I don’t know why they call it the “Pig War”. The pig wasn’t mad at anybody. From the sketchy description we have it seems likely he was a Large Black, a breed “…known for its very docile nature, and …unaggressive temperament…”, according to Wikipedia. It would seem more logical then to call it “Lyman Cutlar’s War”, since he was the one with the musket, and he was pretty worked up on the morning of June 15, 1859, when he said he discovered the "scrofa domesticus" rooting in his potato patch. An unidentified male human was, according to Lyman, leaning on Lyman’s fence and laughing at the pig’s efforts. So outraged was Lyman that he immediately fetched his musket and dispatched the offending porker to Hog-Heaven, whereupon the human ran into the woods.
Okay, it wasn’t charging Cossacks, and the pig wasn’t Napoleon from Animal Farm. But Lyman was an American and the two-toed ungulant was the property of the English owned Hudson’s Bay Company - and you get the feeling that somebody was looking for an excuse to start a shooting war.
In 1846 the United States and Great Britain thought they had avoided just this kind of trouble by agreeing to a Canadian border along the 49th parallel westward from the Rocky Mountains to the middle of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The border line on the map then made a jog to the south to allow the already settled Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island to remain on the British side of the border.
The problem was that right in the middle of the strait were the San Juan Islands, the largest of which was the 54 square miles of the island of San Juan. When the original border was drawn nobody in London or Washington knew the islands were there. But as soon as London realized the truth, The Hudson Bay Company opened a sheep ranch, Belle Vue Farm, on the south coast of San Juan island, and notified the Americans that they now considered all of the San Juan islands to be English property.
The Americans countered, in 1853, by creating Washington Territory, and incorporating the islands into its Whatcom County. Washington Territory even dispatched a sheriff to San Juan to collect taxes, and arrest the scofflaws, i.e. English citizens. But Charles Griffin, the Belle Vue Farm manager, (and owner of the aforementioned pig) treated the warrent as if it were a joke. The sheriff returned home, dragging 30 kidnapped and bleating sheep as compensation.
And there the situation probably would have remained, except that in March of 1858 gold was discovered in British Columbia. This drew an instant wave of American prospectors, the vast majority of whom did not find any gold. But, over the winter of 1858/59, about 30 of the ambitious, restless but thin-blooded Americans, including one Lyman Cutlar, escaped the brutal Canadian winter along the Fraser River by moving to the more temperate coastal climate. Once aboard San Juan island, and being belivers in "Manifest Destiny", they immediately started behaving as if they were the landlords, including executing English pigs for eating American potatoes.
This might be the place to point out that I think Layman Cutlar’s story is too convenient. He claims the pig invaded his potato patch on the very anniversary of the signing of the 1846 treaty, June 15th. Secondly, he mentions a human witness and a fence, both important proof of ownership under American homesteader law. And then there was his behavior post his pork-a-cide.
Lyman offer to pay ten dollars for the deceased little ham hock, a fair price back east. But this being the wilds of British Columbia Mr. Griffin (above) demanded one hundred dollars, a more accurate if slightly inflated quotation. When Lyman refused to even counter that offer, an arrest warrant was issued for Lyman Cutlar.
And even though the warrant was never executed the Americans appealed to their local governor for a redress of grievances. That request eventually went to Brigadier General William Selby Harney (above), a native Tennesaen who had inherited Andrew Jacksons hatred of the British and the command of Washington Territory. Harney immediately dispatched 66 soldiers to San Juan, under the command of the mecurial Captain George Picket.
Being a hopeless romantic George Picket arrived on San Juan and announced, “We’ll make a Bunker Hill of it”, even though his orders were to avoid shooting (and evidently not remembering that Bunker Hill was a defeat). Picket encouraged his men to taunt the British sailors and marines dispatched to keep an eye on the Americans. It seems he was hoping they would shoot first. 
Pickett's provocative behavior led to British and then American and then to British reinforcements, until there were five British warships with 2,000 men and 70 cannons anchored off San Juan island, facing less than 500 Americans with 14 cannons. The island was a powder keg guarded by children playing with matches.
It was at this point that President of the United States James Buchanan first learned about the dead pig on San Juan…from the newspapers. He ordered 77 year old General-in-chief Winfield Scott to get out there and get things under control. The President would probably have agreed with the British Admiral who said the players on the scene seemed determined to “…involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig”.
It took the ancient Scott (above) eight months to travel from Washington, D.C. across the Isthmus of Panama and then up the coast to Washington Territory. But once there he quickly negotiated a truce. Both sides agreed to reduce their forces to 100 men each, and, at British insistance, Picket was replaced. Immediately a sensible calm was restored.
