SAN JUAN ISLAND ACTOR

Being General George E. Pickett: Vouri Retires Role

Story by Ingrid Gabriel
Photos by Brian Smale

"Being dead gives you a remarkable perspective on life."

– quoting playwright and actor Mike Vouri in "The Life and Times of General George Pickett"

posted 05/21/2009
There is a saying that some people are born to greatness, some people achieve greatness and some people are dragged there against their will. We could add that history is full of characters who were just getting by, standing on the sidelines, when the times in which they lived propelled them into positions of authority and leadership beyond anything to which they had aspired. Such a character was General George E. Pickett.

Born into a wealthy Virginia family in 1825, Pickett had a pedigree, privilege and not an excess of ambition. But a genteel downward economic slide of the family fortunes forced him to leave the plantation and enter West Point Military Academy. Graduating nearly at the bottom of his class did not mark him as a young man destined for a noteworthy military career. Pickett, nevertheless, fought in the Mexican War and is famously remembered for leading the catastrophic Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. Even more compelling to us, he holds a unique place in the history of the San Juan Islands as well as the Washington Territories.

Before 1872, the water boundary that separated the United States and Great Britain had not yet been established. It was agreed that the border of the mainland ran along the 49nth parallel and that Vancouver Island belonged to the British. However, the territorial ownership of the Islands was still in dispute and there was friction between the early British and American inhabitants of San Juan Island. Hostilities were exacerbated when a boar of British nationality was repeatedly set loose to uproot the potatoes in an American settler's garden. Lyman Cutlar, the gardener, finally lost patience and shot the pig dead. While the pig was the only casualty in the incident that became known as the "Pig War", Americans appealed to the nearest U.S. Army outpost for intercession.

At that time, Captain Pickett was in command of Fort Bellingham and became the first officer at the scene. He arrived on San Juan Island and set up Camp Pickett – a temporary military encampment – at Griffin Bay. When Captain Geoffrey Hornby was sent with Royal Marines by Governor Sir James Douglas of Vancouver Island to confront Pickett over the territorial ownership of the San Juans, Pickett did not distinguish himself as a skilled negotiator.

Nevertheless, high-ranking officers arrived, including General Winfield Scott, and in March of 1860, a joint agreement of occupation was signed. Pickett commanded the camp, briefly, in July and August of 1859 and again in April 1860 through July of 1861. Soon after, he resigned his commission in the U.S. Army and by September he was home in Virginia to join the Confederate forces.

While most historical accounts are filled with dates and treaties and campaigns, written history is often remarkably silent on the subjects of common life. Only the most dedicated of historians study personal letters, diaries and other accounts to build a more nuanced portrait of the lives of historical figures. The rest of us are left with the coach who taught a couple of interminable American History classes when football season was over, or the small placards at roadside monuments and interpretive centers that dot the nation. Rarely are we brought fully into the times that are not our own, especially those that preceded film and photography.

It would have been inconceivable to Pickett that 124 years after his death in 1875, another man would stand on the same ground where he himself stood and bring his story back to life in all of its complexity, accomplishment, loss and regret. Pickett was both witness and participant to many of the most extraordinary events of his day. Reconstructing his experience through his own words and those of his contemporaries provides an important link to the past, but most of us would not seek out Pickett's story on our own.

Fortunately, we have had Mike Vouri, chief interpreter and historian at San Juan Island National Historical Park, to act as our storyteller. Since 1998, Vouri has been bringing Pickett to audiences in the Islands and the Pacific Northwest through “The Life and Times of General George Pickett”, a play he both wrote and in which he is the single actor (with musical accompaniment by Michael Cohen).

Vouri became first acquainted with Pickett's history when he was public affairs officer and a curator at the Whatcom Museum of History and Art in Bellingham, Washington and curated the exhibit, "George Pickett and the Frontier Army Experience." When he moved to San Juan Island, he began to informally portray Pickett in an improvisational style, relying on primary sources, biographies of contemporaries and letters to provide the details of Pickett's more "off-the-record" private life and give color to the culture of the mid-1800s.

Vouri had theatre training in college, and with the encouragement and creative input of local mentors Andrew V. McLaglen, Dan Mayes and Helen Machin-Smith, Chris DeStaffany and Michael Cohen, he began to write and rehearse the play that he has now performed over one hundred times. Vourie will be retiring after three additional summer performances in May and July and the village is about to lose one of its best storytellers.

"The Life and Times..." opens with the shade of General Pickett, newly deceased, in Confederate grey taking his after-life leisure with a cigar and a banjo strumming Dixie melodies in the background. Although Pickett is remembered in most American history books as a military commander, Vouri gives him a rich back story that reveals a man as flawed and gifted as any other – a common man in uncommon circumstances.

Through Vouri, we begin the arc of Pickett's earthly drama with his Huguenot forebear's escape from France to the New World and his privileged southern childhood. We end an hour and forty-five minutes later, with Pickett's final career as an insurance salesman in Richmond before his death in 1875 at only fifty years of age. Along the way, we open the curtain on a past that is not whitewashed to appear noble or high-minded. The audience travels along with Pickett on his life adventure that includes everything from poor academic marks, brothel visits, firearms, military campaigns, hangings, humor (the General did not invent the picket fence), love, marriage, death of a wife in childbirth and the heartbreaking casualties of war. We learn that mercury was the common “day after” treatment for syphilis; we watch Vouri demonstrate how the primary army weapon of the day, an 1841-pattern Harper's Ferry rifled musket, is loaded and fired.

When Pickett recounts accepting the jumbled remains of his fallen Virginian soldiers brought home in cracker boxes from the battlefield at Gettysburg, Vouri sheds real tears – reminding us that in all times and in all wars, the dead are men and women, sons and daughters, beloved by their families and their communities.

There is still time to see "The Life and Times..." and watch Vouri make a part of Island history come alive. Two performances are being held at the San Juan Community Theater: one is this Saturday, May 23 and another on July 10. The final performance will be on July 17 at Clark Community College in Vancouver, Washington. Contact the theater for tickets and times.

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