Sea Control - Sea Control 329 - The San Juan Island Boundary Dispute with J Overton

Episode Date: March 20, 2022

Links1. "The San Juan Island Boundary Dispute, 1859: Conditions for Peace and Dominance in a Very Gray Zone," by J. Overton, Small Wars Journal, October 19, 2017. 

Hey folks, Jared here. Today I'm joined by Jay Overton. We'll be discussing his article on the San Juan Islands dispute and the Pig War. This episode was edited and produced by David Sahida. We are still looking for audio editors to add to our team. So if you're interested, go ahead and reach out. Our email address is ccontrol at simsec.org. Send us your resume. I wanted to highlight a couple of developments over at the main website.

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Aloha, Shoemates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Jay Overton. We're going to be discussing a piece he wrote for Small Wars Journal back in 2017 entitled The San Juan Island Boundary Dispute, 1859, Conditions for Peace and Dominance in a Very Gray Zone. So, Jay, welcome and thanks for coming on today. Can you tell the listeners a little bit about your background, please? Thanks, Jared. I'm honored to be on Sea Control. I'm currently a non-resident fellow with the Modern War Institute at West Point, and I'm a Navy civilian. And I've been adjunct faculty for the Naval War College Fleet Seminar Program and Marine Corps Command and Staff College. And a long time ago, I was an enlisted Coast Guardsman. Well, thank you again for joining us. And as a reminder to our audience, all opinions express our own and not representative of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So, Jay, first of all, what was the proximate cause for the San Juan Island boundary dispute?

If you can give us some background as well, what was what actually happened? Yeah, this is a little more of an obscure action, so I'll go back a little ways on this one. Most people aren't too familiar with it, but they'll be familiar with some of the personalities and issues surrounding it. So the catalyst really for this event was the 1859 killing of a British-owned pig by an American citizen on an island in the Pacific Northwest, which was at the time claimed by both countries. and the popular name for this dispute is the pig war it wasn't really war so we more of a dispute over an island so that's why we call it the samoa dispute but popularly known as the pig war i'll go back a little further for context on this in 1846 u.s and great burton signed the treaty of oregon which established the 49th parallel and in the verbiage of that treaty it said that the 49th parallel border between the countries would be quote from the rocky mountains to the middle of

the channel which separates the continent from vancouver's island then south through the channel to the strait of ondefuka and west of the pacific ocean and that would be the boundary between what's now british columbia and oregon territory washington state and that seems simple enough when they were drawing that up back in washington the channel they mentioned that separates the islands there however there's actually two separate channels running on either side of the San Juans, small island chain there. And one of those runs to the west of all the islands and one runs to the east. So if the boundary is on the west side, pretty much the San Juans would be considered U.S. territory. If you think that channel is on the east side, that would be British.

So perhaps not surprisingly, the Americans considered that the boundary was on the west side and that all those islands were ours, and the British considered that it was on the east side and all the islands would be theirs. It wasn't that big a deal at the time. It got to be a bigger deal later on. The army established a permanent presence in the Pacific Northwest in 1848, built and occupied Fort Steilacoom, which is near present-day Tacoma, Washington. They were there to protect. There was only at the time a few hundred local settlers, American settlers in the area. Keep an eye on the British here. Protect them from Indians, both the locals, which there had been some disputes with, and then

And something you'll hear over and over again in this time period in this area is the fear of what they called the Northern Indians, which was a blanket term for a lot of tribes from now Alaska and British Columbia areas. They were seagoing tribes that would come down and had really long, tricked-out canoes, kind of. And they were known for doing some trading, but also attacking settlements, taking slaves, taking lots of stuff from pretty much anyone there. They were not really allied with the group in the area there. So it looks a lot like Vikings, although they were called pirates frequently in the press here. It would be what they were doing looks more like what we're familiar with Vikings. Put that aside for a minute. So in response to that, in 1854, the Washington Territorial Government requested that there would be some sort of naval presence from the U.S. would come to the area. There really wasn't any at the time. So at this point, the Navy and Revenue Marine, which is one of the Coast Guard forerunner agencies, they began making regular patrols up to Puget Sound, generally ones based out of San Francisco area.

