🌎 EARLY SURVEYING IN THE SAN JUAN ISLANDS (UPDATED) ❖

"Straits of Rosario, Cypress Island, and
Strawberry Harbor on the right.
Mt. Constitution & Hautboy Island, the latter 
being an old name for Strawberry Island.
Hautboy is a species of strawberry,
Fragaria moschata."
Painting by James Madison Alden (1834-1922),
National archives Record 5396161
Archived at College Park, MD.
Click image to enlarge.

"Semiahmoo Bay, from bluff with Camp
Semiahmoo, Drayton Harbor, and distant view
of Mt. Baker between 1857-1862."
Painting by James Madison Alden
(1834-1922)
National Archives Record 305488
archived at College Park, MD.
Click image to enlarge.

"View from hill on San Juan Island looking south
with Ontario Roads ACTIVE & SATELLITE at
anchor near Lopez Island with Mt. Baker
in distance between 1857-1862."
Painting by James Madison Alden (1834-1922)
From the National Archives, College Park, MD.
Record: 5396161
Click image to enlarge

James Alden Jr. (1810-1877)
courtesy of Wikipedia.

   "The first marine surveying in the San Juan Islands was done by Lieutenant James Alden (1810-1877) of the US Coast Survey in 1852. He led the Hydrographic Party of the US on the coast from 1848-1860 in the ACTIVE. He said the only discovery of importance made that season was a shoal near the entrance of Rosario Strait between Sucia Island and the mainland since called Alden Bank.   
      Surveys continued for approximately a decade. In 1857 the surveyors contended with heavy smoke from forest fires which prevented them from seeing the shore. The following summer they complained of drenching rains. Another handicap was the remarkable range of refraction which distorted the appearance of the shores on exceptionally clear days.
      Work like this, far from settlements, was tough going. Between seasons winter storms washed out a base mark at the southern end of Lummi Island and Native Americans destroyed other stations. George Davidson, who supervised the surveying, concluded in the oldest Pacific Coast Pilot (1859):
      'The experience of three seasons in this locality has not increased our relish for navigating these channels in sailing vessels. With plenty of wind, no navigation could be better, but in a calm, vessels will frequently be jammed close to rocks with only a few fathoms inside of their positions, but 40 to 50 outside, and a swirling current that renders towing the boats utterly impossible.'
      Elsewhere he said, "The number of islands and intricate channels lying between the two straits we shall not attempt to describe. A proper appreciation of them can only be obtained from the chart."
      Modern marine surveying made possible much more complete mapping than in the days of sail, but this too had handicaps.
      Owners of large fishing craft expected the survey launch to get out of the way even though it was engaged in running a grid of straight lines and often the little boat was threatened with swamping or a collision. Crossing kelp beds sometimes involved chewing the long tubular stems with the propeller, stalling, reversing, and chewing the way forward again. Sometimes the work was complicated by a fathometer echo from floating kelp, added to the echo from the bottom. Grass growing two to seven feet high on the bottom of Mosquito Pass and Roche Harbor gave off a puzzling double echo. Incidentally, the deepest hole in the islands was found between Jones and Flattop, where 133 fathoms were recorded.
     The temperature of the seawater in the islands is remarkably constant from the surface to bottom. This may be because it is so thoroughly roiled it gets little chance to warm near the surface. The water stays cold all year, not changing more than ten degrees. Fahrenheit in the hot summer months. Water temperature will swing from 45 degrees in the winter to 55 in the summer. 
     Part of the assignment of surveyors was to measure the tidal currents. It meant launches had to anchor in one spot for 100 hours at a stretch to record the rate of flow every half hour. In Spieden Channel, between San Juan and Spieden Islands, where the tide runs five knots and up to six knots under certain conditions, hydrography had its thrilling aspects.
     Other fast currents are in Cattle Pass between the southern ends of San Juan and Lopez Islands, and around Cactus Island. 
     In fog, the owner of a small boat would be out of luck without knowledge of such current. In Cattle Pass, for example, with the current running top speed and the wind against it, a man attempting the passage in an open boat ought to have his life insurance paid up.
     A survey officer told me, "While the San Juans have no whirlpools in constant directions, they can produce places which must have looked pretty bad to old sailboat men."
      Juan Pantoja would have agreed with him.
     You'll hear different versions of the same story everywhere you go in the San Juans –– about the man who cruised among the islands without a marine chart. He pulled into Fossil Bay at Sucia, tied his line to a buoy and exclaimed that this didn't look like East Sound to him. When asked if he had checked his chart, he said he had none; he was using a Washington road map.
      "Where are you bound from here?" he was asked.
      "For Sidney on Vancouver Island," was the reply.
      "I don't think that road map is going to do you much good out in Haro Strait," the moorage man told him."
Lucile S. McDonald. Making History, the People Who Shaped the San Juan Islands. Friday Harbor Press, Friday Harbor, WA. 1990.


