0:04 [SPEAKER_00]: Have you ever had a fight with a family member over something stupid? 0:09 [SPEAKER_00]: Better yet, have you ever had that fight when we to realize it wasn't so stupid after all? 0:15 [SPEAKER_00]: That behind that excuse for a fight was a real fight, just waiting to be had. 0:21 [SPEAKER_00]: that's basically the story of the pig war, yes, the pig war, which happened between the pork and beans war, in the phoenix war, of course. 0:32 [SPEAKER_00]: And yes, those are all real wars. 0:35 [SPEAKER_00]: They all took place around the American border of modern day Canada. 0:40 [SPEAKER_00]: The Pork and Beans War was a border dispute, in the state of Maine, involving Canadian and American lumberjacks, feuding over jurisdiction in 1839. 0:49 [SPEAKER_00]: The Finian War was basically a five-year raid in which the U.S. government armed Irish immigrants to attack Canadian forts as payback for having supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. 1:04 [SPEAKER_00]: That ended in 1871. 1:07 [SPEAKER_00]: But the pig war was not really about a pig, just like the pork and beans war, was not about a side dish. 1:18 [SPEAKER_01]: The pig was merely the match-shad of the dispute that had been ongoing since 1846. 1:24 [SPEAKER_00]: That was Mike Voorhee, former chief of interpretation and historian for the San Juan Islands National Historic Park. 1:34 [SPEAKER_00]: He is written multiple books on the war and remains the acknowledged world's expert on the subject. 1:40 [SPEAKER_00]: The name of the pig war, he says, was added by 19th century historians with a flare for headlines 1:48 [SPEAKER_01]: During the time, it was known as the San Juan and Broleo, or the San Juan difficulty. 1:55 [SPEAKER_01]: You can read about it in New York Times. 1:57 [SPEAKER_01]: You can read about it in the Times of London. 2:00 [SPEAKER_01]: It was definitely a world event. 2:03 [SPEAKER_00]: Part of what attracted Mike to this story is the fact that it represents the rare case in which the most memorable thing about a war is that it never actually happened. 2:13 [SPEAKER_00]: The death of a pig triggered that crisis and by the time it was over, 2:17 [SPEAKER_00]: that pig represented 100% of all the casualties. 2:21 [SPEAKER_00]: This story is one of peaceful resolution where cooler heads prevailed and countless lives were saved. 2:29 [SPEAKER_00]: As a veteran, Mike has no illusions over the glories of war. 2:34 [SPEAKER_01]: That was a Vietnam bat, and I didn't have a very good time in that war. 2:40 [SPEAKER_01]: I don't think much of war as a method of solving anyone's problems, the war in the Ukraine right now is deeply distressing. 2:51 [SPEAKER_01]: And so this was an opportunity to work in a national park to interpret your passion. 3:01 [SPEAKER_01]: to talk about the peaceful resolution of a conflict every single day to people that came into the park not only from around the country but from around the world talking about peaceful arbitration as a means of resolving a difference. 3:17 [SPEAKER_00]: As with those intense arguments, we have with family members, over things that are trivial, the pig war was really about something quite significant that had happened in the past. 3:27 [SPEAKER_00]: The United States had declared independence from Britain in 1776 and then fought an eight-year war against its former king. 3:37 [SPEAKER_00]: The two countries fought again in the War of 1812 and would spend the next few years trying to figure out who owned what along the new Canadian American border. 3:48 [SPEAKER_01]: After the War of 1812, the border was set between the United States and the British possessions. 3:55 [SPEAKER_01]: and it went to the lake of the woods and Minnesota. 4:00 [SPEAKER_00]: We think of Great Britain today as America's most natural ally, but for the most part of American history, they were our most natural enemy. 