By David Whitmyer, Jerome Schwartz, Nick Stephens

Smuggling was a large operation in the San Juan Islands because of their convenient location so close to the border with Canada. They provided a prime location to buy goods and then run them across the border to be sold at high prices. Sucia Island was one of the places used to hide goods being smuggled for short periods of time. Caves on the island were used as drop off points and we have chosen them for the background to our presentation.

Our objective is to teach the other students about smuggling by taking on the different personas of two smugglers who did their work in the San Juans. We will also be involving the audience by telling our story like we was pirates in a bar, mateys! Arrrrrgh! We will be asking for a few volunteers to role play the parts of Chinese immigrants. Arrrrrrrgh!

-Larry "Smuggle" Kelly-

Larry Kelly was born in 1839. As a young man, he fought in the Civil war for the confederates and when the war was over took to the seas to avoid being ruled by the Union. His first acts of smuggling were simple runs across the border with silks. Once he realized how lucrative the business was, he began to put more effort into his endeavors. Kelly's mode of transport was a bright red fishing boat. Although it was painfully obvious even at night, Kelly managed to avoid capture much of the time simply by outrunning his pursuers. To aid in this, he greased his boat with pot black and tallow, which increased the ease with which his boat could move through the water. The revenue boats, which the law used to give chase to smugglers, were old and slow, no match for almost anything that floated. One of the tricks that Kelly employed was to sneak his boat along the shoals of the Swinomish Slough. It was hard for the revenue boats to maneuver here and provided easy escape. The smuggling business provided Kelly with enough money to purchase a third of Sinclair Island on which he built his home. After the revenue boats started catching onto his tactics, Kelly began dragging the smuggled goods underwater behind his boat where they couldn't be seen by other boats. One of the stories that gained some fame was when Kelly was making a smuggling run with a shipload of Chinamen. Smuggling the Chinese provided a lot of cash and they ended up getting cheated a lot of the time. In this particular instance, the law was pursuing Kelly's boat and he was forced to drop the Chinamen off on a large rock where he was supposed to pick them up later. He never came back and the men almost starved to death before someone else found them. The rock was later given the name Chinaman Rock as a reminder of the incident.

Pre-Prohibition Smuggling

Smuggling in the San Juans consisted of bringing goods down from Canada, without having to go through customs. The profession never really took off until a large influx of Chinese immigrants in the late 1800's opened up a huge market for opium smuggling. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act prevented any more Chinese immigrants from entering the country. The San Juan smugglers suddenly found that they could get $100 a passenger to get the Chinese to this side of the border.

The law could do little to stop them until the arrival of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who was appointed a Customs collector in 1885 by Grover Cleveland. His knowledge of the smuggling ways and routes led to over $150,000 worth of seized opium in one year. Smuggling recessed for a period, but Beecher lost his position as a result of political pressure from steamboat companies which he targeted for their sideline smuggling.

-Prohibition-

Once the 18^th amendment was enacted, smuggling liquor and other alcohol across the boarder began really bringing in the cash. For example, the price of a bottle of liquor was usually around 50 cents on the northern side of the border. By the time it ended up being sold on our side of the border, the price had jumped to around 12 dollars. This was the smuggling that really brought out the creativity. When the revenue boats finally were upgraded and began catching up to the smugglers, they became stealthier and smarter. Besides buying faster boats and installing armor plating on them, the smugglers also came up with better places to make deals and hide their loot. Sydney island, which used to be a leper colony, was one such place. As you can imagine, not many people were willing to go around it.

Henry "The Flying Dutchman" Ferguson

Ferguson was the meanest biology teacher.... err... pirate in the San Juans. Originally a member of Butch Cassidy's gang, he moved to the northwest when things got too hot over in Wyoming. He operated by stealing boats and then reworking and repainting them in one night so they couldn't be recognized. He smuggled opium, Chinamen, robbed warehouses etc... He would also attack and steal cargo from freighters. Hideouts included a cabin somewhere in the San Juans, and another on Skagit island. The Flying Dutchman was captured and arrested for a warehouse robbery but released after only a few years. He immediately resumed his methods. This time he even took an entire safe out of a Langley post office, and for this a warrant was issued demanding his arrest. He ended up killing a Canadian Police Officer during his capture and was sentenced to be hanged.

Jim "Pig-Iron" Kelly

Jim Kelly, who was no relation at all to the infamous "Smuggle" Kelly, arrived in the San Juans in the late 1880's. He quickly aquired his nickname by stealing pig-iron from a Port Townsend steel mill. His home was truly under his hat, for his meals and shelter ' were provided by his "friends" and in return, he would provide them with fine Canadian booze. He spoke openly of his smuggling affairs, for, as the locals would say, "The trick was to catch him." Kelly lived on a the small island of Sinclair in a homestead known as Cottonwood.

Wool Smuggling

Wool was often smuggled in the San Juans, due to the large number of sheep farmers in Canada. One smuggler, Alfred Burke, used a shoddy rowboat to collect wool in between Vancouver and U.S. islands. He would travel at night and in fog, undetected. However, two men -- Dean and Roy Ballinger -- caught on to the wool smuggling (This is because a U.S. census compared the number of Washington sheep and the wool output and found the output to be twice that possible by the number of sheep) and decided to put a damper on the business. So. they visited a Canadian wool farm and, while the farmer was not looking, hid wooden skewers in the bales of wool, then later that year, confiscated over a ton of skewered wool in the United States that had not passed through customs.

During the Pig War, prohibition and even before. the San Juan Islands proved to be the perfect area for smugglers to navigate through, with their irregular coastlines and caves for hiding places. And if there was something to be smuggled, the meanest, toughest hombres would be found fleeing from the law and dumping their cargo in the drink.