54/40 or Fight!

Amazing how certain phrases stay in your head from that decades-ago education, even when they aren’t connected to much of anything but themselves. I remember learning that ‘54/40 or Fight!’ was the compelling American slogan with regard to the northwestern borders of the U.S. when the States and the English were trying to figure out what was whose. It was a little surprising when I moved to Point Roberts to learn with some considerable degree of reality that the U.S. had apparently decided not to fight and had instead accepted the boundary at 49 degrees of latitude instead of 54 degrees and change somewhere in some distant past, even earlier than my grade school days. Perhaps I missed that lesson. Nowadays, I guess the slogan would more likely be ‘54/40 or Whatever.’

You can’t live here without frequently wondering why the British didn’t lean on the Americans to make an exception for Point Roberts, given that the Americans made a big exception for Vancouver Island, whose southern end is well below 49 degrees latitude. That was much more territory than P.R.’s little 4.5 square miles. So I was interested to read the other day that the British did intend to get Point Roberts after the treaty of 1846 (the treaty dealing with the Oregon territory boundaries). That treaty left the water boundaries a little vague and when the British sent some folks over to figure out how to get that straightened out (and, incidentally, how to get most of the offshore islands for themselves), part of their task was to survey the area and to obtain Point Roberts for the British, according to James O. McCabe’s 1964 The San Juan Water Boundary Question. Apparently, the survey results made that unlikely, numbers being what they are, and in any case the question of the fate of the Gulf Islands was of much more importance than the fate of Point Roberts.

This book is hard for me understand, really. First of all, it requires one to be absolutely clear on the fact that the Americans were generally pretty hostile to the British and suspected them of being uptonogood at all times. They were occupying the U.S.-designated Evil Empire slot in those days and that’s, as my granddaughter says about such things, really hard to wrap my head around. The English? Shakespeare? Wordsworth? Queen Victoria? Dickens? Those guys were running The Evil Empire? No, I don’t think so. And then, when everyone really got on with trying to sort out whom the Gulf Islands belonged to (particularly Orcas, Lopez, and San Juan), the cast of characters broadens to include General Winfield Scott (later seen as the noble and very elderly U.S. General who headed the War Office under Lincoln during the Civil War) and Captain (U.S. Army)/General (Confederate Army) George Pickett whose military career, if not his life, ended with Picketts’ Charge at Gettysburg. It was like running into an old friend at a strip club: you’re not sure what either of you are doing there.

In any case, Pickett, while still in the U.S. army, did some good work in trying to get a war started with the British over the San Juan Islands, and Scott got in and quieted things down. It was all about something called ‘The War of the Pigs,’ which was actually the death of one pig owned by the Hudson Bay Company and killed by a U.S. squatter. This part gets a little easier to recognize because it reeks of WMD’s and where are they? E.g., did the British really try to arrest the pig killer and transport him to Vancouver Island. No, but there were a lot of assertions that they had. And any number of people thought this would be a really good time to teach the British a lesson that they needed to learn. (This was right before the Civil War started: excellent timing, I'd say.)

Anyway, when you get through reading about how hard it was to figure out who got which islands, it’s pretty easy to see why Point Roberts fell by the wayside. But now, we’re left with the results. I suppose that is what’s meant by the importance of trying to look ahead.

(Not really integral to the account above, but I’m delighted to find that the oldest house in Bellingham is one built and lived in by then-Captain George Pickett when he was stationed there and working on elevating the pig war into an international war. Next visit to Bellingham, that’s a destination. And if you're not familiar with Pickett's Charge, try the film Gettysburg, because after seeing it, you are unlikely to ever forget what that charge must have looked like.)