  So the British send yet another, yet another, by the HMS Tribune, which is a 31-gun steam frigate.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 13:28Speaker 04

  Uh, please don't keep track of the number of guns because it's a big number by this point. And so what ensues is this incredibly edifying and dignified finger pointing, where like, you're here illegally, I'm not gonna leave, I can't be responsible for whatever happens next. And of course, the US commander, George Pickett, he asks for reinforcements and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. The question becomes like, where is this gonna go? And are either of these massive superpowers prepared to go to war over these tiny islands?

• 14:01Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  And it comes down to actually a British captain, who comes in, this guy by the name of Geoffrey Hornby, and he rocks up and he can see this absolute massive dick swinging arena playing out in front of him. And everyone kind of expects him to like, do show of force, because that's what you do. But actually, his view is that the Royal Navy's policy is not to start wars. The purpose of the Royal Navy is to maintain the free flow of commerce on the high seas.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  We're here to make money, is his attitude. We take care of pirates, we deal with British interests, we do not start wars. And so eventually the word gets back to Washington DC and London about just how badly this has all escalated. And both central governments are horrified that the dispute over a pig has managed to grow with like multiple warships, dozens of guns. And now at this point, it's involving more than 2,000 men. And so they actually send a general in, whose nickname was the Pacifier, a guy by the name of Winfield Scott.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  Oh, I've heard of that, I've heard of him.

• 15:08Speaker 04

  Well, he's the thing, so by this point, he's a little bit famous because he's resolved a diplomatic nightmare somewhere else on the Canadian border. And crucially, he did it without a shot being fired. So he's got this rep, which is how he gets the nickname, Winfield Scott, the Great Pacifier. Interesting thing to note about Winfield Scott, he's not a well man, like he weighs over 300 pounds. I'm only saying that because moving him around is actually a bit of effort. Like they actually have to put him in a basket and a crane to get him on board the ship. So his arrival is sort of, it's noted because it's an unusual way for a person of his calibre to arrive in a basket and crane. The amazing thing about Winfield Scott is by the time he arrives, he manages to dispel the tension in like a week.

• 15:53Speaker 04

  I don't know what, like, it's amazing what he does. And so they actually ultimately agree that they will have joint military occupation of the island. It's no longer a like, we'll just agree to disagree. They actually arrive at some final agreement of joint military operation. But when it comes to deciding ultimately who will actually get the island, weirdly, they turn to Germany.

• 16:19Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 16:20Speaker 04

  The British and the Americans actually turned to the Emperor of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm the first.

• 16:24Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 16:25Speaker 04

  I think because he'd recently defeated France in the Franco-Prussian War, he was seen as like powerful.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  It's what, because even the German Empire is nowhere near.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  No.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  This, Germany has no dog in this fight at all. Maybe that's why they called him.

• 16:37Speaker 04

  I think that might genuinely be it. Here's a guy that represents a legacy imperial power that have had a win and doesn't necessarily have a horse in this particular fight. Bear in mind, the point they get him involved, there is a treaty in place, like no one's pointing guns at each other. So it's now like, let's settle it.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Yep, okay.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  But we can't actually live with this grey area anymore. And in the end, remember when we zoomed into that map and there was water that goes above the islands and water that goes below, that kind of surrounds it? And what they could never work out in the initial treaty was should the borderline go through that strait, the one that goes above or the strait below?

• 17:17Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 17:17Speaker 04

  In the end, the Germans, German singular, decided that the islands should belong to the United States of America.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  So yeah, they end up ending it through a conversation, which they probably could have had to begin with and avoided the entire situation. That business with potentially starting a war over the assassination of Archduke Ames Ferdinand. I've gotta call the pig from now on.

• 17:39Speaker 04

  So look, there's always been a complicated relationship between Canada and the United States. Certainly at times it's been violent. And at the moment, the relationship between the United States and Canada is probably the most complicated it's been in decades, right? The personalities of the two nations have never been more clearly drawn. But I do think it's worth remembering that there are these weird inflection moments in history where it didn't take very much to bring two enormously powerful nations to the brink of a war. And I'm, no one saw it coming, we've spent the last couple of months looking at quite literally just stupid wars.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 18:14Speaker 04

  We actually called the series This Stupid War.

