Remaking the Alaska-Yukon Borderlands: The North-West Mounted Police, the United States Army, and the Klondike Gold Rush ...

Public and academic historians of the Klondike gold rush have long positioned the Alaska-Yukon border as an established fact, serving as a firm dividing line between perceived American lawlessness and Canadian order as thousands of miners rushed to the Yukon and Alaska from 1896-1899. A wider, regio...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Dumonceaux, Scott Drew Cassie
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: Arts 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.11575/prism/37715
https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/111867
Description
Summary:Public and academic historians of the Klondike gold rush have long positioned the Alaska-Yukon border as an established fact, serving as a firm dividing line between perceived American lawlessness and Canadian order as thousands of miners rushed to the Yukon and Alaska from 1896-1899. A wider, regional analysis of the Alaska-Yukon borderlands, however, reveals that at the beginning of the gold rush, the border was little more than a line-on-a-map. When the North-West Mounted Police and the United States Army first arrived in the region in 1894 and 1897, the Alaska-Yukon borderlands was largely a borderless region, with miners, merchants, and transportation companies crossing the unmarked Alaska-Yukon border without interference. As thousands of miners began rushing to the region during the fall of 1897, the efforts of the Mounted Police and the U.S. Army to control the situation transformed the Alaska-Yukon borderlands from a borderless to a bordered region. This process of remaking the Alaska-Yukon ...