Former San Juan Island resident Michael Bunnell has written a humorous historical novel set during the most famous incident in the island’s history. The Friendly Little War of Lyman Cutler faithfully recounts the actual events of the 1859 “Pig War” in which a minor incident between neighbors nearly touched off a shooting war over a long-festering border dispute.
“There was already plenty of comic potential in what some of the real people actually did,” Bunnell has noted. “and a few of the circumstances provided complications that any fiction writer would be proud to have invented.”
The fictional elements that Bunnell did invent make the book, in the author’s words, “something like a musical comedy without the music” with tangled love interests, professional rivalries, and escalating misunderstandings. The obligatory happy ending includes the historically accurate peaceful resolution of the Pig War.
Bunnell, who lived on San Juan Island for two years in his youth, later discovered that his family apparently lived for a time on the site of Camp Pickett where, a century earlier, the future Confederate General and 66 U.S. soldiers had prepared to repel an invasion by more than 1,000 British marines. Bunnell has been writing professionally since the age of 18 and has published hundreds of essays, scores of magazine articles, and dozens of assorted other pieces.
He has written television and radio programs, commercials, and promotional announcements as well as TV series proposals and trade show video scripts. His 10-year broadcasting career that overlapped his freelance writing included work as a radio DJ, program director, sports director, and news director. After returning to writing as his primary activity he has continued to do radio and television voice-overs and a few on-camera appearances. Today Bunnell lives just across the Strait of Juan de Fuca from San Juan Island. His home is near the historic village of Dungeness, where Lyman Cutler bought the seed potatoes which led to the famous pig incident on San Juan Island.
