Ten Bizarre Wars Fought Over Ridiculous Things

On June 15, 1859, an American settler named Lyman Cutlar found a pig rooting in his garden on San Juan Island and shot it. The pig belonged to the Hudson's Bay Company, the British trading firm that also claimed the island. Both the United States and Britain said the San Juan Islands were theirs, because an 1846 treaty had drawn the border through a channel without saying which channel.

When British officials threatened to arrest Cutlar and remove American settlers as trespassers, the US Army sent Capt. George Pickett with 64 soldiers. Britain answered with warships. By the end of August, 461 Americans were dug in with 14 field cannons and eight heavy naval guns, facing a growing squadron of British warships offshore. Rear Adm. Lambert Baynes refused to land troops, reportedly saying he would not drag two great nations into war over a squabble about a pig.

Gen. Winfield Scott negotiated a joint military occupation, and British and American camps shared the island for about 12 years. In 1872 the dispute went to Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany, whose arbitration commission ruled for the United States on October 21. According to the National Park Service, which runs the site, the only casualty of the entire standoff was the pig.

A French pastry cook known only as Monsieur Remontel claimed that Mexican army officers had ransacked his shop in Tacubaya, near Mexico City, during the unrest of the late 1820s or early 1830s (accounts differ on the year). Mexican sources say the officers had simply run up a tab. Either way, Remontel took his complaint to King Louis-Philippe of France.

His grievance was bundled with other French claims, and in 1838 France demanded 600,000 pesos in damages. When Mexico would not pay on French terms, a French fleet under Rear Adm. Charles Baudin blockaded the Gulf ports. In late November 1838 the French shelled the fortress of San Juan de Ulúa, which guarded Veracruz, and then took the city.

The war's strangest casualty was a leg. Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna rushed to Veracruz, was hit by grapeshot in a skirmish with the French rear guard, and had his leg amputated. He later had it buried with military honors, and the wound helped revive his political career. With British diplomats brokering a deal, Mexico agreed to the 600,000 pesos and French forces left in March 1839. The pastry shop gave the war its nickname, but the real issues were unpaid debts and France's push for trade concessions.

In April 1731, Spanish coast guards stopped the British brig Rebecca in the West Indies. Its captain, Robert Jenkins, later said a Spanish officer sliced off part of his ear during the search. Spain had been cracking down on British smuggling, and Jenkins's ship was reportedly carrying contraband sugar.

The story sat for years until 1738, when opposition politicians brought Jenkins before a committee of the House of Commons and he displayed what he said was the severed ear. It became a rallying symbol for members of Parliament who wanted to push Prime Minister Robert Walpole into a fight with Spain. Britain went to war in October 1739.

The ear was the spark, not the cause. Underneath were trade rights in Spanish America, smuggling and a border dispute between the young colony of Georgia and Spanish Florida. The fighting reached American soil: Gen. James Oglethorpe's 1740 siege of St. Augustine failed, and in 1742 his forces turned back a Spanish invasion of St. Simons Island at the Battle of Bloody Marsh. A huge British assault on Cartagena, in present-day Colombia, collapsed in 1741, with disease killing more men than combat. The conflict then merged into the larger War of the Austrian Succession, which ended in 1748.

Ohio and the Michigan Territory both claimed a strip of land along their border of roughly 468 square miles, including the port town of Toledo at the mouth of the Maumee River. The confusion went back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which defined a boundary running due east from the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Old, flawed maps and competing surveys produced competing lines.

In 1835 both sides sent militia toward the strip. Michigan's territorial governor, Stevens T. Mason, still in his early twenties, signed a law making it a crime for Ohio officials to act there. Ohio Gov. Robert Lucas created Lucas County and sent surveyors to re-mark the line. Michigan men chased off the surveyors, and a few shots were fired over their heads. The one notable injury came in July 1835, when a man named Two Stickney stabbed a Michigan deputy sheriff, Joseph Wood, in Toledo. Wood survived.

President Andrew Jackson sided with Ohio. Congress passed a compromise that Jackson signed on June 15, 1836: Ohio kept Toledo, and Michigan got statehood plus the western Upper Peninsula. Michiganders grumbled about trading a port for frozen wilderness, but the peninsula turned out to hold rich copper, iron and timber. Michigan became the 26th state on January 26, 1837.