And there's only like four or five in the whole Pacific at the time coming up here. British Royal Navy was also still in the area. They maintained a presence in and around Vancouver Island, much the same general mission as U.S. forces. And then you had Hudson's Bay Company, rather, which is a quasi-governmental British corporation, and it actually had its own forts and vessels in the area. So during this 10 years or so here, the British and American settlers and forces, they alternated between there would be quarrels, disagreements, and of course, they would cooperate over stuff. Americans at times would fuel tensions when they would pour into British Columbia, usually without the government's permission, seeking fortune after gold strikes. And the British saw those as challenging their sovereignty and security in the region, and that calls for that prompted the stationing of more Royal Navy ships in the area and eventually making British Columbia a British colony in 1858.

A few years before that, we'll go back to 1853, a Hudson Bay Company had established a sheep farm on the largest of the San Juan Islands, this disputed group. So just some sheep there, not a big deal, not really a strategic asset. And then a few American settlers, or squatters as the British referred to them, began moving on to the island not long after that. Pretty good-sized island there. It doesn't matter that much that you have two of these groups here. It's not that crowded.

However, you only had 18 folks there in the summer of 1859. But one day, one of those 18 folks shot a pig who was rooting around in his potato patch, and that pig was owned by the British, by the Hudson Bay Company. So the British authorities threatened to arrest him and consequently to forcibly evict all the American settlers from the islands. The Americans then brought the matter up with the commander of the U.S. Army's Department of Oregon, who was General William Harney, who was known from the Mexican War as being kind of flying off the handle at times, being kind of a rough guy, while he was visiting the area on regular patrols on a U.S. Army ship in Massachusetts. harney responded by sending captain george pickett and just that george pickett a few years away from being a confederate general and he comes with a company of soldiers over on massachusetts from

a near one of the few american forts in the area which isn't that far away i'm in watcom which is now bellingham washington so pickett comes over to sam on an island ostensibly he says he's there to protect all the settlers from raids by northern indians again you'll keep hearing northern indians is the thing everyone keeps saying they're scared of that's why they're around he lands on july 27 1859 and began building fortifications and attempting to enforce american laws on the disputed island which is of course well beyond what you would need if you were just there to protect you from incursions from indians vancouver island governor james douglas learns about what his government believed was an invasion by a military force of their sovereign territory

So he sends British warships over from Vancouver Island to coerce or dislodge Pickett's company. Ideally, he says, try to do it peacefully without resorting to force. So the situation we have there in late summer of 1859 is about 100 or so Americans, American army troops on the southern end of this island. And then we have several large British, one of them even would be considered a capital ship, just a few yards offshore, essentially pointing their guns at these guys. so i think we'll skip the next question about the forces you laid that out pretty well uh as far as what both sides were going to bring to bear in this uh this particular instance what definition are you using for gray zone conflict in this case study and why do you think that fits this case i studied northwest naval and maritime history for several years particularly 1850s

because one reason it's kind of easy to be an expert in that not that many people around familiar there were a few events during a time involving pitch battles between u.s forces and natives and and then that i read about and studied and then in 2015 and 2016 i started seeing the whole gray zone concept being written about and when there were historical examples given they usually just went back no further than like the late 40s cold war type period but as i'm just reading about that concept and i'm reading still on the uh things that are happening up here in the 1840s and 50s, I'm realizing it looks, the pig war particularly, looks a whole lot like a gray zone incident, seemed to fit those definitions. Minus, of course, you know, players and technology

are different. When I attended the Joint Forces Staff College in 2016, I chose to explore this particular event through that gray zone lens for a project there, and I'll also mention a shout out to the instructor, Colonel Bill Wyman, who helped that project along quite a bit, and classmate and good friend who helped out with the ideas and edits, Major Tim Heck, who's now with the Modern more institute the definitions i use particularly for this one similar and relevant one that says quote gray zone challenges are defined as competitive interactions among and within state and non-state actors that fall between the traditional war and peace duality they're characterized by ambiguity about the nature of the conflict and opacity about the parties involved

or uncertainty about the relevant policy and legal frameworks that's from a special operations command white paper there's also a war on the rocks article from the same year that says gray zones a quote involves some aggression or use of force but in many ways defining characteristic is ambiguity hear this over and over again ambiguity about the ultimate objectives the participants whether international treaties and norms have been violated and the role that military forces should play in response quote there there's also usually in the gray zone area you're talking about a hegemonic or superior power, in this case, certainly Great Britain, and those are usually going to support the status quo. And one or more revisionist powers that seek to upset that system,

