San Juan Island
San Juan Island is located in US waters, south and east of
Vancouver Island. This island is at the heart of several bodies of water, including the
Salish Sea. Its western shore looks to the
Haro Strait, its southern end rests in the
Juan de Fuca Strait and points to
Puget Sound, further south. The Spanish named the island in the late 1700s, which
Vancouver also adopted on his charts, though early fur traders knew Port San Juan as Poverty
Bay.
San Juan Island staged the colloquially named “Pig War” when, in 1859, a US farmer
shot a British farmer's pig, during Anglo-America joint occupation of the Island—theirs
was a conflict in miniature of the larger border concerns left unresolved following
the Oregon Treaty of 1846, which settled, so it was thought, the disputes over
Oregon Territory.
The ambiguous treaty clause in question stated that the boundary lie in
the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver's Island.
Unfortunately, San Juan Island touched two channels: the
Haro Strait to the left and the Rosario Strait to the right. After much posturing, both political
and naval, the whole matter was settled by Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1872, when an arbitration
commission ruled the
Haro Strait to be the boundary strait, thus awarding the Island to the United States.
- 1. Andrew Scott, The Encyclopedia of Raincoast Place Names (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2009), 474.
- 2. The Pig War, San Juan Island National Historical Park.
- 3. Ibid.
- 4. Ibid.