Missouri and the Iowa Territory disagreed about where one ended and the other began. Missouri's constitution relied on a line surveyed by John C. Sullivan in 1816, but an 1837 resurvey put the border several miles farther north, handing Missouri a strip of land that Iowa considered its own. Much of the argument turned on which rapids in the Des Moines River the original description meant.

Tax collectors brought it to a head. When Missouri officials tried to collect taxes in the disputed strip, the sheriff of Van Buren County, Iowa, arrested the sheriff of Clark County, Missouri. According to the story that gave the war its name, Missouri agents also cut down three bee trees, hollow trunks full of wild honey, as a form of payment. Settlers on the frontier prized that honey, and Iowans were furious.

In late 1839 both governors called out militia, Lilburn Boggs in Missouri and Robert Lucas in Iowa. Several hundred Iowa volunteers reached a camp at Farmington, but the confrontation fizzled before anyone fought, and the two sides agreed to let federal authorities decide. The U.S. Supreme Court settled the matter in Missouri v. Iowa in 1849, siding with Iowa and fixing the boundary on the old Sullivan line, which surveyors then marked with iron posts.

In June 1969, El Salvador and Honduras played a series of World Cup qualifying matches. Fans were attacked, riots broke out, and the deciding game was moved to Mexico City, where El Salvador won 3 to 2. Within weeks the two countries were at war, and the press called it the Football War, or the Soccer War.

Soccer was the match that lit the fuse, not the fuel. El Salvador was small and crowded, and many thousands of Salvadorans had moved into Honduras to farm. A Honduran land reform program in the 1960s excluded people not born in Honduras, and Salvadoran settlers were pushed off land and expelled. Tensions over migration, land and borders had been building for years.

On July 14, 1969, El Salvador bombed targets in Honduras and sent troops across the border. Honduras struck back at Salvadoran military and oil facilities. The Organization of American States brokered a ceasefire that took effect on the night of July 18, which is why the conflict is also called the 100 Hour War. It was short but not trivial: the UK National Archives puts the dead in the thousands, most of them civilians, and tens of thousands of Salvadorans were forced to return home. A formal peace treaty was not signed until October 30, 1980, in Lima.

Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini of Zanzibar died suddenly on August 25, 1896. Within hours his nephew Khalid bin Barghash moved into the palace and declared himself sultan. Britain, the dominant power in Zanzibar, preferred a different candidate and ordered him to stand down. Khalid barricaded himself in the palace with about 2,800 defenders.

The British ultimatum expired at 9:00 a.m. on August 27. Two minutes later, Royal Navy ships began shelling the palace. The bombardment set the building on fire, silenced its guns and sank the royal yacht Glasgow, the closest thing Zanzibar had to a navy. The firing stopped at roughly 9:40. Counts of the duration vary from about 38 to 45 minutes, which is why it is usually called the shortest war in recorded history.

Short does not mean bloodless. About 500 of Khalid's defenders were killed or wounded, many in the fire, while a single British sailor was wounded. Khalid escaped to the German consulate and was smuggled out to German East Africa. Britain installed its preferred sultan, and Khalid's supporters were ordered to pay for the shells fired at them. The episode ended any real independence Zanzibar had left for decades.

In 1932, an estimated 20,000 emus moved into the wheat belt around Campion, Western Australia, trampling crops and opening gaps in fences that let rabbits through. Many of the farmers were World War I veterans, and they asked the government for machine guns. Defence Minister Sir George Pearce agreed, on the condition that the farmers supply food, lodging and ammunition costs.

Maj. G.P.W. Meredith of the Royal Australian Artillery arrived with two soldiers, two Lewis guns and 10,000 rounds. The emus did not cooperate. They scattered into small groups whenever the guns opened up, a gun jammed during one ambush, and a truck-mounted gun could not hit anything on the rough ground. After bad press, the troops were pulled out on November 8, sent back on November 13, and recalled for good in December. Meredith reportedly compared the birds to tanks for their ability to absorb fire.

Meredith claimed 986 confirmed kills using 9,860 rounds, plus about 2,500 birds he believed later died of wounds. Historians treat those figures as likely inflated. What clearly worked better was a bounty system: in a six-month stretch of 1934, farmers claimed 57,034 emu bounties. The government turned down later requests for military help, and the emus are still there.