Americans and Britishers of the Northwest the advance guard of European civilization. Mot only were the acres themselves desirable, but upon the just settlement of the dispute depended in some measure the spirit in which the citizens of the two neighbor nations were to dwell together.
Furthermore, it was viewed as one skirmish in the war between the settlers on the one hand and the giant monopoly, the Hudson's Bay Company, on the other. A fundamental antagonism is represented here that between the individualism of the settler whose ideal was that of personal independence, and the characteristic outreaching of an impersonal corporation with its host of servants. Behind this again lay the essential opposition between two economic ideas, an opposition that has been apparent throughout the history of the Pacific Northwest. For the settler the basis of material existence was cultivated land, but for the Company it was wild land; one primarily worked for grain and cattle, and the other traded for furs. The more land under cultivation the fewer fur-bearing animals.
While it is true that in the case of San Juan Island it was grazing land for the incidental business of stock raising that the Company was after, nevertheless the hostility between the aims of the grain-grower and the fur trader accounted for the long-standing bitterness felt by the farmers toward the Hudson's Bay Company, and to a large extent for the outburst of warlike temper over San Juan. The victory of the ranchers meant much more than actual possession of the land It meant that; it meant a victory for the flag; and it also meant a successful blow at the power interested in preventing the spread of the industry and culture of the white man, the power doing its utmost to postpone the inevitable day when the forest should be cleared to make habitations for civilized man, and when the redeemed soil should be turned to his uses. Of course, even in British North America, the demand for settlement could not be denied by the Company for long; but the difference in aims accounted for the hatred shown by settlers to the Company.
