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Approximately 172 islands make up the San Juan Islands, located eighty miles from Seattle in the northern reaches of Puget Sound. Together, they comprise San Juan County, one of the smallest but fastest-growing counties in Washington State. The islands cover 175 square miles and are home to roughly 13,000 residents. Friday Harbor, the county seat, is the islands' biggest and only incorporated town.
Native Americans, mostly of the Lummi nation, lived on the islands until Spanish explorers arrived and named the San Juans in the late 1700s. White settlers began to colonize in the 1850s. By 1859, the San Juan Boundary Dispute erupted over the boundary description between Canada and the United States, pitting the British against the Americans. After British warships arrived, Gen. Win-field Scott, commander in chief of American armies, stepped in and arranged for joint occupation on the islands. Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm I finally arbitrated the conflict in 1872, giving the San Juan archipelago to the United States and ending the last territorial conflict between the United States and Great Britain.
Historically, farmers, fishermen, and seafarers populated the islands. But by the 1970s, traditional occupations became less profitable than tourism. The San Juans in the early twenty-first century see a greater economic impact from visitors as well as from the mainlanders and retirees seeking an island alternative to city life.
Bibliography
Bailey-Cummings, Jo, and Al Cummings. San Juan: The Powder-Keg Island: The Settler's Own Stories. Friday Harbor, Wash.: Beach Combers, 1987.
Miller, David Hunter, ed. Northwest Water Boundary: Report of the Experts Summoned by the German Emperor as Arbitrator Under Articles 34-42 of the Treaty of Washington of May 8, 1871, Preliminary to His Award Dated October 21, 1872. Seattle: University of Washington, 1942.
Richardson, David Blair. Pig War Islands: The San Juans of Northwest Washington. Eastsound, Wash.: Orcas Publishing Company, 1990.
———. Magic Islands: A Treasure-Trove of San Juan Islands Lore. Eastsound, Wash.: Orcas Publishing Company, 2000.
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This article relies largely or entirely upon a single source. Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations of additional sources. (April 2008) |
The San Juan Islands are a part of the San Juan Archipelago in the northwest corner of the continental United States. The archipelago is split into two groups of islands based on national sovereignty. San Juan Islands are part of the U.S. state of Washington, while the Gulf Islands are part of the Canadian province of British Columbia. There are over 450 islands in the entire archipelago at high tide, but fewer than one-sixth are permanently inhabited.
In the archipelago, fifteen islands are accessible by public ferry. Public ferries serve nine Gulf Islands and six San Juan Islands.
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The islands were part of the traditional area of the Central Coast Salish. Linguistically, the Central Coast Salish consisted of five groups: Squamish, Halkomelem, Nooksack, Northern Straits (which includes the Lummi dialect), and Klallam. Exploration and settlement by Europeans brought smallpox to the area by the 1770s. In 1843, the Hudson's Bay Company established Fort Camosun at nearby Vancouver Island.
The 1846 Oregon Treaty forced by President Polk established the 49th parallel as the boundary between Canada and the U.S., except in the San Juan archipelago. While both sides agreed that all of Vancouver Island would remain British, the treaty wording was left vague enough as to put the boundary between modern-day Gulf Islands and San Juan Islands in dispute. Conflicts over this border led to the Pig War in 1859. Skirmishes continued until the boundary issue was eventually placed in the hands of Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany for arbitration. The border was finally established in 1872.
The name "San Juan" was given to the San Juan Islands by the Spanish explorer Francisco de Eliza, who charted the islands in 1791, naming them Isla y Archiepelago de San Juan. The expedition sailed under the authority of the Viceroy of Mexico, Juan Vicente de Güemes Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, 2nd Count of Revillagigedo and Eliza named several places for him, including the San Juan Islands and Orcas Island (short for "Horcasitas"). San Juan Island itself was first discovered (by a European) by one of the officers under Eliza's command, Gonzalo López de Haro (for whom Haro Strait is named). The Spanish had found the islands a year earlier during the exploring voyage of Manuel Quimper on the Princesa Real, but it was not clear that they were islands.
Subsequent explorations of the region by the British, under George Vancouver, and the Americans, under Charles Wilkes, resulted in many of the Spanish names being replaced with English ones.
Vancouver's expedition occurred within a year of Eliza's, and Vancouver encountered other Spanish ships and traded information. Thus Vancouver knew of the names given by Eliza's expedition and tended to keep them, although he renamed some things, like the Strait of Georgia. Wilkes, sailing in 1841, had some British charts, but may not have been aware of the Spanish names and charts. He liberally gave new names to nearly every coastal feature not already named on the charts he had. The names Wilkes gave tended to be patriotically American (heroes of the War of 1812 for example), or to honor members of his crew.
In 1847, due to the confusion of multiple names on different charts, the British Admiralty reorganized the official charts of the region. The project, led by Henry Kellett, applied only to British territory, which at the time included the San Juan Islands but not Puget Sound. Kellett systematically kept the British and Spanish names and removed nearly all of Wilkes' names. In some cases Kellett moved Spanish names around to replace names given by Wilkes. Thus in Puget Sound itself, the names given by Wilkes are common and Spanish names rare, while the reverse is true for the San Juan and Gulf Islands (although the Spanish did not explore Puget Sound as thoroughly as the British and Americans, resulting in fewer Spanish names to start with).
Wilkes had given the name Navy Archipelago to the San Juan Islands, and named individual islands for distinguished officers of the US Navy, such as Rodgers Island for San Juan Island, and Hull Island for Orcas Island. Some of his names survived the editing of Kellett, such as Chauncey, Shaw, Decatur, Jones, Blakely, Perry, Sinclair, Lawrence, Gordon, and Percival, all named after American naval officers.[1]
Today, the San Juan Islands are an important tourist destination, with sea kayaking and orca whale-watching by boat or air tours, two of the primary attractions. Part of the charm that attracts tourists and residents to the San Juan Islands is that each island seems to have a character of its own, both in terms of geography and of the lifestyle of the people who live there.
Politically, the bulk of the San Juan Islands make up San Juan County, Washington, though some of the furthest east of the islands are in the mainland counties of Whatcom and Skagit, including Lummi, Guemes, and Cypress Islands.
The majority of the San Juan Islands are quite hilly, the tallest mountain being Mount Constitution at almost exactly a half-mile (800 m) elevation (see Orcas Island), with some flat areas and valleys, often quite fertile, in between. The coastlines are a mixed bag of sandy and rocky beaches, shallow and deep harbors, placid and reef-studded bays. Gnarled, ochre-colored madrona trees (Arbutus) grace much of the shorelines while evergreen fir and pine forests cover large inland areas.
The San Juan Islands get less rainfall than Seattle, about 65 miles (105 km) to the south, due to the rain shadow of Olympic Mountains to the southwest. Summertime high temperatures are around 70 °F (21 °C) while average wintertime lows are in the high thirties and low forties. Snow is infrequent in winter except for the higher elevations, but the islands are subject to high winds at times—those from the northeast sometimes bring brief periods of freezing and Arctic-like windchills.
Beginning in about 1900 the San Juan Islands became infested with European rabbits, an exotic invasive species, as the result of the release of domestic rabbits on Smith Island. Rabbits from the San Juan Islands were used later for several introductions of European rabbits into other, usually midwestern, states.
Three ferry systems serve some of the San Juan Islands.
Passenger-only ferries serve more islands. Passenger-only ferry service is usually seasonal and offered by private business.
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Coordinates: 48°34′N 122°56′W / 48.56°N 122.94°W
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 | Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| US History Encyclopedia. © 2006 through a partnership of Answers Corporation. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more |
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