A Pig Walks Into a Bar and Gets Shot in the Face

Or: How the Victoria Crown Colonists and Bellingham Pig Punchers came to be.

While it’s dangerous when studying history to make broad assumptions of motivation, one could be forgiven for considering it a safe bet that when, on June 15^th, 1859, Lyman Cutlar shot a British pig to death on San Juan Island, Washington, Allegedly America, Earth, he didn’t think he’d just set into motion the founding of not one but two baseball teams.

All he knew was that this pig had walked into and subsequently dug up his potato patch one too many times, dammit, and that pig had to learn that there were consequences for its actions. And those consequences were… well, *points at the title of this piece.*

And Mr. Cutlar hadn’t shot just any British pig, but a Hudson’s Bay Company pig. A pig belonging to a royally-chartered powerhouse. A pig that, were they feeling so inclined towards violence, could be backed up by the greatest navy that had ever existed on Earth. And that navy was, generally, feeling inclined towards violence. I mean come on they were British for Christ’s sake.

For the uninitiated, this is what kicked off the Pig War. I say “war,” but this was less a war and more the least dignified and most bumbling version of “No you shut up!” in American, British, and likely human history (Southwest Conference divorce notwithstanding). The tense, conflict-y stages only lasted a couple weeks, and by the end not a single shot had been fired.

The first stages of this conflict are particularly entertaining when you consider that, for the heads of the British and American government, this was experienced primarily via letters from their Pacific frontier which they opened, skimmed, and went “Excuse me what?”

But eventually after a couple weeks of posturing, the American and British-Canadian belligerents decided it wasn’t really worth fighting over one wee island and its waterways no matter how militarily significant, since we were all about to invent airplanes anyway.

And then, in a comically stereotypical British-and-American-foreign-policy move, they just kinda… stayed put. For like, over a decade. Just guys being dudes, hanging out on a rock in the Salish Sea, unsure of who this rock belonged to but pretty down with the idea of chilling here on taxpayer money instead of being sent to Crimea or Gettysburg. One letter from an American serviceman to his cousin in Antietam wrote “Dearest Jedediah, I’m so sorry to hear about the loss of your legs and gangrene. You should come out west – we are absolutely pounding some piña coladas right now.” (To which the now-legless cousin replied “What the fuck is a piña colada? Also fuck you I don’t have legs.”)

Now, the thing with cooping up a bunch of mostly young men on one lil’ island is that there aren’t generally many things for them to do, entertainment-wise. First they tried waiting for someone to invent video games — even just something as simple as the 1980s icon, Oregon Trail. But eventually they got bored of waiting and discovered an emerging, exciting North American pastime: gun violence.

Shortly after that they got tired of playing gun violence, so they turned to another emerging North American pastime: hunting animals to extinctio— I mean, baseball.

Thus, long before your Everett Flabbergasters existed, their nemeses the Crown Colonists were born. And, made up of the Colonists’ American counterparts on San Juan, their original rivals came to be: the Pig Punchers.

Of course, neither of these were originally associated with any locale other than San Juan Island; they were simply the American team and the British-Vancouver Islander one. And while the Crown Colonists’ name was rather self-explanatory, the Americans settled on “Pig Punchers” after discovering a few games into it that “Men Who Shoot Pigs In The Face” really didn’t roll off the tongue.

After plenty of years to build up a friendly rivalry, the American and British-Canadian troops left San Juan Island by the early-mid 1870s — the Brits and Canadians to their homebase on Vancouver Island and the Americans off to where many of them had originally been stationed across the water at the beginning of this big dumb fiasco: Bellingham.

At this, the Bellingham Pig Punchers and Victoria Crown Colonists were the first two teams of what would become the Cascadia Baseball League.

Unlike most rivalries, Victoria and Bellingham maintained theirs as a mostly friendly affair from this point onward. After all, they both had a common origin and for decades passed down the merry tales of Ye Olden Times on San Juan Island, which had been essentially just a grand fun hangout once they got over the initial conundrum of whether or not to shoot each other to death.

From that point onward the baseball playing aspect of these two teams’ connection was more-or-less some obstacle they had to get through in order to pursue their first passion, day drinking. Subsequently, a Victoria-Bellingham series tended to really just be one giant hootenanny where occasionally a baseball game would break out.

By the 1900s, this connection was strengthened by the fact that Victoria pitcher Ronnie Ronson’s day job was as a private investigator — and his colleagues were none other than, across the Haro Straight, and then the Rosario Straight, and the other little wibbly straight and then the other other littler wibblier straight, Bellingham first baseman Archibald Evans and manager’s assistant slash new pitching coach Mabel Rhys. Together with a couple other associates they made up the international private detective agency, Juan de Fuca Coastal, Private Investigators.

Mabel was particularly valued by the Pig Punchers for inventing a new kind of change up during her tenure that was — and this is the scientific term for it — even changier uppier. She also invented “beaming someone in the face” after hitting her husband with a four-seamer in the noggin in response to him chucking a cast iron skillet at her. The impact killed him almost instantly. (Post-mortem’s cause of death: “skull gone.”) Luckily everyone who knew the two of them agreed this was essentially a good thing since he was a real jagoff. A real “Goodbye Earl” type, if you will.

The “everyone” in question included the Pig Punchers front office, who promoted Mabel to pitching coach the next morning and upped her salary by $250 a year.

This also gave Bellingham an edge because it turned out having a woman on staff who manslaughter’d her douchebag husband, and then making said woman in charge of all the other people who throw objects “fast” and “at you”… well…

As a result, more batters than would admit it were terrified of Bellingham, convinced they’d get a fastball to the temple at any moment should a pitcher’s unpredictable temper flair up. If they knew one thing about women — and they didn’t — certainly Mabel’s hormonal, overly-emotional, and murderous tendencies would rub off on her pupils.

Of course this was completely unfounded, but the Pig Punchers quickly learned this reputation worked in their favor so put little-to-no-effort into correcting any misconceptions about their starting rotations’ anger management.

So, between the three of them and their two sources of income each, Archie Evans, Mabel Rhys, and Ronnie Ronson were sitting pretty comfortably. Well, other than the semi-annual conspiracy theories from the rest of the league about “fraternizing with the enemy” and the implications that came from that. But frankly they and their teammates were all too busy being drunk by noon to care too much, so it was mostly a delightful existence.

Very few people were unafraid of stepping in the box against the Bellingham Pig Punchers — fewer still could actually back that up with the requisite “not being a little bitch”-ness at the plate.

One of those few became known in his first at-bat against Bellingham. It was June 1918, and he was a lanky sunburnt 17 year-old batting ninth in the order wearing blue and not-quite-red, too young, stubborn, and one might argue stupid to be afraid. His sister was in the stands, having got in in the second inning after some homemade pyrotechnics she had been tinkering with had distracted her and made her late.

Of the fellow Cascadia Baseball League teams, as a Ballard Pukey Swede he hated the Everett Flabbergasters but couldn’t be assed to figure out why he should be afraid of these Bellingham Pig Punchers’ pitchers. He’d heard something about a murder and a gal? Whatever. They didn’t seem dangerous.

His name was Rutherford Myrvang.