❖ CATTLE POINT, SAN JUAN ARCHIPELAGO

Cattle Point Light Station
San Juan Island, WA.
Undated image from the USCG Museum, Seattle, WA.

Standing proud through the salt spray, fog, high tides and low, here is a bird's eye view of one of the lights guarding the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
      In 1960 when historian Lucile McDonald visited San Juan Island, as she did many times, she found "to gain entry to this light station, it was a drive on a tortuous route along the cliffs on the southeast end of the island and through a locked gate. The road was for access to the lighthouse and for trucking to and from fish-buying scows stationed near the small inlet known as Fish Creek.
      The hill along which the road passes is Mount Finlayson (only 292 feet elevation), named for Roderick Finlayson, a Hudson’s Bay Company employee, who in 1846 posted the island as the property of Great Britain. Another representative of the company already had visited San Juan in July 1845 and erected a wooden tablet in the Cattle Point area.
      The name of the point first appeared on a British Admiralty chart of 1859, probably as the result of the trading company’s having landed cattle there for Belle Vue Farm, its development on the island. 
      A more famous landing in the area occurred during the beginning of the border dispute in 1859 when Colonel Silas Casey debarked several companies of troops near the point from fog-bound vessels and made a surprise march to American Camp to enforce Capt. George Pickett. The latter had occupied the island with a small command at the beginning of the international boundary dispute with Great Britain.
      Casey surveyed a military reservation on the south end of the island, but Paul K. Hubbs Jr, a customs inspector, claimed a portion of Mount Finlayson and established a farm there. Hubbs called the farm Floraville, for his wife, Flora.
Hubbs sold his farm in 1868 to John Franklin Bryant, a soldier at American Camp, who received his discharge on San Juan Island.
      A year after acquiring the land, Bryant drowned while fishing. His widow, an Irish woman, remarried about 1871. Her second husband, John George Jakle, was her next neighbor to the west of the Bryant property. He was another former soldier who had served with the island occupation force, accepted his discharge on San Juan and homesteaded there.
      Jakle raised sheep. After the lighthouse was built in 1888, he tended it for the government. He rode horseback from his home to the beacon, carrying oil in five-gallon tin cans as it was needed for the light, then only a lantern on a wooden post to guide local boatmen into San Juan Channel. 
      The lantern and oil-storage shack were replaced in 1935 by a small white square concrete house with an octagonal tower and a battery-operated 90-candlepower white light. This controlled automatically by a sun relay, which turned it on and off to conserve the battery in bright daylight.
      No farmer is needed to service the modern lantern, it is cared for by the coast guard base in Seattle except in emergencies when the keeper drives over from Lime Kiln Light on the west side of the island.
      The greater portion of Cattle Point, except for the lighthouse reservation, was owned by Kenneth Dougherty, whose grandfather moved to San Juan Island in the early days of the lime industry.
      Dougherty bought the land from Jakle who told him about the days when migrating Native Americans by the hundreds camped at the neck of land between Fish Creek and Goose Island, cooked fish and clams at their beach fires, and played gambling games.”
Historian/author Lucile McDonald. The Seattle Times, March 4 1960
For modern-day photographs of Cattle Point Light and directions please CLICK HERE