The Pig War: The United States, Britain, and the Balance of Power in the Pacific Northwest, 1846-72

The Pig War: The United States, Britain, and the Balance of Power in the Pacific Northwest, 1846-72. By Scott Kaufman. (Lanham: Lexington, 2004. xviii, 206 pp. $75.00, ISBN 0-7391-0729-1.)

Scott Kaufman's The Pig War is a study of Anglo-American relations in the period 1846 to 1872 that centers on a perennial dispute over the ownership of San Juan Island in the Pacific Northwest. As in many other nineteenth-century boundary negotiations, broad lines drawn by diplomats on two-dimensional maps solve the immediate problem but do not always satisfy circumstances on the ground in the wilderness. The particular circumstances that Kaufman addresses involve the 1859 shooting of a Hudson's Bay Company pig by an American citizen on San Juan Island-an island whose ownership had remained in dispute between Washington and London since the partitioning of the Oregon territory in 1846. Kaufman places this colorful story of the misfortunate pig in the context of an evolving Anglo-American rapprochement tested, he argues, by strategic tension over San Juan Island. Kaufman...