Historical tale · San Juan Island
They started on upper Spring Street while the grass was still wet, following the signs for the American Camp Trail out of Friday Harbor. Seven miles to the camp. Tom carried a small canvas pack. Colin had folded his jacket over his arm, though before they reached the airport he put it on again.
A plane lifted beyond the fence and banked west, toward Vancouver Island. They stopped talking until it had passed.
“Do you know what happened with the pig?” Tom asked.
“I grew up in Victoria,” Colin said. “We did it in Grade Five.”
“So you know.”
“I know somebody shot it.”
“Yes.”
“And there was a war.”
“Almost,” Tom said.
“Almost,” Colin agreed. “You always say it like that’s the good part.”
“It is the good part.”
They walked a little farther. Their shoes brushed water from the grass.
“He was a farmer,” Tom said. “Cutlar. That’s where you have to start. It was eating his potatoes. You have to picture it with its head down.”
And there was the pig, busy in the rows.
It was June 15, 1859. The soil came apart beautifully under its snout. A little pressure, a sideways shove, and another plant tipped over, exposing what it had been growing in secret.
Lyman Cutlar came out of his cabin.
He had planted those potatoes. He had turned the ground and set them in it and waited through the days when nothing appeared to be happening. Now the pig moved down a row, grunting softly, doing a morning’s damage without once looking up.
He shouted.
The pig shifted a few steps.
Cutlar went for his gun.
There was a moment when he came back outside, before he raised it, when the morning could still have gone another way. He could have thrown something. He could have chased the animal until both of them were tired. Instead, he put the stock against his shoulder.
The shot carried across the field.
Afterward, the pig lay among the broken plants. Cutlar stood with the gun lowered. Already it seemed excessive to be holding it.
—
“That’s very sympathetic,” Colin said.
“He’d worked that ground.”
“He’d worked somebody else’s ground.”
The animal belonged to the Hudson’s Bay Company, whose sheep grazed over much of the island. Cutlar went to see Charles Griffin, the company’s farm manager. He would pay for the pig. Money could settle it.
“Ten dollars,” Tom said. “He offered. People forget that part.”
“And Griffin wanted a hundred.”
“For a pig.”
“For a good pig.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Nobody shoots a bad one.”
That was enough to start them again. Cutlar said the animal had been in his garden before. Griffin’s answer was the one line from that summer that everybody remembers, and the two men on the road said it together.
“Keep your potatoes out of my pig.”
Whatever else they had been taught, they had both been taught that.
The pig became a question of the potatoes, and the potatoes became a question of the ground they grew in. Griffin considered Cutlar an American squatter on company land. Cutlar considered himself an American farming on American soil.
Neither man had to move his feet to find himself in a different country.
Thirteen years earlier, a treaty had put the boundary in the channel between Vancouver Island and the mainland. But there was more than one channel. The British favored Rosario Strait, east of the islands. The Americans favored Haro Strait, west of them. San Juan Island lay between.
“Rosario,” Colin said. “Obviously.”
“Haro. Obviously.”
“The Company was here first. They had the sheep, they had a fishing station.”
“And then people came and farmed.”
“People came and squatted. On land the Company was already using.”
“That’s how the whole West got settled,” Tom said.
“Yes,” Colin said. “I know.”
Beyond the farms were older landing places, fishing grounds, paths worn by people who had never needed either government’s permission to come ashore. Neither man on the road brought them up. Both their stories had been taught to start later.
But Griffin and Cutlar had their argument, and each knew where to send it.
British officials threatened Cutlar with arrest. The American settlers asked their army for protection.
By late July, Captain George Pickett had landed with sixty-four men.
—
A car passed close enough that the two walkers stepped farther onto the shoulder. For a while they went single file.
“Pickett,” Colin said to Tom’s back. “George Pickett.”
“Yes.”
“Gettysburg Pickett?”
“Four years before Gettysburg.”
The road was quiet again. They came abreast. Tom hitched the straps of his pack and did not add anything, and Colin, after a moment, decided not to either.
—
The soldiers brought tents, blankets, cooking pots. Things that suggested they expected to stay.
Across the water, in Victoria, Governor James Douglas learned that American troops had landed on the disputed island. British warships followed.
“Douglas was right there,” Colin said. “Twenty miles from here, give or take.”
“So it was your side that sent the ships.”
“He wanted to land Marines. He didn’t get to. Hold that thought.”
From shore, a ship was first a shape, then a collection of details: rigging, boats, figures on deck. The gunports were easier to count when the light changed.
Pickett refused to leave.
More Americans arrived. They dug positions and brought up artillery. Offshore, British sailors drilled at their guns.
A soldier carrying a bucket could look out and see the vessel that might kill him. A sailor leaning against a rail could see smoke rising from the meal those soldiers were preparing.
They could hear one another’s ordinary work.
That was how close it had become.
Orders traveled back and forth. Some demanded firmness. Others urged caution. A man receiving both was obliged to decide which word mattered more.
The British naval commander, Rear Admiral Robert Baynes, would not turn the dispute into a war.
“There,” Colin said. “That’s ours. That’s the part we get.”
“The admiral.”
“Douglas wanted troops ashore. Baynes wouldn’t do it. He said he wasn’t going to start a war between two great nations over a pig.”
“He had five ships and two thousand men,” Tom said. “It’s easy to be calm when you have more guns.”
“It’s easiest to fire when you have more guns.”
Tom thought about that for longer than Colin expected. “Okay,” he said. “Fair.”
Onshore, the Americans remained behind their guns. The days went on.
There were officers who visited one another, drank together, attended church together. Then they returned to their own sides.
Somewhere on the island, Cutlar still had a garden.
“Imagine having to go on weeding it,” Tom said.
Colin glanced at him.
“With all that out there.”
—
By the time they reached the open land near American Camp, the damp had dried from their shoes. The wind moved steadily over the grass.
The story had slowed with them.
General Winfield Scott had come that autumn to settle the immediate crisis. There would be troops from both countries on the island, in separate camps, while the governments worked out the boundary. The arrangement lasted twelve years. Finally, in 1872, arbitration under the German emperor settled the islands on the American side.
The British went home.
“The Kaiser,” Colin said. “We let the Kaiser decide.”
“You agreed to it.”
“London agreed to it. London was always agreeing to things on our behalf.”
“You weren’t even a country.”
“In 1859, no. By 1872 we were.” Colin said it mildly, as a correction rather than a point, and Tom took it as one.
They followed the path toward the old camp. After seven miles, the buildings looked surprisingly small.
“No battle,” Tom said. “That’s what I like about it. All that, and the pig was the only one killed.”
“In the standoff.”
“In the standoff,” Tom said. “Yes.”
He sat down at the edge of the path and worked a stone out of his shoe. Colin stayed standing, looking west across the grass toward the water. Somewhere past it, too low to see from here, was the city he had come from.
“Did Cutlar ever pay?” Colin asked.
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “Do you?”
“No.”
It seemed to be the one part of the story neither of them had been given.
The stone was smaller than either of them expected. Tom turned it between his fingers before dropping it beside the path.
For a moment neither spoke.
Then Colin took an apple from his jacket pocket. He rubbed it on his sleeve, examined it, and opened a small knife. The halves did not come out even. He looked at them a moment, then handed Tom the larger one.
“That’s the bigger half,” Tom said.
“I know,” Colin said. “You carried the pack.”
—
Dialogue and scene details are imagined. The history follows National Park Service accounts of Cutlar’s homestead, the standoff, and its settlement; Griffin’s retort and Baynes’s refusal are given as tradition reports them. The seven-mile route is described by San Juan Island Trails.