4:10 [SPEAKER_02]: As you can imagine, the United States and Great Britain did not enjoy terribly great relations in the post-American Revolution period, and the anti-English sentiment was right in the United States in the 19th century, was really fond of it. 4:23 [SPEAKER_00]: That was Cyrus Forman, who is currently working Mike's old job with the National Park Service in the San Juan Island National Historic Park. 4:33 [SPEAKER_01]: see a lot of people we've been such a great allies with great Britain throughout the 20th century people don't realize the tensions that were still at work between great Britain and the United States in the 1850s. 4:47 [SPEAKER_01]: There were still people who had living memory of the British burning our capital in 1814 during the war of 1812. 4:57 [SPEAKER_01]: And 4:58 [SPEAKER_01]: There were many tensions, there were intrigues over Central America, there were a lot of factors that were. 5:04 [SPEAKER_01]: And the fact that the two countries could actually go to the table and work this out diplomatically to me was quite an achievement and the story worth telling. 5:17 [SPEAKER_00]: But by the 1850s, most of the Canadian American border was firmly established and the 5:27 [SPEAKER_02]: In 1848, they thought that they had pretty much settled the boundary with the treaty of Oregon. 5:34 [SPEAKER_00]: The Treaty of Oregon drew a firm boundary between modern-day Canada and the United States, where there had once been a kind of a shared territory that was opened to people from either country who were willing to live there. 5:47 [SPEAKER_00]: Because of how remote the region was, and relatively inconsequential, relative to their previous conflicts, 5:53 [SPEAKER_00]: the two countries were willing to co-habitate for decades after the war of 1812 in a prior treaty in 1818. 6:03 [SPEAKER_02]: It's worth noting that this area, the entire Pacific Northwest, up until that treaty was signed, had been legally a part of both Great Britain and the United States of America. 6:14 [SPEAKER_02]: They couldn't decide and they didn't want to argue, and so they had what was 6:20 [SPEAKER_02]: the idea that it would be both British jurisdiction in Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Idaho, and US jurisdiction. 6:28 [SPEAKER_02]: And both parties had rights, but no one really had decision-making or governing authority, which was no big deal. 6:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Part of what changed was the election of an American president with an appetite for expansion and for war. 6:42 [SPEAKER_02]: In 1846, President Pope was elected on a campaign slogan of 5440 or fight. 6:49 [SPEAKER_02]: Literally, we will go to war with Great Britain and lastly give us all of the Pacific North, the last all the way to Alaska, facing a president who had vowed war with Great Britain's to war. 7:00 [SPEAKER_02]: the entire Oregon territory and the same president who had just finished raging war with Mexico in order to seize numerous parts of Mexico, right? 7:09 [SPEAKER_02]: All of the states of California, Texas, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, parts of Colorado, parts of Wyoming, right? 7:18 [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, could clearly demonstrate in his willingness to engage in violent conquest against other 7:28 [SPEAKER_02]: And so the British tried to make as generous a settlement as possible, because they did not want to war with the United States. 7:36 [SPEAKER_02]: Originally, everyone thought that the state of Washington, what is now the state of Washington, was going to be a part of Great Britain. 7:42 [SPEAKER_02]: They had more forces on the ground, they had massive amounts of the capital invested at Fort Vancouver in Vancouver, Washington on the other side of the Columbia River from Portland to Oregon. 7:53 [SPEAKER_02]: And it was a more equitable state, but they sang the threat of violence from a president who had demonstrated the use of violence and willingness to start a war for illegitimate reasons or in order to claim land, they said, we will give you most of what you want. 8:10 [SPEAKER_02]: And so they drew a straight line across the northern boundary. 8:14 [SPEAKER_02]: But when it hit the sea, the British demanded that they get to keep all of the Vancouver Island 8:22 [SPEAKER_00]: The British were eager for peace and conceded to most every American demand. 8:28 [SPEAKER_00]: They only asked to keep their command center in the region, which happened to fall just south of that line. 8:34 [SPEAKER_02]: The Royal Navy had already put its major command center for the entire Pacific into Esclimals Harbor, which is in Victoria, so that would have been below that line. 8:45 [SPEAKER_02]: And so that the 8:51 [SPEAKER_02]: will be the rate that divides the Vancouver from the mainland. 