in this case, the U.S. With those definitions, just before San Juan Island kicks off, as it were, got a pretty classic gray zone environment, as I saw it, in the Puget Sound area. Get ambiguity about the nature of competition and conflict. Nobody's sure about exactly the parties involved. You've got the local Indians and the northern Indians somehow involved. No sure if they're actually sort of proxies for one side or another, or just acting on their own. Ambiguity about the role of military forces and ultimate objectives sought, for example, the U.S. is saying we're just here to protect everyone from the Northern Indians. Kind of doesn't look like that, but maybe it is true. The other side doesn't really know. Also, you get

incremental is used to describe revisionist power tactics. So if you've got divisions storming a beach or a lady gulf-sized task force or fleet, probably not really a gray zone there. For this revisionist power action you've got a originally a dozen or so u.s soldiers being transported on a civilian mail boat to a civilian dock unloading their arms and equipment in fairly plain sight to set up a position in contested areas so with all that that's where everyone's gray zone and i'll sort of counter argument to that there's good piece in the naval war college review by craig whiteside and said gray zones aren't really useful concept and i'm paraphrasing him badly he and his co-author argued that you know there's either war or there's peace there isn't one or the

other and i think in retrospect we can know that this you know when they call this the pig war it wasn't really a war we know that you know it didn't meet that definition but for the folks involved at the time they didn't really know that so i'm defining gray zone more as the parties and the actors involved may not really know exactly what's going on even though later we know that there wasn't really a war. You mentioned that both the U.S. and Britain had recently resolved separate conflicts. What impact did the conflicts in the Crimea and Mexico have on this dispute? Both the forces in the Northwest, they'd been involved in several small wars around the world, but I think the Crimea and the Mexican wars were pervasive factors because they were so recent,

and they became actual conditions in this operating environment. Some of the British officers involved on their site were aware of the recent war against near-peer adversaries in the joint warfare in the Crimea, which is just a few years before in the 1850s, and was pretty much a series of horrific operations for dubious reasons that caused tremendous casualties for unclear goals. Nobody got much out of the Crimean War. Some soldiers, sailors, senior officers, political actors even had the War of 1812 in mind. We had a few veterans still around for that one during this event. And of course, that war had resulted in much damage and little gain for both belligerents. So you're aware perhaps not much would come out of those on the British side. Harney and Pickett on the U.S. side were both veterans of the Mexican War, which of course

yielded far better results for the U.S. than did the Crimean War for Britain. But there wasn't really the idea in this, if there was to be a third war between the U.S. and Britain breaking out, there was no idea that the U.S. would march on London and dictate surrender terms like we did in Mexico City. So neither wasn't much to come out of this one. Even also during this, the quasi hybrid war, if you will, between or low intensity conflict, however you want to find that, between the British settlers and the British American settlers and the northern Indians was also still something simmering all the time there. And there was still a large native population in the northwest here that was, while there were lots of treaties signed, there was still some opposition to the increasing European encroachment in the area. So that was in folks' mind, too. It wasn't just going to be a war between these two over this little island.

So even while this is going on, you have the ship, the Shoebrick, which is a lighthouse tender, and the Massachusetts, which at this time is an Army vessel, who are off in the sound here. They're leaving San Juan Island, essentially leaving the U.S. folks without really a naval power there, and they're going off to take care of disputes between the settlers and the Indians. So there's lots of other things going on in the area. It's not just a generally peaceful environment, except for the San Juan. Lots of other things going on here. And how is the dispute ultimately resolved? While this is all going on up here, U.S. President James Buchanan doesn't really know about it. It takes weeks, sometimes months for news to get back. When he finds out that there's the possibility of kicking off a third war with Great Britain over this little island in the northwest, he dispatches Winfield Scott, who's the general of the army at the time, on a six-week sea voyage to negotiate a settlement. Scott's done this before with British over a dispute over some land in Maine. He's obviously the senior longest-serving military officer we've got going at the time.

so he does a six-week voyage around the cape there doesn't go over land i always like this he manages to deter this war without actually leaving his ship he's they've sent him on because he's fat and kind of sick there can't do a whole lot except sit and write letters but he does that very well so his idea is to propose a joint occupation of not more than 100 troops per side 100 on the british 100 on american and that they can only have defensive weapons there to fight off the northern indian attack so again they're using the northern indians as sort of the big boogeyman there that everybody's like well we're not really here to fight one another let's just at least tell ourselves that that's who we're here to protect against and the british agree to