Tourists boated out from Vancouver to observe the dueling artillery practices and stare at the soldiers , while officers from both sides shared whiskey and cigars in manager Charles Griffin’s home. I'm willing to bet that they also shared an occasional ham. Certain that an eventual compromise would be reached, and having the distraction of a civil war looming back on the East Coast, Scott wasted no time in returning.
But almost the minute General Scott left Washington Territory, General Harney ordered Picket back to San Juan Island to resume his command. Clearly Harney’s intent was to stir up more trouble. But when word of Pickett’s reinstatement reached Washington, D.C., Harney was immediately relieved of his command. And that was pretty much the end of General Harney’s career. He was allowed to quietly retire in 1863, just about the time that his former junior officer, George Pickett, was directing a charge of 15,000 rebels across the battlefield at Gettysburg.
If Pickett had succeeded in starting a war with England over San Juan Island in 1860, I have to wonder if he would have still resigned his commission that year and joined the Confederacy. Or perhaps his and Harney’s plan had been all along to distract Washington with a war against England, making it easier for the South to seccede. There were plenty of Americans in 1860, including Abraham Lincoln’s new Secretary of State, William Seward, who thought a war with England would rally the south back to defense of the American Union. All such ideas were pipe dreams.
It is not an accident that Lyman Cutlar disappeared from history when no war was fought in defense of his potato patch. He also disappeared from San Juan island. The border dispute was finally settled in 1871, when America and England submitted to “binding arbitration”, overseen by Kaiser William I of Germany. And in 1872 The Kaiser awarded the San Juan Islands to America. So America won the islands without anybody else being killed, not even another pig.
Every morning on San Juan Island, Washington state, U.S. Park Service Rangers raise the stars and stripes over the "American Camp" on the south coast of the island, and the Union Jack over the north coast; this is the only spot on American soil where the U.S. government affords honors to a foriegn flag, in memory of two nations too sensible to fight a war, and of a pig who gave his life that others might live.
http://www.nps.gov/sajh/historyculture/the-pig-war.htm
Okay, it wasn’t charging Cossacks, and the pig wasn’t Napoleon from Animal Farm. But Lyman was an American and the two-toed ungulant was the property of the English owned Hudson’s Bay Company - and you get the feeling that somebody was looking for an excuse to start a shooting war.In 1846 the United States and Great Britain thought they had avoided just this kind of trouble by agreeing to a Canadian border along the 49th parallel westward from the Rocky Mountains to the middle of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The border line on the map then made a jog to the south to allow the already settled Fort Victoria on Vancouver Island to remain on the British side of the border.The problem was that right in the middle of the strait were the San Juan Islands, the largest of which was the 54 square miles of the island of San Juan. When the original border was drawn nobody in London or Washington knew the islands were there. But as soon as London realized the truth, The Hudson Bay Company opened a sheep ranch, Belle Vue Farm, on the south coast of San Juan island, and notified the Americans that they now considered all of the San Juan islands to be English property. The Americans countered, in 1853, by creating Washington Territory, and incorporating the islands into its Whatcom County. Washington Territory even dispatched a sheriff to San Juan to collect taxes, and arrest the scofflaws, i.e. English citizens. But Charles Griffin, the Belle Vue Farm manager, (and owner of the aforementioned pig) treated the warrent as if it were a joke. The sheriff returned home, dragging 30 kidnapped and bleating sheep as compensation.And there the situation probably would have remained, except that in March of 1858 gold was discovered in British Columbia. This drew an instant wave of American prospectors, the vast majority of whom did not find any gold. But, over the winter of 1858/59, about 30 of the ambitious, restless but thin-blooded Americans, including one Lyman Cutlar, escaped the brutal Canadian winter along the Fraser River by moving to the more temperate coastal climate. Once aboard San Juan island, and being belivers in "Manifest Destiny", they immediately started behaving as if they were the landlords, including executing English pigs for eating American potatoes.This might be the place to point out that I think Layman Cutlar’s story is too convenient. He claims the pig invaded his potato patch on the very anniversary of the signing of the 1846 treaty, June 15th. Secondly, he mentions a human witness and a fence, both important proof of ownership under American homesteader law. And then there was his behavior post his pork-a-cide.Lyman offer to pay ten dollars for the deceased little ham hock, a fair price back east. But this being the wilds of British Columbia Mr. Griffin (above) demanded one hundred dollars, a more accurate if slightly inflated quotation. When Lyman refused to even counter that offer, an arrest warrant was issued for Lyman Cutlar.And even though the warrant was never executed the Americans appealed to their local governor for a redress of grievances. That request eventually went to Brigadier General William Selby Harney (above), a native Tennesaen who had inherited Andrew Jacksons hatred of the British and the command of