Qualla: San Juan Island National Historical Park

San Juan Island National Historical Park: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mark Hansen, Public domain. On 15 June 1859, Lyman Cutlar found a pig eating his potatoes and shot it. He was twenty-seven, an American squatter on land the Hudson's Bay Company was running as a sheep farm, and the pig belonged to the company's agent, Charles Griffin. Cutlar offered to replace the animal or pay for it. Griffin wanted a hundred dollars, an absurd sum for a hog and a deliberate assertion of who owned this island. Within six weeks the United States Army had sixty men ashore under Captain George Pickett, the Royal Navy had warships in the channel, and two of the most powerful countries on earth were one nervous officer away from a shooting war over a boundary line nobody had bothered to settle. They stayed like that, camped at opposite ends of San Juan Island, for the next twelve years. The pig remained the only fatality.

Image: Mark Hansen | Public domain

San Juan Island National Historical Park: Eleven Thousand Years Before the Pig

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carport, CC BY-SA 3.0. None of this was empty country. People have lived in these islands for roughly eleven thousand years, since the continental ice sheet withdrew at the end of the last glaciation, and the six central Coast Salish nations descend from them. Archaeological evidence places hunting and...

Image: Carport | CC BY-SA 3.0

San Juan Island National Historical Park: Sixty Men and a Squadron

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Light (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The American homesteaders asked for military protection after the Cutlar affair and got it, which is how a dispute over livestock became an international incident. Pickett landed his infantry at the island's southern end. The British answered with Royal Navy ships, and the office...

Image: Chris Light (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

San Juan Island National Historical Park: Twelve Years of Neighbours

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0. It lasted from 1859 to 1872. British Royal Marines held a camp on the island's northwest shore from 1860, in a sheltered cove with a formal garden and a blockhouse, while the American garrison occupied a wind-scoured prairie above the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The two sides built a...

Image: Joe Mabel | CC BY-SA 3.0

San Juan Island National Historical Park: Arbitrated in Berlin

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit This image was taken by me and is released for public use., Public domain. The 1871 Treaty of Washington finally handed the question to a neutral party, and the neutral party was Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany. He considered the two competing channels and in 1872 ruled that the boundary ran through Haro Strait, the western channel, which put the San Juan I...

Image: This image was taken by me and is released for public use. | Public domain

San Juan Island National Historical Park: The Butterfly That Came Back

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NPS, Public domain. The prairie at American Camp turns out to be doing something no other place on earth is doing. It holds the world's only viable population of the island marble butterfly, a small pale insect considered extinct for ninety years until it was rediscovered in 1998 and listed as endan...

Image: NPS | Public domain