The Pig That Almost Started a War
On June 15, 1859, an American settler named Lyman Cutlar found a large black pig rooting through his garden on San Juan Island. The pig belonged to the Hudson's Bay Company, the British trading outfit that considered these islands part of British territory. Cutlar shot the pig. He offered to pay for it. The British demanded a sum he found absurd. Within weeks, American soldiers landed on the island. The British sent warships. Two of the most powerful nations on earth squared off over a dead pig and a garden fence.
The confrontation could have turned into a real war. At the peak, nearly five hundred American troops and five British warships faced each other across the southern tip of the island. But no one fired. The local commanders on both sides recognized the absurdity of what was happening and chose restraint. Rear Admiral Robert Baynes reportedly refused to "involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig." The standoff cooled into a joint military occupation that lasted from 1859 to 1872 — twelve years of two armies sharing one island while diplomats in distant capitals tried to draw a line through the water.
The line was the problem. The 1846 Oregon Treaty had set the border between British and American territory at the 49th parallel, then said the boundary would follow "the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver Island." There are two channels. The British said the border ran through Rosario Strait, which would place the San Juan Islands in British territory. The Americans said it ran through Haro Strait, which would place them in American territory. Both readings were defensible. Neither side would budge.
In 1871, both nations agreed to submit the dispute to Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany for arbitration. On October 21, 1872, the Kaiser ruled in favor of the American claim, drawing the border through Haro Strait. The British packed up their camp, the Americans packed up theirs, and the Pig War ended without a single human casualty on either side. One pig died. Two empires stood down.
Two Camps, One Island
During the joint occupation, the Americans established their garrison at the southern end of the island and the British set up at the northern end. The two camps operated under an unusual arrangement: each side governed its own nationals, and neither side was supposed to have more than one hundred troops on the island at any time. What could have been tense turned out to be remarkably cordial. The officers socialized. They celebrated each other's holidays. They hosted dinners, horse races, and Fourth of July events that British soldiers attended voluntarily.
Both camps still stand, and you can walk through them today as part of San Juan Island National Historical Park. American Camp sits on a windswept prairie at the southern tip, open grassland running to high bluffs over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Hudson's Bay Company farm that started the whole dispute was near here. You can see the earthworks, the officers' quarters, and the redoubt where soldiers would have retreated if fighting had broken out. The landscape is raw — wind, open sky, rabbits everywhere (descendants of ones the British brought), and trails that run along cliff edges with views to the Olympic Mountains.
English Camp is the opposite. Tucked into a sheltered bay at the northwest corner of the island, it feels like a small English village dropped into the Pacific Northwest. The white barracks building, the blockhouse, the commissary, and the hospital have been restored. Behind the barracks, up a short trail through old-growth forest, you find the formal garden the British officers planted — a cleared patch on a hillside with a view of the harbor below. They grew vegetables and flowers. They brought seeds from England. They made the place feel like home for twelve years, then left it behind when the Kaiser's ruling came through.
Before the Boundary
Long before any European power drew a line on a map, the San Juan Islands belonged to the Coast Salish peoples. The Lummi, Samish, Songish, and Saanich nations used these islands and surrounding waters for thousands of years. The archaeological record here goes back at least five thousand years, and the evidence suggests continuous habitation and seasonal use across the entire archipelago.
The San Juan Islands sat at the center of one of the richest marine ecosystems on the Pacific coast, and the Salish peoples developed fishing techniques uniquely adapted to these waters. Reef-net fishing — a method believed to be practiced only in the straits around the San Juan and Gulf Islands — used anchored nets stretched between two canoes positioned over shallow reefs where salmon passed. Spotters watched the water for the flash of fish, and teams coordinated the lift with precise timing. It was a communal, highly skilled practice, tied to specific reef locations that families held rights to across generations.
The boundary dispute between Britain and the United States, and the eventual American claim, displaced the indigenous nations whose connection to these islands predated both empires by millennia. The Lummi Nation today maintains a reservation on the mainland near Bellingham and continues to assert its ties to the San Juan archipelago. When you stand at American Camp or English Camp and read the interpretive signs about the Pig War, remember that the two empires arguing over whose land this was were both newcomers.
The Orcas at Lime Kiln
Lime Kiln Point State Park, on the island's west side, is widely considered the best land-based whale watching site in the world. The reason is simple geography: the Haro Strait narrows here, and the rocky shoreline drops steeply into deep water. The Southern Resident orcas — a genetically distinct population of killer whales that feed primarily on Chinook salmon — travel through this corridor regularly, sometimes passing within meters of the rocks where you stand.
