This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I'll dig them up in terms of dates and treaty names, but there's two that created the meridian boundary northwards from Mount St Elias which is the basis of the British claim to the Yukon and Stikine/Stickeen; the first was the Spanish-Russian treaty demarcating Mount St. Elias as the boundary of their respective exclusivities in the region, the other was the subsequent Russian-British deal on the same lines, with the exception that the demarcation applied only to inland reaches, not coastal areas; in which lay the seeds of the Alaska Boundary Dispute when that boundary east of Mount St. Elias had to be worked out. There might be a map of Stickeen Territory around; another part of this - now that I now it had a formal designation, which I didn't know before (other than as the NWC/HBC Athabasca and MacKenzie fur districts) - it's worth noting that another chunk of it wound up being added to BC when that province's boundary was placed at the 60th Parallel: the Peace River Block. The original boundaries of the Colony of British Columbia I guess I'll have to dig up and map, i.e. what the colony was pre-Stickeen, pre-Peace, and in terms of then-contemporary perceptions that Forts Stikine and Taku and the locations of Haines and Skagway were part of the province (oh, and those silly islans east of Victoria that were so much fuss, too, but that's another topic-area). Skookum1 02:00, 14 March 2007 (UTC)
Hmm. Well, as far as I know the HBC did not have title to the North-West Territory, which was the whole point of it not being in Rupert's Land to start with; and also I'm unsure how more than marginal HBC activites were in the Yukon basin at that time; as in the notes above, the British claims to the area related to coastal-empire-related treaties and ensuant claims; but which left blank slates in the form of what became BC and also what became designated as t he North-West Territory. I'll have to read the text overleaf again to see if I've missed something, but was the North-West Territory placed in charge of the HBC, i.e. was this an HBC designation, or British imperial one; and I think care should be taken to distinguish the meaning of "Territory" in this title vs its meaning in Northwest Territories/ Yukon Territory, or Saskatchewan Territory etc., in which Territory is a constutional organism; in this case it's just a name, with no administration or formal constitution (again, as also was New Caledonia 1846-1858, and again there the HBC had no "territories" other than its fort's premises; so the need to adjust "surrender its vast territories to the dominion" so as to apply to the outside-of-Rupert's Land situation seems necessary.... Skookum1 00:41, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
I note the map shows the Anyox-Prince Rupert area as part of the North-Western Territory; I'm unaware of this; the Colony of BC's northward limit, by previous treaties with the Russians, was the southern limit of the Panhandle at 54-40. What's the basis for the boundary shown on the map? Also to note that I think the abandoned Fort Durham and Fort Stikine had been nominally under the Columbia Department and so were theoretically, if only briefly, part of the Columbia District, until Gov. Simpson ordered their closure; part of the Columbia Department at least, if not the Columbie District; they weren't part of the New Caledonia "administration" which hadn't at that time been extended to the Coast. Skookum1 ( talk) 15:14, 27 June 2008 (UTC)