Abstract
The Northern Review 44 (2017): 293–326 In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries the United States became a significant imperial power with which an overstretched British Empire did not want conflict. The planting of numerous American flags in the Canadian Yukon, and especially in Dawson City, symbolized this dynamic, which was accompanied by some tension and apprehension on the part of British-Canadian authorities. At the same time, hints at a future friendly alliance between the United States and Britain can be seen in the mingling, in the Yukon Territory, of Yankees, Britons, and Canadians who all shared (among other things) a common literary heritage. Among these hints was an implausible but sincere proposal on the part of a US Congressman for the United States to cede the Alaska Panhandle to Canada. This article is part of a special collection of papers originally presented at a conference on “The North and the First World War,” held May 2016 in Whitehorse, Yukon. https://doi.org/10.22584/nr44.2017.013
Highlights
In the late-nineteenth and early-twenƟeth centuries the United States became a significant imperial power with which an overstretched BriƟsh Empire did not want conflict
The change had been sparked by the arrival of “a small steam tug” carrying merchants from San Francisco and, more importantly, an American army officer ordered to “claim this fort for the American Government in case it appears to be in American Territory.”[1]
Bompas faintly hoped that Fort Yukon (Gwichyaa Zheh), just above the Arctic Circle, was not situated on what had been Russian territory before the United States purchased Alaska in 1867, but by letter’s end he was more candid, supposing that there was “little doubt that this fort is over the American boundary and the Hudson’s Bay Company will ... have to give up the fort to the Yankees.”
Summary
“I believe I must send you a line ... to tell you the changes that are coming over us here.” William Bompas, Anglican priest and future bishop, was writing in August 1869. Grant “praying for the annexation of British Columbia to the United States.”[7] Bompas’s assumption that American designs in the Far Northwest extended well beyond merely securing Alaska was echoed in ideas widely, if not officially expressed. An interesting end point is a littleremembered scheme to cede the Alaskan panhandle to Canada Both episodes—Bompas witnessing the raising of the US flag at Fort Yukon and, nearly fifty years later, Canadians hoping for a generous real estate transfer from the United States that would give the Yukon Territory a direct link to the Pacific—illustrate the power of the United States relative to Canada and, in hemispheric terms, Britain. For all the human diversity in the Far Northwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the dominant public cultures were British and American. As for what settlers, miners, and visitors of European origin living in the Yukon Territory called themselves, the terms British, English, and Canadian were frequently interchangeable
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