The Alaska Boundary Dispute was a territorial dispute between the United States and Canada (then a British Dominion with its foreign affairs controlled from London), and at a subnational level between District of Alaska on the U.S. side and British Columbia on the Canadian side. It was resolved by arbitration in 1903. The dispute had been going on between the Russian and British Empires since 1821, and was inherited by the United States as a consequence of the Alaska Purchase in 1867.[1]
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In 1825 Russia and Britain signed a treaty to define the borders of their respective colonial possessions, the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1825. Part of the wording of the treaty was that:
The rather vague phrase "the mountains parallel to the coast" was further qualified thus:
This part of the treaty language was really an agreement on general principles for establishing a boundary in the area in the future, rather than any exact demarcated line.
The United States bought Alaska in 1867, and in 1871 British
Columbia (which was formed in 1858 from the remaining part of
the Hudson's Bay Company's Columbia District following the
Oregon Treaty plus the New Caledonia District and the
Stikine
Territory) united with the new Canadian confederation. The Dominion of Canada then requested a survey, but it was refused by the United
States as too costly: the border area was very remote and
sparsely-settled, and without economic or strategic interest at the
time. In 1898 the national governments agreed on a compromise, but
the government of British Columbia rejected it. U.S. President
McKinley proposed a permanent lease of a port near Haines, but
Canada rejected that compromise.
Around that time, the Klondike Gold Rush enormously increased the population of the general area, which reached 30,000, composed largely of Americans. Between the 1880s and 1890s, an estimated 100,000 fortune seekers moved to the Klondike region in search of gold.[2]
Even though only a fraction of these miners actually discovered gold, the sudden influx of people greatly increased the importance of the region and the desirability of fixing an exact boundary. There are claims that Canadian citizens were harassed by the U.S. as a deterrent to making any land claims.[3] Finally, in 1903, the Hay-Herbert Treaty entrusted the decision to an arbitration by a mixed tribunal of six members: three Americans, two Canadians, and one British. Like the 1872 arbitration of the Pig War which determined the British -American Boundary in the San Juan Islands this dispute settlement mechanism would prove to work in the U.S.A.'s favor.
The main legal points at issue were which definition of the coastal range should be chosen as the basis of the boundary and whether the "ten marine leagues", 30 nautical miles (35 mi; 56 km), should be measured from the heads of the fjords or from a baseline which would cut across the mouths of the fjords.
After several tie votes and with the Christmas season approaching, the British arbitration board member Lord Alverstone sided with the United States position on these basic issues, although the final agreed demarcation line fell significantly short of the maximal U.S. claim (it was a compromise falling roughly between the maximal U.S. and maximal British/Canadian claim). The Panhandle (the Tatshenshini-Alsek region) was not quite exclaved from the rest of British Columbia.
Because the Canadian delegates had disagreed with Lord Alverstone's vote, in protest the Canadian judges refused to sign the award, issued 20 October 1903, and violent anti-British feeling erupted in Canada. The result was a surge in Canadian nationalism separate from an Imperial identity. [4] Canadian anger gradually subsided, although suspicions of the U.S. provoked by the award may have contributed to Canada's rejection of free trade in the 1911 "reciprocity election".
Irritated at the decision, Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier asserted that Canada's lack of treaty-making power made it difficult to maintain its rights internationally, but he took no immediate action and the situation remained essentially unchanged until Canada became a separate signatory at the Treaty of Versailles and still later when the government of William Lyon Mackenzie King took independent charge of foreign policy beginning in 1921.
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