General's comments from 1859 offer snapshot of NW

Anyone can use NARA's microfilm and public-access computer facilities. So I decided to test them out by seeing what kind of firsthand account I could find of an officer involved in the Pig War, the 1859 dispute that almost brought the U.S. and Great Britain to war over the water boundary between Vancouver Island and the San Juan archipelago, due to the murkiness of the Oregon Treaty of 1846.

I hit pay dirt with a long missive from Gen. William S. Harney to Gen. Winfield Scott in Washington, D.C., recounting his voyages around Puget Sound in July 1859.

In it, Harney comments on "the immense and impenetrable forests" that line Puget Sound, making it the only "channel of communication from point to point." He also shares discoveries about the local climate and its agricultural possibilities.

"At Victoria, on Vancouver's Island," he says, "I observed a fig tree in the open air with the fruit half grown upon it; as I believe Norfolk, Virginia is the highest latitude on the Atlantic coast where the fig grows in the open air, this fact affords a good comparison of the climates of the two coasts in these respective latitudes."

There are snapshots of Victoria as a city in the making: "Great labor is being expended in the building of Victoria much of which is done by the Northern Indians who go in there to work with the Hudson Bay Company and are hired by the day for a small pittance."

Geopolitics get Harney's attention, too, as he notes that British Columbia is mostly populated by "Americans and foreigners." This, he explains, is because "the English cannot colonize successfully so near our peoples." He foresees a day when the British authorities will be induced to "yield, eventually, Vancouver's Island to our Government. It is as important to the Pacific States as Cuba is to those on the Atlantic."

Here is history in flux, lived in the moment, with its ultimate outcome unknown — fascinating stuff.

— Michael Upchurch