CUTLER'S GUN AND A PARK IN THE PLANNING

 

L-R: James Crook, Senator Henry M. Jackson,
with Lyman Cutler's gun, 
and Rhoda Anderson, sister to James,
standing next to the historic blockhouse 
at Garrison Bay, San Juan Island, WA.
Jackson was the chairperson of the Senate Interior 
and Insular Affairs Committee.
Click image to enlarge. 
Low-res scan of an original gelatin-silver photograph from the 
archives of the Saltwater People Historical Society© 

News Notes from the Washington State Historical Society
Vol. 5. No. 1, December 1964

"The world is full of battle monuments. It needs a few monuments to battles that never happened.
      Heed, then, the call of Senator Henry Jackson and others for national attention to be focused on a remote corner of Washington State, where an international boundary dispute almost erupted into battle, and finally, after a decade, was settled by a peaceful method ––arbitration.
      That corner is San Juan Island, the largest island in the group known collectively as the San Juans. On it are two historic sites––English Camp and American Camp. These and the area around them should be purchased by the federal government and turned over to the National Park Service who would then establish the San Juan Historical National Park.
      Some say it ought to be "Pig War" National Park. But that doesn't sound nice. Furthermore, it is inaccurate. There was a pig. But there was no war. And that's what needs to be commemorated.
      We spent last Saturday going to and from San Juan Island on a Coast Guard cutter, along with some 60 others assembled by the Washington State Historical Society, meeting with the local people at Friday Harbor and wandering about the site of English Camp, where the English blockhouse built before the Civil War still stands on the edge of a sheltered cove. Some history has to be related to understand the significance of the site: Euro-American settlers moved onto San Juan Island in the 1850s. Some were American homesteaders. Some were Hudson's Bay Co. sheep raisers. A treaty had been signed in 1946 finally settling the dispute of long-standing over the boundary between Oregon and Canada. It wasn't at 54 degrees, 20 minutes of latitude, as many had advocated, but instead was the 49th parallel and was to extend along "the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver Island and thence southerly through the middle of the said channel, and of Fuca's straits to the Pacific Ocean."
      This sounded all right in London and Washington, D.C. but it failed to specify which side of the San Juan Islands was to be considered the channel. Americans said it was on the west side. The British said it was on the other.
      Tax collectors, not surprisingly started the big row that ensued. The Hudson's Bay sheepherders wouldn't pay taxes to American tax collectors. So, 30 British sheep were seized and sold for payment of delinquent taxes. This produced an angry letter of protest from James Douglas, the British governor on Vancouver Island, to Gov. Isaac Stevens of newly organized Washington territory. But nothing was done. Then in 1859 an American settler on the island, Lyman A. Cutler, became enraged when one of the Englishmen's pigs kept invading his potato patch. In an unguarded moment, he gave vent to his rage by shooting the pig.
      He regretted his hasty action immediately and went to the Hudson's Bay agent with an offer to pay for the pig. But the Briton was angry, too, and said he would send to Victoria, for a gunboat to come and get Cutler and take him away to be tried and be punished. Cutler reloaded his gun and was prepared to defend himself, but was persuaded by his neighbors to hide so that he couldn't be found when the English came to arrest him. Then the settlers petitioned for help from the army, and a company of federal troops was dispatched from Fort Bellingham. They had no sooner arrived on San Juan, when three British warships anchored offshore and unsheathed their guns, ready for battle.
      The American commander on the island, Capt. George Pickett, showed more restraint than he displayed in later years at the battle of Gettysburg, and refused to fire the first shot. British Admiral Baynes, overruling the hotheaded Gov. Douglas, ordered the British ships not to fire unless they were fired upon.
      Gen. Winfield Scott was rushed to the scene, and he worked out a compromise agreement that called for joint military occupancy of San Juan until the diplomats resolved the question of who owned it. So for the next 12 years, while the diplomats dillied and dallied, the two nations maintained military camps on the island, a few miles apart.
      They didn't menace each other. They got along fine and visited back and forth. Finally, in 1872, the island boundary dispute was submitted to arbitration. The arbiter was the German emperor, Wilhelm I, grandfather of the Kaiser in WW I. He investigated the matter thoroughly and ruled that the channel actually was west of the islands, as the Americans had contended all along.
      Thereupon, the English broke camp, marched down to the shore, and sailed away never to return. They left several of their numbers, however, victims of drownings and accidents, buried in a little graveyard on a hill.
      Within two years a man named Crook moved onto the English campsite to homestead. His son, James Crook, lives there to this day [1964.] Senator Jackson assured him last week that he could have his wish to spend the rest of his days on the site. A man who has lived in one place for 90 years ought not to be moved.
      The federal government, if Jackson's bill goes through, would have no trouble with title insurance. No one but Crook and the State of Washington has owned the property––not since the day the German emperor resolved a dispute that began with the killing of a pig, and provided one of the few examples the world has ever seen of two nations resorting to international arbitration, rather than force, to settle an argument over territorial rights."
John M. McClelland Jr. Reprinted by permission from the Longview Daily News.