Harney Re-Examined, Part III: William Harney and the Pig War

Third in San Juan Island National Historical Park's series on General William Harney. Parts I and II followed his career to 1855, when he destroyed Ash Hollow, a village of Brulé and Oglala people in present-day Nebraska who had tried to surrender. This part follows his dealings with Native Americans afterwards, and how he nearly started a war between the United States and Britain.

General Harney around the time of the Pig War.

After Ash Hollow

Harney's men looted the village of anything portable and burned the homes and belongings that remained; Harney ordered the dead left unburied, for the wolves. He then marched his soldiers across the Midwest, mapping land for future settlers, hunting for treasure and fossils, and intimidating the Native Americans who lived there.

Survivors of Ash Hollow and other Native Americans came to him to make peace. He would not negotiate then, and called them instead to a great treaty council the next spring. Told that his winter quarters at Fort Pierre lacked supplies, he pressed on with his 2,000-mile march through Sioux country anyway: if he did not intimidate the tribes, he wrote, he would "lose much of my prestige....the results would more than compensate for any loss of animals and the temporary exposure of my men." That winter his own men died of illnesses from malnutrition and lost limbs to frostbite. Many were also haunted by the killing of women and children at Ash Hollow, which they talked about all winter. They sang: "We will never forgive old Harney for bringing us to Fort Pierre."

The council at Fort Pierre

On March 1, 1856, Sioux leaders gathered at Fort Pierre. Harney opened with a threat: if they accepted his terms, "they will find me the best friend they ever had; but if they don't do it, they will find me the worst enemy they ever had."

On the second day he staged a show of the "great power of the white man," including the power to "kill and bring to life again." His surgeon put a dog under with chloroform and displayed it as dead. When the surgeon could not revive it, the assembled leaders laughed at him. After treaties were signed guaranteeing settlers bound for the far West free passage through Indigenous lands, Harney sent messengers to the Pawnee, Cheyenne and Arapaho threatening to "sweep them from the face of the Earth" unless they signed similar treaties.

Florida, Kansas, Utah

His superiors now sent him wherever they thought his reputation would help.

• Florida, 1856 and 1857. His troops combed the Everglades for any sign of people and systematically destroyed Seminole homes.
• Kansas, spring 1857. Fighting between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces had brought bloodshed and destruction; Harney's forces kept order, and Kansans voted on a state constitution without serious disruption.
• Utah, summer 1857. He was ordered to lead a column to Utah Territory to intimidate Brigham Young and the Mormon leadership, whose polygamy and communal life had scandalized the government. At a party in Kansas he boasted he would "hang Brigham [Young] first and try him afterward." Meanwhile the United States was destroying Cheyenne homes and possessions, and in retaliation part of Harney's supply train, sent ahead to Utah, was destroyed. Harney blamed the officers of that campaign: had the Cheyenne "fear[ed] for their family" — that is, had women and children been killed as at Ash Hollow — the train would have been left alone. The unrest got him sent back to the Midwest to intimidate Native Americans there instead.

The Pacific Northwest

In 1858 Harney went to the Pacific Northwest with orders to "thoroughly chastise" its Native Americans, explicitly to harass civilians, destroy their livestock and "not make any overtures of friendship" until the tribes had been punished for resisting settlers. Peace had already been made by the time he arrived. Instead of fighting, he had some Yakama prisoners from the war hanged without trial, and pushed white settlement east of the Cascades into land that had been reserved for Indigenous people.

The Pig War

On July 16, 1859, Harney ordered American troops to occupy San Juan Island, which both American and British settlers legitimately claimed. The trigger was a pig: the American settler Lyman Cutlar had killed one belonging to Britain's Hudson's Bay Company, whose agents and British officials — often the same people — had been trying to intimidate him because his farm got in the way of their long-established sheep operation.

Britain answered in kind. All summer, American soldiers on the island and British forces offshore faced each other without firing a shot. Harney, who called San Juan Island "the most commanding position we possess on the sound," probably acted for strategic reasons; he also believed in America's manifest destiny, which to him meant that "the knell of power was sounded in Europe when the first pilgrim vessel sought a harbor on the western shores of the Atlantic."

Harney did nothing to calm the crisis he had created. It took Winfield Scott, the Army's highest-ranking general, sent by President James Buchanan — who strongly disapproved of Harney — to travel from New York to the Pacific Northwest. Scott rebuked Harney, reassigned him to St. Louis, and negotiated a peaceful joint occupation of San Juan Island that lasted until 1872.

Sources

• National Park Service, San Juan Island National Historical Park, "Harney Re-Examined Part III: Harney and the Pig War," in the series Harney Re-Examined: A New Look at a Forgotten Figure. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/harney-re-examined-part-iii-harney-and-the-pig-war.htm
• Part II: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/harney-re-examined-part-ii-harney-s-treatment-of-native-americans.htm · Part IV: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/harney-re-examined-part-iv-harney-and-the-hanging-of-the-san-patricio-brigade.htm
• Corrected: the page spells the Oglala "Oglalla" and President Buchanan "Buchannan."