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

• Main Author: Letzring, Michael
• Other Authors: Ehrlander, Mary, Boylan, Brandon, Falk, Marvin, Maio, Christopher
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Boundaries; Maps; Alaska; Canada; Cartography; Alaska Boundary Tribunal; History; Doctor of Philosophy in Historical Geography: Interdisciplinary Studies; Boil The; Fairbanks; Arctic; tlingit
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11122/13086

Dissertation (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2022 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. General introduction -- Forward -- Background -- Foundational literature -- Research questions -- Methods -- Structure. Chapter 1: An extravagant pretention, colonial cartography, geographic knowledge, and the Russian Ukase of 1821 -- I. Introduction, colonial claims and positions -- II. The Ukase of 1821 -- III. Diplomacy -- IV. The maps -- V. Middleton's memoir -- VI. The "provisional line" -- VII. Bibliography. Chapter 2: The earliest United States map of the Alaska Territory, sources, boundaries, and the wiles of William H. Seward -- I. Introduction -- II. The maps of 1867 -- III. Methods -- IV. Findings -- V. ...