8:56 [SPEAKER_02]: The problem is that these men in Washington, DC, never been to the Pacific Northwest, did not know that there were two strengths. 9:03 [SPEAKER_02]: Really, we are a result of the imprecise nature of cartography and treaty decisions in the 19th century. 9:13 [SPEAKER_02]: And a direct result of what happens when you have imperial officials who have no experience with the area that they're making decisions for making decisions. 9:24 [SPEAKER_00]: So much drama over determining which straight was which might sound overblown, but this was a big deal, not only did it determine the ownership of those 400 islands, but it also threatened to pin down American shipping and sea power all along Washington's and the country's northernmost coast. 9:44 [SPEAKER_02]: If the British Empire had these islands, it would have made very hard for Americans to have capable navigation in the Puget Sound area. 9:52 [SPEAKER_02]: It would have basically boxed the United States in all the way down to the Columbia River. 9:58 [SPEAKER_00]: In order to improve their case for winning the stalemate, the royal governor of the region surely decided to maximize the British presence in the disputed territories. 10:08 [SPEAKER_02]: James Douglas, an Afro-Scottish official of both the Hudson's Bay Company and the Royal Governor, a position that combined corporate and governmental powers in a unique way, decided to put facts on the ground in order to make this both in order to profit and in order to make sure that the British Empire could claim these strategically valuable islands. 10:38 [SPEAKER_02]: sheep and other farm animals here, along with 17 Hawaiian shepherds in December of 1853, and they set about turning San Juan Island into a massive corporate sheep farm. 10:50 [SPEAKER_02]: That sheep farm flourished, and by 1859 they were over 4,000 sheep, living on San Juan Island, and in that year Americans began to arrive. 11:00 [SPEAKER_00]: While the British have been populating the islands through a corporate takeover by the Hudson's Bay Company, the American population had grown more organically. 11:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Settlers and pioneers had steadily migrated west, looking for land and new opportunities. 11:16 [SPEAKER_01]: The American approach, as we all know, took place over the Oregon Trail, which really warmed up and became red-hot by the early 1840s, and you had Americans flooding into Oregon. 11:31 [SPEAKER_01]: So many Americans moved north of the Columbia River, which divides Oregon and Washington. 11:37 [SPEAKER_01]: That 11:39 [SPEAKER_01]: Washington territory became a separate entity. 11:42 [SPEAKER_01]: And when it did in 1853 at the end of the year, the new territorial governor, a guy above the name of Isaac Stevens, declared that the San Juan Islands were really part of Washington territory. 11:56 [SPEAKER_02]: in 1858, gold was discovered in the Fraser River Valley of British Columbia, and that when news reached San Francisco, what was known as the floating population of San Francisco, the group of men who were looking for any gold rush to try and make themselves as wealthy as earlier gold rushers, showed up in British Columbia. 12:16 [SPEAKER_02]: That scared. 12:17 [SPEAKER_02]: Governor Douglas, who imagined this could be a way to the United States to begin to see his territory of these guys were successful. 12:24 [SPEAKER_02]: Luckily, these guys didn't understand the environmental history and specifics of the Fraser River Valley so they showed up in the summer. 12:32 [SPEAKER_02]: You can't mind gold, they're really into winter because of a river of depth. 12:37 [SPEAKER_02]: And consequently, they spent all their money in the Bing towns that created, and almost all of them went home, except for a 22-end who, as patriotic Americans, used San Juan Island as their church were east, and didn't want to go home failure, so they decided to home-stead in the improved pastures that the Hudson's Bay Company was using. 