James Madison Alden trained as a US Navy cartographer, but he is best known for his landscape paintings beginning on the West Coast of the US and near the new US-Canada border while he was serving on the Coast Survey ship the USCS ACTIVE in 1854 under command of his uncle James Alden Jr. (1810-1877)

There is a historical plaque on Cypress Island, San Juan Archipelago, WA., to commemorate this artwork by James Madison Alden.

      

❖ PIG WARRIOR of 1859 ❖

American Camp Troop station,
San Juan Island, Washington Territory.
Photograph of a sketch by an unknown artist.
Courtesy of B.C. Provincial Archives © for L. McDonald, 1960.
Photo from the archives of S. P. H. S.

"A bill introduced in Congress in January 1965, proposing that the federal government purchase 1,800-acres on San Juan Island and create a national historical park commemorating the Pig War, has set several persons wondering what became of the man who started the trouble.

      Percival R. Jeffcott, Ferndale, WA historian, and Ray Jordan, Sedro Woolley member of the Skagit County Historical Society, are among the latest to inquire into the subsequent career of Lyman A. Cutler, who fired the shot that set off an international boundary dispute lasting 12-years.
      The future park would pay tribute to the powers of arbitration, for no blood was shed, except that of the porker.
      Lyman Cutler, after having raised a crisis that spread far beyond the bounds of the potato patch where he found a British hog rooting, did not remain long enough in the island to learn whether they were to be English or American. He was living on the mainland when the decision was reached.
      Jeffcott, who believes he has tracked down Cutler's burial place south of Bellingham, recently told of his findings in a talk before the Ladies of Kiwanis group in that city. He said he has every reason to conclude that Cutler was interred on Deadman's Point, which later was hydraulicked into Bellingham Bay and that the pig warrior's last resting place is beneath industrial plants on what is now known as Commercial Point.
      Cutler, a Kentuckian, aged 27, was among the first dozen American squatters on San Juan Island, arriving in April 1859, presumably after a disappointing experience in the Cariboo gold rush in B. C. He staked a 100-acre homestead claim on what is known as the Fraser place, facing American Camp Road near its intersection with the road to Mar Vista.
      A contemporary described him as 'one of the unwashed sovereigns of the United States who did not scare worth a cent.' Another recalled he was 'tall, light-haired, fine looking, fearless, adventurous, and full of fun.' A third said he set up housekeeping with a native woman in a structure that was a cross between a tent and a hut.
      Cutler is credited with having made a round trip of considerably more than 40-miles to Dungeness by sailboat to purchase a sack of seed potatoes for $30. He dug up about a third of an acre in the midst of a Hudson's Bay Co sheep run and sowed his spuds.
      It is a marvel that a pig was the only one of the company's livestock to find them; several thousand sheep, 40 cattle, 35 horses, and 40 hogs, grazed at large on the south end of the island. The potato patch was fenced only on three sides; the terrain it occupied was part of Bellevue Farm, which the company had operated for six years.
      On the morning of 15 June, Cutler saw the pig nuzzling among the potatoes, chased the animal into the nearby woods, and shot it. When the encounter was reported to Charles Griffin, manager of the farm. Cutler said he had been assured by American authorities that he had a right to the land, it was American soil, and he and other squatters would be protected by the US government.
      A boundary commission, then at work, had not yet decided on which side of the international border San Juan lay. Until the point was settled, Griffin considered Cutler and his ilk trespassers. The manager at once sent a letter to his superior in Victoria. Before it reached its destination he received unexpected support. The steamship BEAVER came in from Nisqually with A. A. Dallas, the company's chief factor, on board.
      The latter paid a call on the Kentuckian, told him that he had killed a breeding boar valued at $100 and intimated he had better pay for it or stand trial.
      Cutler did not like the tone of the ultimatum. To him the animal was worth no more than a common razorback; he professed a willingness to settle for $10. Evidently hot words were said on both sides. Cutler later reported Dallas 'insulting and threatening' and Griffin was heard to remark that the Americans were a pack of intruders and he had been a fool ever to let the first one remain.
      What happened after that is well known. Brig. Gen. William S. Harney, calling at the island on a tour of Puget Sound defenses, heard a highly colored account of the episode and dispatched Capt. George Pickett and 68 infantrymen from Fort Bellingham on 27 July to protect the Americans and prevent any attempt to carry Cutler off to Victoria for trial.
      At the urging of fellow settlers, Cutler made himself scarce for some time. His friends were afraid he might get trigger happy and kill any British subject sent to arrest him.
      Conflicting accounts exist as to what happened next. Paul K. Hubbs, Jr, American customs officer on the island, said that Pickett's first act on San Juan was to order Cutler's arrest and that Hubbs was deputized to go and get the culprit.

