The Pig War (1859)

This Day in Esoteric Political History

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 19 June 2022

⏱️ 12 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s June 19th. This day in 1859, a skirmish on the San Juan Islands over a pig that intruded on a farmer’s potato crops leads to an argument, which leads to a diplomatic crisis, which almost leads to a war between the US and Canada.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.
0:07.0	My name is Jody Avergan.
0:10.0	This day 1859, Lyman Cutler, an American farmer living on San Juan Island, which is in the Pacific Northwest, sort of in the water between Seattle and Vancouver.
0:22.0	Anyway, this farmer, Lyman Cutler, goes out into his field and he finds
0:26.3	a pig eating some of his potatoes. And what does Lyman Cutler do? Well, he shoots that pig.
0:31.9	And that, my friends, is a bad move because it turns out that at
0:36.2	this moment, 1859, the San Juan Islands were kind of on a nice edge. It was disputed
0:41.5	territory that both the American and British claimed as their
0:45.2	own existing treaties that carved up the territory along the American-Canadian border, just
0:50.9	north of Seattle, had sort of not been clear about what would happen to
0:54.8	these islands and this pig incident really set things off because the pig was
0:59.7	owned by an Irishman who was employed by the British Hudson Bay Company.
1:05.0	Everyone got mad.
1:06.4	The pig was dead.
1:07.5	British authorities threatened to arrest Cutler.
1:09.6	American settlers called for military protection from this arrest. Things
1:13.6	escalated from there and that is how we get the Pig War of 1859. So here to
1:20.9	discuss as always are Nicole Hammer of Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wausley.
1:25.1	Hello there.
1:26.1	Hello Jody.
1:27.1	Hey there.
1:28.6	Very important fact, right off the bat.
	...

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