The Pig War

With a plot to grace any comic opera, the 1859-1872 "Pig War" broke out when an American living on a quietly disputed island in the Gulf of Georgia shot a British pig. The nearby Vancouver Island authorities and the military leadership of the Washington Territory both wanted to escalate the trivial incident into a full-blown war between the US and Great Britain. The hot-heads decided that the problem should become one of the earliest examples of international arbitration. The German Kaiser was brought in. The Pig War is a highly readable account of a little-known episode in Anglo-American history.