Cartography, territory and empire mapping the Alaska boundary dispute, 1821-1903

Abstract

In the wake of the Klondike gold rush of 1898 a long-simmering dispute over the boundary between Alaska territory and British-America (Canada) rose to a boil. The disagreement between the United States and England was a combination of imperial arrogance, geographic ignorance, administrative neglect, and diplomatic brinksmanship. At every step the dispute was fueled by colonial cartography and served an eventual European/Euro-American hegemony over the indigenous Tlingit people. In this dissertation, a series of three papers will describe and analyze the precursors and resolution of the Alaska Boundary Dispute in part by employing novel methods of analysis of historical maps that the respective colonial powers used to establish their sovereign claims and then re-introduced as evidence in the 1903 tribunal. The research in this project examines the transformation and reordering of geographic knowledge through the employment of cartography of the Northwest Coast, but also reveals by deductive analysis of the same maps the underlying power struggle between colonial Europeans and Indigenous Americans. Colonial cartography contributed to a competition for imperial space on the Northwest Coast and the analysis of colonial mapping reveals a legacy of geography mediating history, maps creating territory, and the power of geographic knowledge.