Washington Territory. Harney immediately dispatched 66 soldiers to San Juan, under the command of the mecurial Captain George Picket.Being a hopeless romantic George Picket arrived on San Juan and announced, “We’ll make a Bunker Hill of it”, even though his orders were to avoid shooting (and evidently not remembering that Bunker Hill was a defeat). Picket encouraged his men to taunt the British sailors and marines dispatched to keep an eye on the Americans. It seems he was hoping they would shoot first. Pickett's provocative behavior led to British and then American and then to British reinforcements, until there were five British warships with 2,000 men and 70 cannons anchored off San Juan island, facing less than 500 Americans with 14 cannons. The island was a powder keg guarded by children playing with matches.It was at this point that President of the United States James Buchanan first learned about the dead pig on San Juan…from the newspapers. He ordered 77 year old General-in-chief Winfield Scott to get out there and get things under control. The President would probably have agreed with the British Admiral who said the players on the scene seemed determined to “…involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig”.It took the ancient Scott (above) eight months to travel from Washington, D.C. across the Isthmus of Panama and then up the coast to Washington Territory. But once there he quickly negotiated a truce. Both sides agreed to reduce their forces to 100 men each, and, at British insistance, Picket was replaced. Immediately a sensible calm was restored.Tourists boated out from Vancouver to observe the dueling artillery practices and stare at the soldiers , while officers from both sides shared whiskey and cigars in manager Charles Griffin’s home. I'm willing to bet that they also shared an occasional ham. Certain that an eventual compromise would be reached, and having the distraction of a civil war looming back on the East Coast, Scott wasted no time in returning.But almost the minute General Scott left Washington Territory, General Harney ordered Picket back to San Juan Island to resume his command. Clearly Harney’s intent was to stir up more trouble. But when word of Pickett’s reinstatement reached Washington, D.C., Harney was immediately relieved of his command. And that was pretty much the end of General Harney’s career. He was allowed to quietly retire in 1863, just about the time that his former junior officer, George Pickett, was directing a charge of 15,000 rebels across the battlefield at Gettysburg.If Pickett had succeeded in starting a war with England over San Juan Island in 1860, I have to wonder if he would have still resigned his commission that year and joined the Confederacy. Or perhaps his and Harney’s plan had been all along to distract Washington with a war against England, making it easier for the South to seccede. There were plenty of Americans in 1860, including Abraham Lincoln’s new Secretary of State, William Seward, who thought a war with England would rally the south back to defense of the American Union. All such ideas were pipe dreams.It is not an accident that Lyman Cutlar disappeared from history when no war was fought in defense of his potato patch. He also disappeared from San Juan island. The border dispute was finally settled in 1871, when America and England submitted to “binding arbitration”, overseen by Kaiser William I of Germany. And in 1872 The Kaiser awarded the San Juan Islands to America. So America won the islands without anybody else being killed, not even another pig.Every morning on San Juan Island, Washington state, U.S. Park Service Rangers raise the stars and stripes over the "American Camp" on the south coast of the island, and the Union Jack over the north coast; this is the only spot on American soil where the U.S. government affords honors to a foriegn flag, in memory of two nations too sensible to fight a war, and of a pig who gave his life that others might live.http://www.nps.gov/sajh/historyculture/the-pig-war.htm- 30 -
It was a few minutes after three-thirty on Monday afternoon, Halloween,October 31, 1864. And what George Lamb could not have known as he throttled his fourteen year old 4-4-0 steam engine (above), named the “Clinton”, which was pulling a nine car cattle train, back onto the main line track, was that his attempt to save fifteen minutes would cost the lives of thirty-two human beings. 
Railroads were still new technology in 1864. The Broad Street work shops of the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia, where the “Clinton” had been assembled in 1850, was the Boeing Aircraft of their day; employing 1,700 highly skilled workers producing 2,000 locomotives every year. But the history of American railroads is in large part a series of abject lessons in how not to run a railroad.
Most of the lines were single track, meaning there were many more collisions in America than in Europe. The valid justification for this was that America’s railroads had to cover hundreds of miles between large cities, which made dual track lines outrageously expensive to build and maintain. But worse still, in terms of bloodletting, was America’s addiction to unfettered capitalism.
While producing many centers of growth and innovation, this horror of regulation also produced extraordinary waste, death and dismemberment. One example was at Lafayette, which during the middle of the 19th. century became a railroad crossroads. It was astride the shortest north-south route between Chicago and Cincinatti, and the shortest east-west route between Pittsburg and St. Louis. In Lafayette the two routes crossed, as the Chicago and Cincinnati Railroad (later called the Big 4)and the Toledo and Wabash Railway.
