Posey Island Marine State Park History

Posey Island Marine State Park is a small island featuring a popular campsite for kayakers that is easily accessible from the northwestern part of San Juan Island.

A Rocky Island

The San Juan Islands are distinct from most of Puget Sound in that they feature shorelines with exposures of hard bedrock, rather than the bluffs of clay, sand and gravel left by Ice Age glaciers that are predominant on most of Washington’s Salish Sea, the state’s inland saltwater passages.

The rocks that make up Posey Island are part of a group of rocks that may have begun forming around a mid-ocean rift in a tectonic plate. Basalt lava erupted at the rift and was slowly buried. Chert (a form of the mineral quartz) formed as tiny oceanic organisms died and sank into the depths, covering the volcanic basalt. Sediments eroded from nearby landmasses in turn covered the chert as the tectonic plate slowly moved over the Earth’s mantle, driven by heat currents within the planet. Geologists are still puzzling out the sequence of events that ultimately thrust these rocks over younger rocks as they collided with the North American continent millions of years ago.

The slosh of waves against the bedrock shores of Posey Island has built a small spit of sand on the southern edge of the island, pointing towards larger Pearl Island, less than 400 feet away.

Indigenous Land

Posey Island Marine State Park lies within the traditional territory of Coast Salish Indigenous people whose present-day descendants include members of the Lummi Nation, Samish Indian Nation, Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, and First Nations in Canada.

For thousands of years the lands and waters of the San Juan Archipelago have provided habitat for a diverse community of life that forms the basis of their cultures. As winter days lengthen into spring, herring and herring roe collect in the eelgrass beds near shore. A little later, spring Chinook salmon pass through the island channels. Early summer brings sockeye salmon, harvested for millennia with reef nets. Sea urchins are gathered by expert divers in late summer, and clamming peaks in the fall.

The Pig War

Dual claims to the Pacific Northwest region by the US and Britain were negotiated in 1846, setting the land boundary at 49° north latitude, but the status of the San Juan Archipelago, including Posey Island, remained disputed, as British and American authorities disagreed over the placement of the maritime border between Vancouver Island and the mainland.

On June 15, 1859, Lyman Cutlar, an American farmer claiming land on San Juan Island under terms of the Donation Land Claim Act, shot a pig owned by an employee of the British Hudson’s Bay Company. Cutlar’s offer of restitution was spurned and British authorities threatened to arrest Cutlar. American settlers asked for US military protection. Captain George Pickett (of later infamy for his role as a Confederate officer) and 66 soldiers of the 9th Infantry Regiment responded from Fort Bellingham, establishing a camp at the south end of the island. Additional US troops were transferred from Fort Townsend.

The British sent three ships under the command of Captain Geoffrey Hornby in response, building fortifications on the north end of the island with orders from James Douglas, the governor of the Vancouver Island colony, to remove the Americans from the island. Hornby refused the order, waiting for instructions from Rear Admiral Robert Baynes. Baynes countermanded the order, saying he would not escalate the conflict into war “over a squabble about a pig.”

US negotiators likewise desired to de-escalate the situation, as their focus shifted to the early stages of the US Civil War. Negotiations resulted in a joint occupancy agreement, with forces reduced to no more than 100 personnel, who enjoyed amicable social relations for the duration of the occupation.

In 1871, the Treaty of Washington between the US and Great Britain mandated the submission of the competing claims for adjudication by a commission appointed by German Kaiser Wilhelm I. On October 21, 1872, the commission decided in favor of the American claim. The British Royal Marines withdrew on November 25, 1872, and the American troops had all returned to Fort Townsend by July 1874.

Federal Control

Local tribes had ceded ownership of the area to the US federal government under duress in the Treaty of Point Elliot in 1855, in spite of the as-yet unsettled colonial administration of the San Juan Archipelago. After the jurisdiction was settled, the ceded lands became part of the federal public domain lands. The tribes reserved rights to harvest natural resources in their usual and accustomed places, including the lands and waters surrounding Posey Island.

Posey Island, at 1.1 acres, was never transferred out of the federal public domain into private ownership.

The island purportedly received its present name during maritime surveys. It was originally charted incorrectly as an appendage of nearby Pearl Island, which was named by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes on the US Exploring Expedition in 1841. Though he noted that the name was applied for the island’s “shape and position,” Pearl Island is not round, and it nearly blocks access to nearby Roche Harbor on San Juan Island.

During more detailed mapping by the US Coast Survey in the mid-1800s, surveyors delineated Posey Island as a separate landmass, purportedly applying the name based on information from local residents that they sometimes obtained bouquets of the plentiful wildflowers on the island.

Making a Park

In 1960, the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission (WSPRC) signed an agreement to lease Posey Island. A primitive campsite was developed by the WSPRC as a requirement of the lease. The rental rate of ten dollars per year that was established at that time was reduced to zero after passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act in 1976 provided for the leasing of public land to governmental entities for recreation purposes without charge.

On May 1, 1980, the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission (WSPRC) updated and renewed the lease of Posey Island for an additional 25 years.

Cascadia Marine Trail

In the mid-1950s, a veteran of the World WarII 10th Mountain Division, Tom Steinburn, joined with Washington mountaineer/geologist Wolf Bauer to begin exploring the reaches of Puget Sound by kayak. He noted that when traveling by kayak “your equipment carries you instead of you carrying your equipment.” He would go on to help found the Washington Water Trails Association and advocate for the 1993 establishment of the Cascadia Marine Trail, a 150-mile route on the waters of Washington’s Salish Sea honoring the water transportation utilized by the region’s Indigenous people for thousands of years. At the June 26, 1999 event recognizing the Cascadia Marine Trail as one of 17 National Millenium Trails, First Lady Hillary Clinton said that the trails “tell the story of our nation's past and will help to create a positive vision for our future.”

Posey Island State Park’s two primitive campsites are designated solely for use of human-powered boaters as part of the Cascadia Marine Trail, along with sites in about 30 other Washington State Parks.

San Juan Islands National Monument

In 2011, a group of leaders from San Juan County began advocating for the establishment of a protected area made up of the remaining federal public domain lands located in the San Juan Archipelago, including Posey Island. In response, US Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar directed the manager of the BLM Wenatchee Field Office, Karen Kelleher, to coordinate development of a proposal to designate the lands as a National Conservation Area. On November 10, 2011, Salazar forwarded a report to Congress outlining a proposal for the protected area.

Senator Maria Cantwell introduced legislation in the US Senate to accomplish the task, and a hearing was held on the legislation on March 22, 2012. However, opposition to the proposal was voiced by Representative Doc Hastings, who stated that “the country can’t afford any more public land,” and refused to advance the proposal.

On March 25, 2013, President Barack Obama issued Presidential Proclamation 8947, designating the San Juan Islands National Monument to protect the federal lands, including Posey Island and other BLM property leased by the WSPRC at Patos Island and Blind Island. In the proclamation, he noted that the monument would serve as a “refuge of scientific and historic treasures and a classroom for generations of Americans.”