12:57 [SPEAKER_02]: Needless to say, after 12:59 [SPEAKER_02]: five or six months of having Americans putting farms down in Hudson's Bay Company land. 13:07 [SPEAKER_02]: There was a lot of tension between Hudson's Bay Company officials and these Americans that boiled over on the wording of June 15, 1859 when one of the pigs belonging to the Bellevue sheep farm of Hudson's Bay Company got into the potato patch of a failed goldmine or named 13:27 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, listening to the story today, most of us will be inclined to blame the owner of the pig for failing to control his property. 13:35 [SPEAKER_00]: When our dogs go on someone else's property, for example, and wreck something or hurt someone, it's our fault. 13:42 [SPEAKER_00]: But at that time, on the frontier, the responsibility of keeping the pig away from 13:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Pigs at free range. 13:53 [SPEAKER_02]: If the pig was in your potato patch, that meant you failed as a farmer. 13:57 [SPEAKER_02]: Right? 13:57 [SPEAKER_02]: It was your responsibility to keep animals out. 14:00 [SPEAKER_02]: Not the animals responsibility to stay out. 14:03 [SPEAKER_00]: And so he had incorrectly or poorly sentenced his crimes. 14:08 [SPEAKER_00]: But Lyman called her wasn't having it. 14:10 [SPEAKER_00]: He began warning people. 14:12 [SPEAKER_00]: The next American potato, this pig ate, would be his last. 14:17 [SPEAKER_00]: He had warned the chief trader, 14:19 [SPEAKER_01]: of build new sheep from a gun in Charles Griffin, that this railback pig that belonged to the company was rooting in his potato patch. 14:28 [SPEAKER_01]: Charles Griffin just told the American, you're nothing but a trespass. 14:31 [SPEAKER_01]: And he thought the whole island was their colony or their plantation. 14:35 [SPEAKER_01]: The American fed no business there. 14:38 [SPEAKER_01]: The Americans, of course, saw it differently. 14:41 [SPEAKER_01]: And so when 14:43 [SPEAKER_01]: The American saw the pig in his potato patch. 14:46 [SPEAKER_01]: He lost his temporary chase the pig out of the garden to the edge of the woods and shot it. 14:51 [SPEAKER_01]: And that's when the trouble really started. 14:55 [SPEAKER_01]: You didn't kill people's livestock on the front here. 14:58 [SPEAKER_01]: That's a given. 14:59 [SPEAKER_01]: That's a given from the Appalachian mountains all the way west. 15:03 [SPEAKER_01]: That's not something you did. 15:05 [SPEAKER_01]: You ended up having to pay a price. 15:07 [SPEAKER_01]: And that's what happened. 15:09 [SPEAKER_00]: But the price in this case was too high. 15:12 [SPEAKER_00]: as and so high, it was basically an insult intended to end the possibility of easy reconciliation. 15:20 [SPEAKER_00]: Cutler knew he was in the wrong. 15:21 [SPEAKER_02]: He went to apologize, but Charles Brethon, the head of the sheep farm, saw this as an opportunity. 15:28 [SPEAKER_02]: And he wanted incident or excuse to be a kithing American out of his island and reclaiming his entire sheep farm. 15:34 [SPEAKER_02]: So when Cutler offered to pay him for the pig, 15:38 [SPEAKER_02]: Griffin demanded some more than a pig's worth about 10 times the price of a pig, which cutler rightly viewed as an insult. 15:46 [SPEAKER_01]: Griffin just says, you scruffy little man that is a valuable animal, it's going to cost you $100. 15:52 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, cutler claimed on $100 in 1859 funds was pretty, that's a pretty steep price to pay for a birch your board. 16:05 [SPEAKER_01]: And he said a hundred dollar, I could have paid a hundred dollar for a pick that ain't worth ten of. 16:11 [SPEAKER_02]: And he yelled at Griffin and told him if any animal, you included Mr. Griffin gets in my land. 16:16 [SPEAKER_02]: I will shoot them dead just like I did that pick. 16:19 [SPEAKER_02]: Cutler told his neighbor Paul K. Hubs, the collector of customs, a job basically meant to annoy the British and try and get the pay taxes in a place that they regard as their own land. 16:30 [SPEAKER_02]: Hubs went and told 16:31 [SPEAKER_02]: The commander of American forces and belling him that an American had been attacked on American soil. 16:38 [SPEAKER_00]: Ultimately, word made its way up the military ladder and reached the commanding general of the American armed forces in Oregon, a man named Brigadier General William S. Carney. 