Since every rail line was a competitor, although the maps present the image of an integrated network, each comany did its best to restrict its competitors access to its customers. Rail lines did not physically cross without inentse and protractred negotiations. Even Lafayette, a town of less then 10,000 people in 1864, had three seperate passanger and frieght stations, thus adding intense buisness competition and duplication to the pressures for profit. Did this impact safety?
In the intervening thirty years literally tens of thousands of passengers would be killed or injured and thousands of workers would die or suffer crushed fingers, mangled arms or severed legs, and untold fortunes would be lost or destroyed in damaged freight, because of obsolete and needlessly dangerous equipment.
The problem of communication was paramount. It was not until the advent of steam engines that humans were able to move faster than biology could carry them. No human or horse could maintain twenty-five miles an hour over thirty or forty miles. A civil war era steam locomotive, like the “Clinton”, had no trouble maintaining that pace. Still, humans could know what was speeding down the track toward them only as far as they could see, which is why junctions and sidings often had elevated towers to keep watch and provide some limited warning.
And even though the telegraph allowed George Lamb to know that the “Cincinnati Express” had left Lebanon, Indiana almost sixty minutes before, there was no way for George to know exactly where that train was in the 37 miles between Lebanon and Lafayette. That was why the company rules required George’s “special” to wait until the Express was 35 minutes late before moving past “3 mile siding”. 
And that is when the safety rules ran up against the opportunitism of capitalism. On a normal day George Lamb worked in the machine shops of the Lafayette Rail Car Company on the north side of Lafayette. (Purdue University students, who often found part time work in the shop, are still known as “Boilermakers”.) And the local ticket agent undoubtedly charged extra for the “special” delivery of those nine car loads of cattle, bound to feed the Federal armies blocking old John Bell Hood’s attempt to re-capture Nashville.
The trick for George Lamb was to smoothly slip his “special” in between the already heavily scheduled traffic between Chicago and Cincinnati and beyond to the war front in Tennessee, without gumming up the regugular service. For doing that he would earn a bonus. And so, when George Lamb heard a distant whistle, he assumed it was the regular southbound train bound for Indianapolis which he was to follow, south.
So he felt confident in heading south twenty minutes early. Engineer Lamb accelerated across the Wea Creek Bridge, and slipped along the rails onto the flat prairie beyond.
Twenty minutes later, as he slowed for the graceful curve north of Culver’s Station (now Clarks Hill), George Lamb abruptly realized he had made a horrible mistake. For he was staring into the terrible Cyclopes eye of the “Cincinnati Express”, barreling toward him at over thirty miles an hour. There were five hundred and eight souls aboard the Express, mostly Union soldiers on leave. Engineer Lamb said there was no time to even apply the brakes. He and fireman McClory threw them selves from the cab just before...
...the two boilers slammed into each other with a closing speed of over seventy miles an hour, exploding in screams of steam and souls. Everyone aboard the first wooden passenger car of the “Express” was killed as the wooden cars splintered and telescoped into the rear of the engine,
...slamming its human cargo into a mass of bent iron and brass and broken bone and splattered blood. Long after the collission had ceased, after the last bit of wood had snapped and the last passenger car had cartwheeled in the farm fields to the right and left of tracks, the injured cattle began to scream. 
It was well after dark before the first of the 35 injured reached Lafayette, and were sheltered at the “Bramble House” hotel at 3rd and South Street, and katty-cornered, in a billiard room at the Lafayette House Hotel. The thirty-two deceased were left in a freight house at the bottom of South Street along the tracks. Ten were later buried in St. Mary’s cemetery.
Twenty-two Union soldiers who were either too injured to be identified or whose bodies were unclaimed were buried in Greenbush cemetery in Lafayette, their tombstones lined up in rank.
The Grand Jury blamed Engineer Lamb for “…reprehensible carelessness and disobedience of rules and regulations”, but at least they also mentioned that the Lafayette and Indianapolis Railroad had employed him, despite knowing that Lamb had caused an accident at Culver’s Station the year before, which had caused property damage but no injuries. It seems likely after this latest disaster the L&I would not continue to make that mistake. After the Grand Jury verdict Engineer Lamb disappears from history. But his is a conundrum that sounds far too familiar.
There are always working stiffs willing to take Engineer Lamb’s job, desperate for a paycheck or a promotion, who would violate the written rules and risk their own and other’s lives to secure a job. (The Jury didn’t even mentioned the ticket agent who sold the “Special”.) Engineer Lamb understood the unwritten rules.
Most people who survive paycheck to paycheck understand the unwritten rules. But, like the members of the Coroner’s Grand Jury, they are torn between the reality they know and what they have been taught, between how they know the game is played and their faith in the sanctity of the rules. 
As I said, it sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
