San Juan Boundary Dispute

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The American army officer knew that the odds against him were overwhelming. The three warships set at anchor in the bay below his camp mounted a total of 61 guns and carried nearly a thousand men, including a contingent of Royal Marines. Manned by just 66 soldiers, his own recently occupied position was fortified by earthworks and protected only by a single six-pounder gun and two mountain howitzers. The orders that Captain George Edward Pickett of the U.S. Army had received from his commanding general had been clear, however, and he was determined to hold his position.

Pickett had served with valor in the Mexican War right after his graduation from the United States Military Academy at West Point, and he had subsequently seen duty at several frontier posts. Now, on August 3, 1859, the man whose name would be forever linked to the most famous of all Civil War charges was the American commander on the scene as the United States and Great Britain again stood on the brink of war. The issue dividing the two countries this time was the ownership of the often fog-shrouded San Juan Islands that dot the strait between what is today the state of Washington and British Columbia’s Vancouver Island.*

The San Juan Islands constituted the last bit of disputed territory along the border between the United States and the British colonies to the north–today’s Canada. An 1818 treaty had extended the international border westward along the forty-ninth parallel, from Lake of the Woods, at what is today the far western tip of the province of Ontario, as far as the Rocky Mountains. Beyond that lay a vast, little-explored region between Spanish California to the south and Russian Alaska to the north, which was vaguely referred to as the ‘Oregon Country.’

By failing to agree on the partitioning of the territory, the two countries had left it open to exploration and occupation by nationals of both. But on June 15, 1846, after many years of conflicting claims, the United States and Great Britain signed the Oregon Treaty, establishing the boundary at the forty-ninth parallel west from the Rocky Mountains ‘to the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver’s Island and thence southerly through the middle of the said channel and of Fuca’s Straits to the Pacific Ocean.’

Remaining to be resolved was the exact location of the boundary through that channel, in the middle of which lay the San Juan Islands. The Haro Strait to their west separated the islands from Vancouver’s Island; it was this channel that the Americans claimed as the boundary. For its part, Britain insisted that the international boundary ran down the eastern, Rosario Strait, and that the San Juan Islands therefore belonged to the Crown.

Because its territory north of the forty-ninth parallel and west of the Rockies had not yet attracted an abundance of permanent settlers, the British government in 1849 leased all of Vancouver’s Island to the Hudson’s Bay Company for seven shillings a year, with the proviso that the company take over efforts at colonization. In 1851, James Douglas, formerly chief factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company on Vancouver’s Island, was appointed governor of that colony.

By the end of 1853, the British presence on the 24-mile-long and 8-mile-wide San Juan Island itself included a Hudson’s Bay Company’s fishing station and Bellevue Farm, a 4,500-head sheep ranch. The following year, a United States customs collector, Isaac N. Ebey, landed on San Juan Island with his deputy, Henry Webber, and attempted to collect duties from the farm manager, who swore out a warrant for the deputy’s arrest for trespassing on British soil. Nothing further came of this incident, and the dispute was allowed to simmer.

In March 1855, American sheriff Ellis Barnes of Whatcom County, the northernmost county in Washington Territory,* supported by a party of ten armed men, rounded up 35 sheep belonging to the Hudson’s Bay Company, intending to sell them as payment for back taxes. This action generated protests from Governor Douglas to his counterpart, Governor Isaac I. Stevens of Washington, and to the British Colonial Office and led to the submission of a claim for $15,000 in damages by the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Tags: 19th Century, American History, Foreign Affairs, Historical Conflicts, Politics

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