(L-R) Ships SATELLITE and ACTIVE.

Photo of an undated sketch made on a hill on San Jan Island,
looking toward Lopez Island and Mt. Baker.

"San Juan town is a lost place beside a beach on San Juan Is.
It is not even a ghost town, nor are there piling,
decayed log foundations, or broken bricks, to mark where it stood.
Yet it was once the principal port and the noisiest, most lawless,
and most troublesome spot, in the San Juan group.
 It lay downhill southeast of American Camp,
close to Griffin Bay, and at the south end of a pond." L. McD.

      The same day the British warship SATELLITE anchored off Griffin Bay to land John De Courcy, who had been appointed magistrate to try the case on the island. The British officers were surprised to find American troops already on San Juan when its ownership was under arbitration by the boundary commission.
      Pickett, one step ahead of the game, had appointed an American justice of the peace, Henry R. Crosbie. The latter, in a report to Washington, took credit for advising Cutler to place himself under Pickett's protection. The pig shooter acceded, to the relief of everyone.
      Crosbie said that Cutler was in custody only one day. Hubbs insisted in an interview late in his life that Cutler never was tried by the authorities on either side. British reports present a different view. The captain of the SATELLITE said that Pickett told him on 31 July, Cutler was given a court hearing, fined heavily, and the amount would be paid to the Hudson's Bay agent to compensate for the loss of the boar.
      That September, Hubbs helped Cutler phrase his story of the shooting in a favorable light, laying the firing of the shot to 'a moment of great irritation'. Cutler in the statement sworn to before Crosbie said he had expressed a desire to replace the pig at once.
      Cutler at first gained prestige from the episode. He was elected constable by the Americans on the island and later served as a deputy sheriff, a post he was holding in May 1864. Then he disappeared from the San Juans.
      The next one hears of him, he was 39 years old, unmarried, and living in Samish precinct in April 1871, with John Gray, a fellow Kentuckian, and logger. Jeffcott discovered that Cutler took a squatter's claim a short distance south of Blanchard, north of Bow in the northwest part of present Skagit County, 'east of the William Wood place.'
      In 1874 Cutler became sick and moved to a hotel on Bellingham Bay to be near to a doctor. Jeffcott thinks it must have been in Sehome. On 27 April 1874, Cutler died, leaving an estate of $489.75 to which his father, brother, and sister in Michigan, were heirs.
      Among his belongings, sold on 13 June at an administrator's sale, Jeffcott learned from county probate records, was the shotgun with which Cutler was said to have used to kill the pig. D. P. Thomas purchased it and many years later sent it to the Washington State Historical Society, where it now reposes. It was brought out last fall [1964] and displayed at a park hearing in Friday Harbor."
Above writing by Lucile McDonald, author/historian;
The Seattle Times, 30 May 1965.

Last page from The Pig War
by Betty Baker
Harper & Row, New York, and London, 1969.
Library of the S. P. H. S.