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George Edward Pickett (1825-1875) was a career United States Army officer who became a major general in the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. He is best remembered for leading Pickett's Charge, the futile and bloody Confederate offensive on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg. In February, 1864, Pickett had 22 Union prisoners of war hanged on questionable charges of desertion; because of this, Pickett lived in Canada with his family out of fear of prosecution from 1855-1856. He returned to Virginia when the investigation into that matter was halted. Post-military, Pickett worked as a farmer and sold insurance. He died in Norfolk, Virginia of a liver abscess on July 30, 1875.

Pickett served in the Washington Territory and in 1856 commanded the construction of a fort in Bellingham, Washington. While in Washington, Pickett married his second wife, a woman from one of the Northern Indigenous peoples (she is said to have been Haida, but this has not been verified). Her name may have been Sâkis Tiigang, meaning "mist lying down" or "Morning Mist" in the Haida language, although this may be a romanticized invention and/or a mistranslation. She probably died within a year of the birth of their son, James Tilton Pickett, from complications related to the birth.

At the American Camp on San Juan Island, Pickett commanded a small complement of troops during an incident known as the "Pig War" in 1859, in which a border dispute between American and British settlers nearly escalated to military conflict after the killing of a pig in a potato field; in the end the affair was resolved without additional bloodshed. The border issue was ultimately put to arbitration by the German Emperor, whose commission decided in favor of the Americans in 1872.

James Tilton Pickett (1857-1889), George Pickett's eldest child, was born in the Bellingham "Pickett House" on December 31, 1857. James appears to have lived part of the time with his father and part with his maternal grandmother for the first few years of his life. When George Pickett returned to Virginia in 1861 to join the Confederate Army, he decided not to take his son with him because a child of mixed race would not be accepted in Virginia society. Accordingly, he arranged for "Jimmie" to be cared for by Catherine and William Collins, a local childless couple, under the supervision of the boy's godfather, Major James Tilton. George Pickett never saw his eldest son again but left with him several mementoes and proof that he was indeed James's father. As a child, James exhibited considerable artistic talent; as a young man, he attended the Union Academy in Olympia, Washington Territory, and the San Francisco Institute of Design in California. James corresponded with, but never met, his father's third wife LaSalle Corbell Pickett. On one occasion, James met with his younger half-brother George Pickett Jr. in California, but this meeting seems to have gone poorly and James was subsequently estranged from the Virginia Picketts. James became an accomplished artist: he worked as an artist and reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Portland Oregonian. He died of illness in Portland, Oregon at 32 years old. James T. Pickett is buried at Riverview Cemetery in Portland, Oregon.

LaSalle Corbell Pickett (1843-1931), born Sallie Ann Corbell, was George Pickett's third wife. She was a biographer of her husband and gained minor fame as a lecturer and writer. Her subjects, in addition to military history, included recollections of "her childhood [...] on a Virginia plantation" in the antebellum South, with stories and "character sketches" in dialect, claiming to accurately represent the "rapidly disappearing" language and culture of Black slaves (promotional brochure; item 7a-b). For many years LaSalle Pickett promoted an idealized version of her husband's character and accomplishments; many of her claims about General Pickett’s career have since been proven to be fabrications. LaSalle and James Pickett corresponded cordially during James's lifetime, but in later years, to avoid damaging her husband's reputation in the eyes of white society, Mrs. Pickett attempted to conceal General Pickett's true relationship to James and the existence of his second wife—in a 1908 book, she claimed that James had been a "gift" to her husband from an "Indian chief." LaSalle and George Pickett had two children, George Jr. and Corbell; Corbell Pickett died in 1874 at the age of eight.

Sources:

• Boltz, Martha. "The General's Second Family: The One that History Forgot." The Pickett Society, 17 February 2001, www.pickettsociety.com/jimmie.html
• Cutrer, Thomas W. "Military Executions during the Civil War." Encyclopedia Virginia, 27 October 2015, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/military_executions_during_the_civil_war
• Dougherty, Phil. "The Pickett House (Bellingham)." History Link, 27 June 2018, www.historylink.org/File/20594
• "George Pickett." Wikipedia, accessed 18 February 2020, e
• Gordon, Lesley. "LaSalle Corbell Pickett (1843–1931)." Encyclopedia Virginia, 27 October 2015, www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Pickett_LaSalle_Corbell_1843-1931
• Gorin, Arielle, and Faragher, John. Cascadian Crossings: The Battle for the Pacific Northwest Borderlands after the Oregon Treaty. Diss. Yale University, 2016. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. 11 February 2020.