I recently had a great week at Friday Harbour on beautiful San Juan Island and visited both the well preserved American "fort" and the British "fort".
The storyboards on site are very informative giving some slight idea of the isolated boredom both camps must have suffered.
The dispute arose when the previously ill defined border was being formalised. The obvious thing was for it to just go straight west as an extension of the land border. Unfortunately the winding deep water channels serving the two great ports of Seattle and Vancouver would have been cut by a straight line forcing ships to enter each other's territorial waters.
Both sides wanted a free run for their ships so claimed San Juan Island and its adjacent channel where the main bottleneck occurred. After a ridiculous stand-off (including the infamous pig-shooting but fortunately no man-shooting) the two governments went, in an amazingly late twentieth century political action, to a third country for arbitration.
The Kaiser with typical German practical thinking said in so many words "Forget the politics, get real and put the border along the path best suited to a sensible compromise" As a result there is one of the most twisting borders one can find on a map. The USA did end up with San Juan Island but the Canadians can still get to Vancouver without entering US territory.
If only we had more Kaisers in today's world to knock a few heads together!
Lang
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