16:49 [SPEAKER_01]: Harney had a reputation if he had a pretty nasty background. 16:53 [SPEAKER_01]: He was a rastable as all get out and because he had grown up in the orbit of Andrew Jackson, he hated anything British. 17:03 [SPEAKER_01]: So there was no British. 17:05 [SPEAKER_01]: We're not going to threaten Lyman Cutler. 17:08 [SPEAKER_00]: for shooting a pig on his watch. 17:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, when Mike says Harvey had a reputation, he's being kind. 17:15 [SPEAKER_00]: William Harvey was a terrible, terrible person, a racist, sexist war criminal. 17:22 [SPEAKER_02]: Harvey was a man according to of high newspapers that in the 1830s, he was described as quote an inhuman monster. 17:30 [SPEAKER_02]: Carney was a man who amongst the coolties that he admitted over the course of his life were the armoureder of seminal civilians during the seminal war and the destruction of seminal villages. 17:43 [SPEAKER_02]: Most famously, one night in, I think it was 1835. 17:46 [SPEAKER_02]: He came home drunk. 17:48 [SPEAKER_02]: She was mansion in St. Louis, probably drunk. 17:50 [SPEAKER_02]: He does the record doesn't say it was drunk, but likely. 17:52 [SPEAKER_02]: And he couldn't find his keys. 17:55 [SPEAKER_02]: And he decided that it was the result of an enslaved young 17:58 [SPEAKER_02]: And he began to brutally beat her a torture session lasted for three days that left her dead and that was so shocking that the white slaveholders of St. Louis nearly lynched him and Birch's house down and he had to go a wall until his military buddies could find him a sympathetic judge and get a change of venue so that he could be acquitted for this murder. 18:21 [SPEAKER_02]: He was one of 18:26 [SPEAKER_02]: He also was responsible for the first major massacre of Lakota people at the Battle of Ashfalo in Nebraska, where basically a group of brutally suit people who had been in a previous conflict with the United States. 18:42 [SPEAKER_02]: He surrounded their village on multiple sides. 18:45 [SPEAKER_02]: He asked, they came with a white flag and tried to surrender. 18:49 [SPEAKER_02]: For any told them, he would not accept their surrender. 18:51 [SPEAKER_02]: They had to fight, and he came in and killed at least 150 civilians who were trying to surrender to them. 18:57 [SPEAKER_02]: He was court-martled on four different occasions. 18:59 [SPEAKER_02]: He would beat his soldiers. 19:01 [SPEAKER_02]: One time, famously, a dog was in his keep vegetable post when he was at a thwart in the Midwest. 19:07 [SPEAKER_02]: And he ran out and chased the dog down for a mile and then beat the dog. 19:11 [SPEAKER_02]: It was one of his soldiers, dog he beat the dog to death. 19:14 [SPEAKER_02]: That was actually one of two dogs that he murdered in uniform. 19:18 [SPEAKER_02]: He also was holding a piece negotiation. 19:21 [SPEAKER_02]: And he wanted to show that white technology was superior to native technology. 19:25 [SPEAKER_02]: So he announced 19:27 [SPEAKER_02]: to the tribes that he assembled that quote, we can now bring people back from the dead and we are that superior. 19:34 [SPEAKER_02]: And so he had his post-surgent unestatized dog. 19:38 [SPEAKER_02]: And he made everybody poke its ribs and then the dog died in anesthesia. 19:42 [SPEAKER_02]: So he wasn't able to bring the dog back from the dead. 19:45 [SPEAKER_02]: He was a court Martian for different court Martians, but he always used his close personal links to Andrew Jackson, who he had been an ageie when he was a young man to escape punishment. 19:58 [SPEAKER_02]: He always claimed that his superiors and the army wigs, who hated him for being a Jackson man, and they were just trying to punish me for being a Democrat and a real Jackson. 20:08 [SPEAKER_02]: And that was sort of carnicing. 20:10 [SPEAKER_00]: This is the last person you want involved in this kind of crisis or really anything of its kind, but harney was at the forefront of the pig war, which only made violent escalation that much more likely. 