Alaska Boundary Dispute

Alaska Boundary Dispute, early 20th-century controversy over the location of a portion of the boundary between Alaska and Canada. According to a vaguely worded 1825 treaty between Britain and Russia (the controlling colonial powers), the frontier north of latitude 54°40’ north was to follow a range of mountains 16.1 km (10 mi) inland from and parallel to the Pacific coast. In many places, no such mountains existed, but the ambiguous wording caused no problem until the late 1890s, when the discovery of gold in the Klondike region east of Alaska gave Canada an interest in access to the Pacific coast adjacent to the goldfields. The Canadians argued that in many cases the mountains mentioned by the treaty were actually on offshore islands and that in those places the western border of Canada was the Pacific Ocean. The United States, which had purchased Alaska from the Russians in 1867, maintained that the whole coastline was U.S. territory. In 1903 the United States and Britain referred the question to a commission of six members, three appointed by each power. The commission, which met in London, included three Americans, Secretary of War Elihu Root and Senators Henry Cabot Lodge and George Turner; two Canadians, Sir Louis Jetté and Allen B. Aylesworth; and England's chief justice, Lord Richard E. Webster Alverstone. Alverstone sided with the Americans, forming a majority in favor of the U.S.