The Southern Resident population is critically endangered. As of recent counts, fewer than seventy-five individuals remain, divided into three family groups known as J, K, and L pods. Their decline is tied to the decline of Chinook salmon, their primary food source, along with vessel noise, pollution, and habitat degradation in the Salish Sea. Watching them pass Lime Kiln — dorsal fins cutting through the current, the sound of a blow carrying across the water — you are watching a population in real trouble, and you know it.
The lighthouse at Lime Kiln dates to 1919, a small concrete tower perched on the rocks above the strait. Hydrophone equipment installed nearby picks up the calls of passing whales, and researchers at the site have been monitoring the Southern Residents for decades. The park is not a guaranteed sighting — these are wild animals moving through open water — but when the orcas do pass, the experience is unlike any aquarium or whale watching boat. You are standing on rock, at their level, watching them move through their own world.
Roche Harbor and the Mausoleum in the Woods
Roche Harbor, at the island's northwest corner, was a limestone quarrying operation before it became a resort village. John S. McMillin arrived in the 1880s and built the Roche Harbor Lime and Cement Company into one of the largest lime producers west of the Mississippi. The Hotel de Hare, the company store, and the workers' cottages all survive, repurposed into a marina village with restaurants, a sculpture garden, and guest rooms in the old hotel.
The strangest thing McMillin left behind is up a wooded trail behind the resort. Afterglow Vista is the McMillin family mausoleum, and it is unlike any memorial you have seen. A set of concrete columns — broken at the top to symbolize lives cut short by death — surrounds a round stone table with six chairs, each inscribed with a family member's name. The chairs face inward. The ashes of the McMillin family are sealed inside the column bases. The whole structure is built according to Masonic symbolism: the broken columns, the number of steps, the orientation. It is a family dinner table frozen in stone, set in a clearing in the woods, waiting for guests who will never sit down again.
You can walk to Afterglow Vista in about ten minutes from the Roche Harbor marina. Most visitors miss it entirely. The trail is marked but easy to overlook, and the mausoleum sits in deep shade under tall firs. It is one of the most quietly unsettling places on the island — a monument to a lime baron's wealth and belief system, standing alone in the forest a century after the family that built it is gone.
Friday Harbor and the Rain Shadow
Friday Harbor is the only incorporated town on San Juan Island, and it fits in a few blocks. The ferry dock, the shops, the restaurants, the whale museum, and the marina are all within a short walk of each other. In summer, the town fills with day-trippers from the Anacortes ferry and boaters working their way through the islands. In the off-season, it contracts to its year-round population of a couple thousand and goes quiet.
The surprise about Friday Harbor — and the San Juan Islands generally — is the weather. Seattle, sixty miles to the south, averages around thirty-seven inches of rain per year. The San Juan Islands get about twenty-five. The reason is the Olympic Mountains: the range intercepts moisture-laden air blowing in from the Pacific, wringing out most of the rain before it reaches the islands. The San Juans sit in the rain shadow. The result is drier summers, milder winters, and a microclimate that feels more like the Gulf Islands of British Columbia than the famously gray Puget Sound lowlands. You notice it the moment you step off the ferry. The light is different. The air is different. The madrone trees twisting along the shoreline are a rain-shadow species — they grow here because the conditions allow it.
The Whale Museum, on First Street in Friday Harbor, is small and earnest. It focuses on the Southern Resident orcas and the broader marine ecology of the Salish Sea. The exhibits are not flashy, but the research is real — the museum has been involved in orca monitoring and stranding response for decades. It is the kind of place where the person at the front desk can tell you which pod was spotted this morning and where.
The Best Outcome
San Juan Island almost became British. It almost started a shooting war between two empires. An American farmer killed a pig, soldiers landed, warships arrived, and then — nothing happened. For twelve years, two armies camped on opposite ends of a small island, grew gardens, attended each other's parties, and waited for politicians and a German emperor to sort it out. The Kaiser drew a line. The British went home. The Americans went home. The island went back to being quiet.
That quietness is still the defining quality of the place. You drive the island's two-lane roads past sheep pastures and lavender farms. You stand at Lime Kiln watching for orcas in the strait. You walk through English Camp and find a garden planted by homesick officers who never fired a shot. You climb the bluffs at American Camp and look out over water that two nations once claimed and neither was willing to fight for — not really, not when it came down to it.
The Pig War is the best absurd-but-real history in the Pacific Northwest, and possibly the best outcome of any territorial dispute in American history. Two empires threatened war, chose patience instead, and left behind an island where the loudest sound most days is the wind off the strait or the breath of an orca passing close to shore. The thing to carry from San Juan Island is the knowledge that sometimes the best resolution is the one where nobody does anything at all.