20:23 [SPEAKER_01]: Harney dispatched the company of the United States infantry to the island under the command of Captain 20:37 [SPEAKER_01]: who a few years later would resign his commission in the United States Army, throw in with the Confederacy and lead his division in the fake-fold charge on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Pickett's Charge, same guy. 20:52 [SPEAKER_01]: So Pickett's orders were to come to the eye and to ensure that the British did not assume jurisdiction over American citizens. 21:01 [SPEAKER_02]: And within a month of the pig's death, you had over 60 American soldiers landing on CNN Island to begin claiming it and to build thoughts and protect American soldiers. 21:12 [SPEAKER_02]: That same day that pick it landed, of course, newspapers back and across the water and Victoria within view, put out headlines announced that Americans had invaded San 21:22 [SPEAKER_02]: And the well-navy forces that were actually originally deployed to Vancouver in order to protect British sovereignty from the gold miners ended up confronting American military forces on San Juan Island. 21:37 [SPEAKER_02]: And so you add about 2,000 roller reeds on three ships. 21:41 [SPEAKER_02]: in the harbor and you had what green about 500 American soldiers, a little over 500, building a massive fortification. 21:51 [SPEAKER_02]: And luckily, though there were times that they got close to it over the summer of 1859, the two forces just looked at each other and didn't fire a shot. 22:06 [SPEAKER_01]: which in those days met not on the shoreline where you were subject to being raked by the guns by the warships but on high ground. 22:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Pick it lands and post the proclamation says this being United States territory only the laws of the United States of America were applied and leaves his camp on the beach. 22:29 [SPEAKER_01]: The British find out that there's U.S. infantry on the island. 22:32 [SPEAKER_01]: They dispatched a warship, HMS, Trippian, a 31 guns, steam, frigate. 22:38 [SPEAKER_00]: Royal Navy captain, Jeffrey Fibbs Hornby, is ordered to remove picket from the island. 22:44 [SPEAKER_00]: And if that met using force and starting a war, so be it. 22:48 [SPEAKER_00]: Picket refuses to leave. 22:50 [SPEAKER_00]: And yet Hornby chooses not to attack. 22:54 [SPEAKER_01]: Hornby knows that if he takes military action against him, that he might prevail in an initial attack, but the American soldiers would run into the woodlands, and then he'd have to reap them all out and very likely a war could ensue. 23:11 [SPEAKER_01]: It was not the role of the British Navy to start wars. 23:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Their role was to ensure that safety of commerce on the high seas, 23:21 [SPEAKER_01]: and ensure that great Britain remained the great world power that she was. 23:27 [SPEAKER_01]: Pickett, believing that discretion is the better part of Galler, moves his camp about a half a mile over the hill to the opposite shoreline on the cattle point of insulin. 23:40 [SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to be an expert in military strategy to be puzzled by Pickett's decision-making. 23:46 [SPEAKER_00]: He's simply moving from one vulnerable position to another. 23:50 [SPEAKER_01]: Hornby wrote a letter to his wife. 23:52 [SPEAKER_01]: He said, this George Pickett, I really don't understand this man at all. 23:57 [SPEAKER_01]: First, he puts his cap in an expose location. 23:59 [SPEAKER_01]: Then he moves it to the opposite shorelight. 24:02 [SPEAKER_01]: All I need to do is steam around the point, drop anchor, and shelling from there. 24:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Well, what he did not understand. 24:08 [SPEAKER_01]: And no, was that Pickett graduated dead last in his class at West Point. 24:14 [SPEAKER_00]: But even then, with a potentially easy victory at hand, Hornby does not attack, he doesn't want a war. 24:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, for Hornby, his superior backs him up. 24:26 [SPEAKER_01]: The Admiral, the commander of the Deceptic Station, a great Brit-Mar, Lambert Baines arrived a few days later. 24:34 [SPEAKER_01]: And the governor is angry. 24:37 [SPEAKER_01]: and storms up to bands as your man who was in support and then follow his stuff. 24:43 [SPEAKER_01]: The bands understand hornbeez reasoning and back same I 100% and says you did the right thing. 