Kaiser Wil-Ham is the focal point of the outdoor interpretive plaza at San Juan Island National Historical Park/NPS

A small island, potatoes, and a dead pig nearly brought the United States and the British empire to war in the mid-18th century, and that's why San Juan Island National Historical Park has unveiled a bronze pig that stands with a potato in its mouth in front of the park's visitor center.

As the National Park Service tells the story, on June 15, 1859,  Lyman Cutlar, an American, shot and killed a Hudson Bay Company pig he found rooting in his garden on the island that stands in the ocean channel between what was then the Washington Territory and Vancouver Island, a British possession. When British authorities threatened to arrest Cutlar and evict all his countrymen from San Juan Island, a delegation of Americans living on the island sought military protection from Brig. Gen. William S. Harney, the anti-British commander of the Department of Oregon.

Harney responded by ordering Company D, 9th U.S. Infantry under Capt. George E. Pickett (of later Civil War fame) to San Juan. Pickett's 64-man unit landed on July 27 and encamped near the Hudson Bay Company wharf on Griffin Bay, just north of Belle Vue Sheep Farm. 

Vancouver Island Gov. James Douglas was at first dismayed, then angered by Pickett’s landing. His response was to dispatch Capt. Geoffrey Phipps Hornby, RN, commanding the 31-gun steam frigate HMS Tribune, to dislodge Pickett, but to avoid an armed clash if possible. Hornby was soon joined by two more warships, HMS Satellite and HMS Plumper with 21 and 10 guns respectively, the latter also with 46 Royal Marines and 15 Royal Engineers aboard. Pickett refused to withdraw and wrote Harney for help.

Throughout the remaining days of July and well into August, Hornby accumulated more marines; the majority veterans of amphibious landings under fire in China. However, Hornby wisely refused to take any action against the Americans until the arrival of Rear Adm. R. Lambert Baynes, commander of British naval forces in the east Pacific. Baynes, appalled at the situation, advised Douglas that he would not "involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig."

Meanwhile, Pickett was reinforced on August 10, by 171 men under Lt. Col. Silas Casey, who assumed command and, with Pickett in tow, went to Victoria to parley with Baynes. The old admiral (a veteran of the Battle of New Orleans in 1815) refused to leave his 84-gun ship of the line, HMS Ganges, to call upon Casey aboard a lighthouse tender. A disappointed Casey took note of the Ganges’ size and on his return to San Juan pleaded for more men.

By August 31, 461 Americans were encamped in the woods just north of Belle Vue Sheep Farm, protected by 14 field cannons. Eight more 32-pounder naval guns were removed from the USS Massachusetts to be emplaced in a redoubt excavated under the direction of 2nd. Lt. Henry M. Robert (future author of Robert’s Rules of Order).

While the Americans dug in, the British conducted drills with their 52 total guns, alternately hurling solid shot into the bluffs and raised rocks along Griffin Bay. It was all great fun for tourists arriving on excursion boats from Victoria, not to mention the officers from both sides who attended church serves together aboard the Satellite and shared whisky and cigars in Charles Griffin’s tidy home. -- National Park Service

To make a long story a bit shorter, San Juan Island remained under joint US-British military occupation for another 12 years. In 1872, "when Great Britain and the United States signed the Treaty of Washington, the San Juan question was referred to Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany for settlement. The kaiser referred the issue to a three-man arbitration commission who met for nearly a year in Geneva. On October 21, 1872, the commission, through the kaiser, ruled in favor of the United States, establishing the boundary line through Haro Strait. Thus the San Juan Islands became American possessions and the final boundary between Canada and the United States was set. On November 25, 1872, the Royal Marines withdrew from English Camp. By July 1874, the last of the U.S. troops had left American Camp. Peace had finally come to the 49th parallel, and San Juan Island would be long remembered for the 'war' in which the only casualty was a pig."

Now the pig, or at least a pig sculpture, memoralizes the "Pig War" in front of the park's new American Camp Visitor Center, which opened on June 24. On September 22, the park staff unveiled two key elements of the facility: A life-size bronze statue of a Berkshire boar, with a potato in its mouth, and a bronze orientation map depicting the maritime Coast Salish world.

The new facility explores 10,000 years of island history through exhibits created in direct collaboration with six park-affiliated Coast Salish Tribes, artists, artisans, and local historians. 

The bronze pig was created by Washington State sculptor Robert MacDonald, of Mach 2 Arts. The park held a contest to name the pig and naming suggestions were solicited from the public. A vote was held on social media; 135 votes were cast and the overwhelmingly favorite name was Kaiser Wil-ham. The pig itself represents the animal at the center of the Pig War, and its name refers to Kaiser Wilhelm, the first emperor of Germany, who held boundary arbitration hearings in 1872 that peacefully resolved the twenty-six years of international disputes in the San Juan archipelago.

The historical park was established in 1966 to commemorate the peaceful resolution of that conflict and to preserve and interpret the island’s history.