San Juan Boundary Dispute

 | American History  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

* The mainland west of the Rocky Mountains, from the forty-ninth parallel to Alaska, was known as New Caledonia until 1858, when it became the colony of British Columbia. Vancouver Island–until 1861 known as ‘Vancouver’s Island’–was a separate British colony. The two former colonies together joined the Canadian confederation as the province of British Columbia in 1871.

The situation created enough concern in Washington, D.C., that Secretary of State William L. Marcy wrote to Governor Stevens to recommend that the officials of the Washington Territory do nothing that might provoke conflict in the area. He further urged that neither the Americans nor the British should attempt to exercise exclusive sovereign rights until the ownership of the islands could be settled. Marcy requested that the British Colonial Office send a similar message to Governor Douglas, which they did.

It appeared that officials in the seats of government in London and Washington, D.C., believed that the dispute over the ownership of the islands would be decided in due course. A Joint Boundary Commission, with Archibald Campbell as the head of the American delegation and Royal Navy Captain James C. Prevost leading the British, met in the disputed area several times during 1857 but settled nothing.

The matter rested uneasily through both the Indian uprising that threatened the Washington Territory in the mid- 1850s and the Fraser River gold rush of 1857-58 in the Hudson’s Bay Company’s territory of New Caledonia. The uprising brought a greatly increased American military presence to the Pacific Northwest, and the gold rush led Britain to establish New Caledonia as a formal colony, known as British Columbia, with James Douglas–already governor of Vancouver’s Island–as its governor.

By 1859, 18 Americans, unsuccessful in the gold fields of the Fraser River valley, had settled on San Juan Island. In June of that year, one of them, Lyman A. Cutlar, shot a pig that he saw rooting in his garden. Realizing that the animal was from the Hudson’s Bay Company farm, Cutlar offered to compensate the farm manager. But when informed that the pig was a prize breeder with a value of $100, Cutlar refused to pay. His stance occasioned a visit by A. G. Dallas, president of the board of the Hudson’s Bay Company and son-in-law of Governor Douglas, and several other gentlemen to Cutlar’s farm to inform him that he was trespassing on British soil and would be subject to arrest by British authorities if he did not pay what was owed.

This already volatile situation was exacerbated by the arrival on the scene of Brigadier General William Selby Harney, the recently appointed commander of the United States’ Military Department of Oregon. The 58-year-old Harney was well known in the army for his bravery in battle, his foul temper and vividly vulgar tongue, his frequent insubordination, and his disposition to overlook or avoid both the military chain of command and the prerogatives of other government departments in order to achieve what he considered necessary ends.

Based at Fort Vancouver, Washington Territory, General Harney sailed to San Juan Island in July 1859 aboard the USS Massachusetts. Upon his arrival, he met some of the American residents of the island and learned about Indian attacks on the settlement and the incident with the pig, as well as the American islanders’ fear and dislike of the British. Harney immediately pledged his support and suggested that they draft a petition–for which he provided the wording–requesting that he station a military force on the island.

Without consulting either civil territorial authorities or his superiors in the War Department, Harney then ordered Captain Pickett and Company D of the Ninth Infantry to proceed from Fort Bellingham on the mainland to San Juan Island and establish a post, ostensibly to protect the inhabitants from hostile Indians and ‘to resist all attempts at interference by the British authorities residing at Vancouver’s Island, by intimidation or force….’ Although he issued the order on July 11, Harney did not send a report of his action to the War Department in Washington, D.C., until July 19; that report did not arrive there until September.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

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

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.