24:52 [SPEAKER_01]: It's not our job to start a war. 24:54 [SPEAKER_01]: We need to consult with the diplomats in Washington and London. 25:00 [SPEAKER_01]: We need to let them resolve the problems. 25:02 [SPEAKER_01]: We should hold fast. 25:07 [SPEAKER_01]: And that's it settled in to this standoff on Griffin Bay, which is the subtitle of my book. 25:14 [SPEAKER_01]: The Americans were reinforced. 25:16 [SPEAKER_01]: Pickets reinforced and the command is taken over by Lieutenant Colonel Silas Casey. 25:22 [SPEAKER_01]: They unload naval guns from the U.S. gunboat, USS Massachusetts. 25:29 [SPEAKER_01]: And they start falling these naval guns up to the top of the Minimates, and they start building an earthwork. 25:37 [SPEAKER_01]: These naval guns are 32 pounders. 25:39 [SPEAKER_01]: They can throw a shell for a solid shot, mild or mild and half. 25:45 [SPEAKER_01]: Hornby's suddenly alarmed. 25:46 [SPEAKER_01]: Oh my gosh, what are they doing? 25:48 [SPEAKER_01]: We weren't supposed to allow him to erect fortifications. 25:52 [SPEAKER_01]: Now they have the advantage of me. 25:54 [SPEAKER_01]: They can send a plunging fire. 25:56 [SPEAKER_01]: It looks like the Americans are intending to stay no matter what. 26:00 [SPEAKER_01]: So Hornby sends a dispatch to Admiral 26:09 [SPEAKER_01]: And the Abrol says, you will not, you will stand fast. 26:13 [SPEAKER_00]: We will wait to see what the diplomats do. 26:17 [SPEAKER_00]: One of the really striking things about 19th century negotiations is just how long it took information to travel each way. 26:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Each piece of correspondence in a dispute like this one could take weeks or even months to reach its audience. 26:38 [SPEAKER_01]: There were two ways that you did it. 26:40 [SPEAKER_01]: The first way, you could take a steamer down the San Francisco, send a cable, the river, the Sacramento, and over the Sierrae's to Carson City, and then put the telegram on the overland stage, which would go across the plains to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. 27:00 [SPEAKER_01]: And then you could send another telegraph from Fort Leavenworth. 27:05 [SPEAKER_01]: The other way it was to go to the estimates of Panama and take the Panama Railroad across the estimates that have been completed in 1855, remember on the estimates of Panama there had been a real competition between Vanderbilt and his companies and the civic male 27:31 [SPEAKER_01]: And that's the way you did it. 27:33 [SPEAKER_01]: You took the rail across Panama and you took a steamer up to Washington. 27:38 [SPEAKER_01]: So messages were sent by two methods. 27:41 [SPEAKER_01]: The telegram from Fort Leavenworth made it 24 hours again of the messenger. 27:48 [SPEAKER_01]: by ship. 27:49 [SPEAKER_01]: And when the two nationals found out about this, they just said, oh my God, when the British found out that they immediately went to the United States Secretary of State and said, hey, what's going on here? 28:04 [SPEAKER_01]: And there was some mistrust, but the American said, they had no idea that this was going to happen. 28:10 [SPEAKER_01]: This was 28:11 [SPEAKER_01]: not part of the plan. 28:12 [SPEAKER_01]: Hurny, General Hurny is acting on his own. 28:16 [SPEAKER_01]: We had nothing to do with his landing the infantry on the island and to demonstrate our good faith we will dispatch. 28:26 [SPEAKER_01]: windfield Scott to work just out. 28:28 [SPEAKER_01]: The British were actually very pleased by that because windfield Scott had solved two board of crises in the 1830s, first over the board of at Niagara Falls, and then at a Rooster in Maine. 28:46 [SPEAKER_01]: and had work things out diplomatically in both those cases. 28:51 [SPEAKER_01]: Scott was a soldier, but he was also a lawyer. 28:55 [SPEAKER_01]: Winfield Scott was a brevittly tenant general. 28:59 [SPEAKER_01]: He had led American forces in the invasion of Mexico during the Mexican-American War. 29:07 [SPEAKER_01]: He was 72 years old. 29:09 [SPEAKER_01]: He was six foot five, 385 pounds. 29:13 [SPEAKER_01]: He had drops. 29:14 [SPEAKER_01]: He had gout and he'd fallen off his horse and broken his collarbone. 