In every book I’ve read by Emma Bland Smith, there’s the story itself—and then, in her author’s note and supplemental pages, the story behind the story. As someone who is always chasing wonder, I love her writing in both places. What makes her work especially delightful is that her style shifts to perfectly suit each book. The Pig War is one of my favorites because of her excellent dry humor. Even in the author’s note, that wit bursts through. I can’t help but think I’d utterly enjoy having coffee with this curious and funny soul.
As Smith notes, “It was more of a cold war or a standoff, since no one died but the pig.” Funny. True. And fascinating.
Before diving into the narrative, Smith and illustrator Alison Jay set the scene with a two-page spread featuring a vintage-style map and text structured like a play script. It introduces the date (1859), the setting (“a small but lovely island called San Juan”), the characters (“a few dozen men who had gotten along okay, for the most part, for some years”), and the mood (“About to change, for the worse”).
From there, we meet the unfortunate pig, owned by the British Hudson’s Bay Company, who wanders into the potato patch of an American miner, Lyman Cutler. “Maybe Lyman hadn’t had his coffee. Maybe he’d slept poorly. Maybe he was looking forward to boiling those potatoes for his supper. Maybe he was thinking of the many painful miles he’d rowed to buy the potato seed. But for whatever reason, when he saw that pig, he got cranky.” And so, Lyman shot the pig.
Regretting his impulsive decision, Lyman set off to pay the pig’s owner a fair price. But Charles Griffin, the pig’s owner, was in no mood to be reasonable. The men parted as enemies, and Griffin escalated the matter up the British chain of command, demanding that the Americans be removed from the island. “But those Yanks, they knew their way around a fountain pen, too.” Soon, the two nations found themselves teetering on the brink of war.
Smith does a brilliant job of capturing the drama while also infusing it with relevant and interesting historical facts. The story is fast-paced and I needed to know how it would resolve.
This is history at its most engaging—an excellent short account of an event that could have led to war but instead became an opportunity for diplomacy. A must-have for living book librarians, teachers, and parents who love bringing history to life.