that if you go back to sort of the things that kick off for is the fear honor and interest at that point you've got honor maintained because they can both kind of occupy the island fear minimized or projected onto a third party and then you only leave really interest and neither side there's really not much interest in this actual piece of land the value of the object there to either side is minimal so the english after this set up what's called english camp which is on the north end of the island and the americans set up american camp on the south end and that arrangement lasts till 1872 when it's put before an international court and the german kaiser decides the Harrow Strait, which is the Western Channel, is the actual boundary, and that puts all

the islands on the U.S. side. And you wrote that ambiguity favored the revisionists. Why do you think that was the case, and what lessons do you see for the U.S. today? The dominant power, which of course in this case was Britain, basically had a don't shoot first policy during the whole Pax Britannica period, which this is in the middle of there. Their methods, policies, ways of doing things were just better known more public more well-defined to friends and enemies what they had to gain and lose by an action like this was a little more easily identifiable than the what the smaller visionist power might have an interest in here so it would usually be in the dominant powers of its interest for competitors and friends to know what they're going to do in certain

situations i believe for this it sets the tone a general level of peace across the global empire They're not making any surprise moves, pretty much. Maintain the status quo. Easy enough to know that they've also got colonies and outposts all over the world, and this particular object in contention just doesn't seem to them or to their competitors something really to start a major war over. Some things would be worth it, but not this. Revisionist power, in this case the U.S., usually not going to be as predictable.

Their actions and policies, they're younger, or at least younger as a global power. They're not going to be as well-known or defined. and they don't have as much history or interest in the status quo they want to change things dominant power has to be on guard constantly against a variety of threats and let that be known the revisionist just needs to act out once essentially without their competitors being ready or having the foresight and maybe without their competitors even realizing who was doing the aggression at first so it's pretty easy to understand what value britain would place on this little island not much proportionally at this time particularly whereas the revisionist power

The U.S. is growing quite a bit there, and they may have far more to gain from its position and thus be willing to risk more. Easy enough to make comparisons between the current will they or won't they attack amongst some of America's peer-to-peer competitors. Or maybe the question, maybe they already are attacking or have attacked. You've got the little green men, the little blue men. You've got South China Sea, of course, probably the most cited example of a temporary gray zone. But of course, while the U.S. is involved in those disputes there, we, U.S., it isn't actually our disputed territory, which would be invaded. So there are, of course, differences. I don't want to make too many parallels between this and current events. Let's leave that to others. we're operating concern for either protecting allies or an international order and China and Russia perhaps are looking to change that international order in ambiguous and incremental

ways but it's not like we're claiming we own the Spratlys or that we own another island piece of territory under threat but clearly there are a few countries out there looking to change the international order and we're seeking status quo basically as for the value of this object the island never had much strategic or military value U.S. has several military bases in Puget Sound, but not on this island, and now it's mostly a tourist area known for whale watching and for the national parks that tell the story of this event, and they've preserved the sites of American Camp and English Camp. Cool to see. Side note to the continued ambiguity, which, as I said, I believe still favor the revisionist here. There are contemporary rumors at the time, and I've seen

this theory, conspiracy theory, that both George Pickett and General Harney, who were both Southerners, were hoping to provoke a war between the U.S. and Great Britain to pave the way for a secessionist movement. We're only a couple of years out from the Civil War. And then figuring that the U.S. wouldn't be able to fight a third world with Britain and a civil war simultaneously. I don't know if that's true, but Harney, a Tennessean, stayed with the Union and Pickett obviously didn't. And there's a good argument now about Pickett by Colonel Eric Wagner, wrote an article about 10 years ago or so that made a good argument for Pickett being a good diplomat, actually, that he did his best to avoid were there.

So even now, there's still some ambiguity to this whole affair. My main takeaway is that decision makers should always consult an article chart before they decide to do anything as a surface warfare officer. That's just the maxim that I choose to live by. You're a good swope.

Yeah, absolutely. But that is unfortunately all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Jay Overton. Jay, where can we find you online and what else are you working on? I met Jay Overton, 1847, on Twitter, but I mostly just use that to follow people smarter than me. I do have an early stage potential book project based on a panel I chaired at this year's McMullen Naval History Symposium.

It'd be a collection of essays dealing with non-traditional, non-warfighting naval activities and operations. So if any of our Sea Control listeners out there are interested in learning more or even better, possibly contributing, contact me for this project. email is cpowerbomb that's c-a-p-o-r-b-o-m at gmail.com that's cpowerbyothermeans at gmail.com and I'll send you some information

so you can get involved that sounds great I look forward to talking to you when that comes out but to listeners thank you for tuning in we'll see you next time © BF-WATCH TV 2021

Thank you for watching.