• 18:16Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 18:16Speaker 04

  Because I was so interested in all of these stories in the past where you hear about a trigger point, where the reason two nations or two groups go to war is because there's something that on paper just seems so dumb. But usually what that reveals is there's a powder keg of issues that have been building up over decades that have never been properly dealt with. In the case of this island, they just agreed to disagree with who owned the island. And that created an environment where two groups of people, a tiny community

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  could bring an enormous amount of potential violence to two very big nations that, you know, realistically already had a complicated dynamic at that point in history, or two, two empires, because it's not technically nations at that point. And that's kind of the biggest lesson I've taken away from, from this and all the other strange wars we've been looking at. That if you don't deal with the root causes, if you keep kicking the can down the road on territorial disputes or border disputes or trade disputes, there will come a moment, potentially, where if there isn't a cooler head in the room, that can explode.

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, at the moment, obviously the US and Canada is a strange situation at the moment. But over the last several decades, there are obvious border disputes between countries like India and China, along with China and Taiwan, the South China, I mean, a lot of it has to do with China, to be honest.

• 19:32Speaker 04

  I'm noticing a thing.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  A lot of it's China.

• 19:34Speaker 04

  Examples.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  But all of those places are so often described as powder kegs because nobody can decide, you know, what's what. And yes, eventually someone might shoot the pig. The pig war, I like it a lot, uh, it makes a lot more sense to me than the emu war.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  Oh no, the emu war makes heaps of sense to me. The emu war is way more sense to me than this one.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  I mean, the emu war just seems to me like it was a, you know, a pest eradications project that went a little bit wrong.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  Back after World War One, the Australian Army went to war with emus in West Australia and the emus won. That's the headline.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  They didn't defeat the Australian Army, you know, it was a truce.

• 20:06Speaker 04

  They got Kaiser Wilhelm.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  Well, no, it's funny, they talk about like, the bullets keep bouncing off the emus, they're impervious to us.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  Sure they are.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  Maybe your aim's not that good, mate. Okay, so here's the thing, after World War One, you've got a huge amount of traumatised young men who they were genuinely worried about rising up against the government because they'd seen that in returned vets in other countries. And so the origin of why they end up in the West Australian wheat belt in the first place, the government quite literally was like, here, have some land, spread out, don't rise up, we know you've been through some stuff. I've started viewing the emu war through the lens of like, this was a way to deal with traumatised soldiers, with the promise of building up their own land. Then of course, once they get there, they're turning it into agricultural land, growing with wheat. And the emus are like, oh great, so we can eat this stuff, right?

• 20:55Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  So like the emu war is very funny on the one hand, but it's like, if you scratch a little bit deeper, it does kind of tell you a sad story about, because I don't think we pay enough attention to World War One for Australia in general. Something in the vicinity of 60,000 young Australians, mostly boys, let's be honest, get killed. The ones that come back have never seen anything like it, they're so traumatised. And then we sent them out to like grow arable land, what we thought was arable land in an unforgiving landscape. And then suddenly they're attacked by emus, we can fight the emus. Oh wait, no we can't.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Mark, thank you. I feel like the disputed border is sort of almost partially the story of, if you're listening and no one saw it coming as well. We find little stories on the border of our programmes to come together and discuss and build friendly relations between the two programmes that benefit us both. Mark, thank you very much.

• 21:54Speaker 03

  Do you remember this incredible hot mic moment? In the past, people have rarely lived longer than 70 years. But today they say that at 70, you are still a child. It's a conversation between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

• 22:10Speaker 05

  Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become and even achieve immortality.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  In Thursday's episode, we're looking into Putin's quest for eternal life. It involves harvesting the organs of mini pigs, blood transfusions and some very special top secret Russian goo. I'll catch you then.