29:19 [SPEAKER_01]: He wasn't a real happy guy. 29:20 [SPEAKER_01]: He had to be putting a basket and crane onto the ship. 29:25 [SPEAKER_01]: And every time he went from ship to shore, it was the same thing or ship to ship. 29:31 [SPEAKER_01]: So it took him six weeks to arrive here. 29:34 [SPEAKER_01]: And it was not a real pleasant journey for him. 29:37 [SPEAKER_01]: But by the time that he arrived, he found that two sides here, while awaiting a diplomatic solution and sort of settled in, 29:47 [SPEAKER_01]: To this sort of bizarre joint occupation already there were citizens coming over from Victoria visiting the American amps at the American officers red tending church services on the British ships. 30:02 [SPEAKER_01]: was sort of a pleasant atmosphere. 30:06 [SPEAKER_01]: Everyone knew that it could be otherwise that the worm could turn, so to speak any time. 30:13 [SPEAKER_01]: But when Scott arrived, he found the British very willing to talk and negotiations opened between himself and Governor Douglas Scott was diplomatically astute and was highly respected by the British. 30:31 [SPEAKER_01]: this elderly and infirm man to the other side of the world to resolve this difficulty was a demonstration of good faith. 30:41 [SPEAKER_01]: They're only took them a week. 30:43 [SPEAKER_01]: And by the end of the week, they had agreed to a stand down. 30:46 [SPEAKER_02]: When Phil Scott came and he immediately worked out 30:50 [SPEAKER_02]: a solution, which was that we needed an international arbitrator because this was a bad treaty that was being in exactly and we need somebody who's neutral to negotiate and in the meantime, the Americans and British, both stationed forces on the island and Americans would be in charge of law for American settlers and the British would be in charge of law for British settlers. 31:11 [SPEAKER_02]: That was late 1859, the British took away in 1860, and of course the United States quickly descended into civil war. 31:19 [SPEAKER_02]: Obviously during the civil war, the San Juan Island border dispute was not something that decision makers in Washington DC had any end with Sid deal with, the soldiers who were here had very poor supplies because they were the last priority of the 31:38 [SPEAKER_02]: where this was both Britain and the United States. 31:41 [SPEAKER_02]: And both sides had a very active social life together. 31:45 [SPEAKER_02]: Many British soldiers ended up staying and becoming home-setters. 31:49 [SPEAKER_02]: Many American soldiers did as well. 31:51 [SPEAKER_02]: And while here's later, they held an arbitration panel in Switzerland officiated by the Kaiser of the new nation of Germany. 32:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Germany had recently defeated France and the Franco-Prussian War ending the carnival empire of Napoleon's third, and they were the eminent power, Western power, other than the United States and Great Britain. 32:15 [SPEAKER_01]: So they were the obvious choice to arbitrate between the two nations. 32:21 [SPEAKER_01]: Bismarck, who ran the country, submitted 32:25 [SPEAKER_01]: the question to three adjudicators, German adjudicators, who met for a year in Geneva, Switzerland, the United States and Great Britain submitted arguments and counter arguments to the group. 32:38 [SPEAKER_01]: There was one adjudicator who thought it should be the middle channel that runs between 32:47 [SPEAKER_01]: In the archicolago, the Americans said, nope, it's got to be the hero straight at the Rosario straight or we don't play. 32:55 [SPEAKER_01]: So the German group in October. 33:00 [SPEAKER_01]: of 1872 issued a decision. 33:03 [SPEAKER_01]: They voted two to one that the harrow straight to the west between Vancouver Island and Samon Island was the boundary that was meant in the Treaty of Oregon. 33:15 [SPEAKER_01]: And so the ruling was issued on November 22nd, 1872, the British Royal Marines marched peacefully out of English camp. 33:26 [SPEAKER_02]: Within two months of the ruling, the British left, this became the United States, and this island has been the USA ever since. 33:37 [SPEAKER_00]: In the next episode, we'll be exploring more of the lasting significance of the Pick War, as well as some of the ways in which things could have gone terribly wrong.
Show full transcript (293 segments)
