0:00 On June fifteenth, 1859, an American farmer named Lyman Cutlar shot a pig.0:05 That one act, over a potato patch on a tiny island you've never heard of, brought the United States and the British Empire—the two great global powers of the day—to the absolute brink of war.0:19 It's a different kind of historical madness than the Strasbourg Dancing Plague we talked about in the last episode.0:28 With the dancing, nobody could figure out why hundreds of people were compelled to move.0:34 Here, everyone knew exactly why, and it was still completely, utterly insane.0:40 So here's the setup.0:41 The San Juan Islands, a beautiful little archipelago between what's now Washington state and Vancouver Island.0:49 The problem was, a treaty from 1846 was… vague.0:53 It set the border in the channel, but there are two channels.0:57 So both the U.S.0:59 and Britain claimed the islands.1:01 American settlers, like our farmer Lyman Cutlar, started moving in.1:06 And so did the British, mostly employees of the massive Hudson's Bay Company, like Charles Griffin, the owner of the pig.1:15 The pig, a large black boar, had a bad habit of rooting around in Cutlar's potato patch.1:21 On June fifteenth, Cutlar had enough.1:24 He shot it.1:25 He went to Griffin to apologize, offered him ten dollars for the pig.1:30 Griffin, furious, demanded a hundred.1:33 That's over three thousand dollars today.1:36 Cutlar told him to get lost.1:38 Griffin went to the British authorities.1:41 Cutlar and the other Americans went to the U.S.1:44 military.1:45 And this is where a squabble becomes a crisis.1:48 The American commander in the region sends in troops to "protect" the settlers.1:54 He sends Captain George Pickett.1:56 Yes, that George Pickett, the one who’d later lead the disastrous charge at Gettysburg.2:03 Pickett lands with sixty-six soldiers and declares, dramatically, "We'll make a Bunker Hill of it." The British, understandably, are not impressed.2:14 The local governor, James Douglas, dispatches three warships.2:18 Then five.2:19 By August, you have five British warships with over two thousand men and seventy cannons staring down four hundred and sixty-one American soldiers with fourteen cannons.2:31 All because of a dead pig.2:33 This is the moment where we've seen the pattern before, right?2:38 A small, localized incident—an assassination, a ship sinking, a border skirmish—becomes a pretext.2:45 It's the spark that lights the fuse of a much bigger powder keg of nationalism and imperial ambition.2:53 Think Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.2:56 A single shot that rewrites the map of the world.2:59 But here’s where the analogy breaks down, and where the story gets really good.3:05 Because in 1914, the system was built to escalate.3:09 All the treaties and alliances were tripwires.3:12 In 1859, two key people decided to cut the wire.3:16 The first was the British commander on the scene, Rear Admiral Robert Baynes.3:22 He arrives, sees the massive fleet, sees Pickett's little encampment, and gets his orders: land the marines and start a fight.3:31 And he refuses.3:32 He looks at the whole absurd situation and says—and this is a direct quote—he will not "involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig." An admiral who chose sanity over orders.3:46 Meanwhile, word finally reaches Washington D.C., and President James Buchanan panics.3:52 The U.S.3:53 is already fracturing over slavery and is just a couple of years from civil war.3:59 The absolute LAST thing he needs is a full-blown war with the British Empire.4:05 So he sends his top general, Winfield Scott, to go fix it.4:09 Scott gets there, and he and the British governor work out maybe the most civilized solution to a military standoff ever.4:18 They agree to a joint occupation.4:20 Each country would be allowed to maintain a camp on the island with no more than one hundred men.4:27 For the next twelve years, the U.S.4:30 Army and the Royal Marines shared an island.4:33 They had separate camps, but reports say they got along famously, visiting each other's messes and celebrating each other's national holidays.4:44 Imagine that.4:45 Finally, in 1872, everyone decided it was time to settle the border for good.4:50 And they didn't go to war.4:52 They went to an arbitrator.4:54 They asked a neutral third party, German Emperor Wilhelm the First, to look at the original treaty and make a final ruling.5:03 He studied the maps, listened to the arguments, and in October 1872, he awarded the San Juan Islands to the United States.5:12 The British flag was lowered for the last time, and the Royal Marines sailed away.5:18 The only casualty of the entire twelve-year conflict remained the pig.5:24 It's so easy to laugh at this story.5:26 A war over a pig.5:28 But the point isn't how absurdly it started.5:31 The point is how sanely it ended.5:33 In a century of empires and armies looking for a fight, this is a story about commanders and presidents actively looking for an off-ramp.5:43 It’s a reminder that escalation feels inevitable, but it’s always, always a choice.
