MEMBER OF THE PHILADELPHIA BAR THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION, ETC. AUTHOR OF "THE BROOKE FAMILY OF WHITCHURCH, HAMPSHIRE, ENGLAND" READ AT THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE FRANKLIN INSTITUTE, JANUARY 15TH, 1902, FOR MARCH, 1902 PHILADELPHIA PRESS OF ALLEN, LANE AND SCOTT 1902 THE ALASKO-CANADIAN FRONTIER At the end of May, 1898, the United States and Great Britain agreed to appoint an Anglo-American Joint High Commission to consider and arrange upon a basis more favorable to both sides, such important problems as the regulations of the North Atlantic fisheries, commercial reciprocity, and the Behring Sea fishery question. Soon after, "For the first time a statement was presented by the British Government to the Government of the United States on the 1st of August, 1898, developing the fact that a difference of views existed respecting the provisions of the treaty of 1825" between the United States and the English Empire, concerning the meaning of the Alaska frontier, as defined in the Anglo-Russian treaty of 1825;1 and on August 23d the British Government claimed that the eastern 1 The Alaskan Boundary, by the Hon. John W. Foster: The National Geographic Magazine, November, 1899: Washington, page 453. Mr. Foster, the able author of this article, was Secretary of State, 1892-93, in the Harrison Adminstration, and has been from the beginning one of the United States members of the Joint High Commission. 2 See map No. 1. In collecting maps on the subject of the Alaskan frontier, I have received kind aid from Mr. P. Lee Phillips, chief of the Map Division of the Library of Congress, and Mr. Tittman and Mr. Andrew Braid, of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey Office, boundary of Alaska should run from the extremity of Prince of Wales Island at fifty-four degrees forty minutes, along the estuary marked on recent maps as Pearse Canal, up to the top of the Portland Canal, from there straight to the coast, and then along the mountains on the mainland nearest to the shore and across all the sinuosities of the sea that advance into the continent up to Mount Saint Elias.3 By the treaty negotiated at Saint Petersburg and signed there on February 16/28, 1825, the Muscovite and the British Empires agreed in Articles III. and IV. of that treaty upon the following divisional line between their respective North American possessions. ARTICLE III. "The line of demarcation between the possessions of the High Contracting Parties upon the coast of the continent and the islands of America to the northwest, shall be drawn in the manner following: "Commencing from the southernmost point of the island called Prince of Wales Island, which point lies in the parallel of fifty-four degrees forty minutes north latitude, and between the one 3 The Alaskan Boundary, by the Hon. John W. Foster: The National Geographic Magazine, November, 1899: Washington, page 455. 4 Fur Seal Arbitration: Washington, Government Printing Office, 1895; Volume IV., pages 42-43. |