The USA’s various internal and external borders have been changed and rejigged countless times over the years, and it has the odd little panhandles and extra states to show for it. But we tend to think that by now, things have basically settled down – that the country, with a few exceptions of various overseas territories and islands that might one day become states, is pretty much finished. We all know where it starts and ends. Right?

Well, no. Turns out, there’s a crisis at the border, right now. It’s a veritable invasion – and you’ve probably never even heard about it. Why? Two reasons: one, it’s the Canadian border we’re talking about; and two, it mostly concerns fish.

The ballad of Dixon Entrance

Somewhere between the Haida Gwaii archipelago, on the north coast of British Columbia, and the southern tip of Alaska’s panhandle, Canadian waters turn into American ones. But exactly where that happens depends on who you ask – since the border between the two countries is, to this day, in dispute.

“Even before European contact with the nearby indigenous peoples, the Haida, Tlingit and Tsimshian occasionally warred over the land and sea boundaries in this abundant territory,” explains a 2019 BBC Travel article about the area. “These days, this boundary disagreement continues between new adversaries and the treasure at the heart of this dispute has evolved[.]”

The modern dispute has its origins in the 18th century, when “Canada” referred to the westernmost part of Britain, and “Alaska” to the easternmost part of Russia. After decades of stalemate, the two powers finally set out where one territory began and the other ended with the Treaty of Saint Petersburg in 1825.

Or at least, that was the theory. The trouble was, they hadn’t exactly gone into detail: the treaty kept the boundary pretty vague, placing it essentially “somewhere in the mountains” – and to compound matters, the whole thing was written in French, which meant various important terms could be nuanced depending on your native language. 

That wasn’t a problem at the time, though, since who’s climbing Mount Saint Elias in 1825? It’s hard, cold, far away, and has bugger all resources in the area – why waste men, time, and money mapping it out properly? So, when the US bought Alaska in 1867, and British Columbia joined the newly created Dominion of Canada in 1871, the sketchy border situation still wasn’t all that high on anyone’s radar.

But then, in August 1896, something terrible happened. They discovered gold in the Klondike.

The Klondike gold rush

If there’s one thing that can get a country real granular about its borders, it’s gold (just ask California). So, when Keish, also known as Skookum Jim Mason, discovered the precious metal in Bonanza Creek, it didn’t just kick off the Klondike gold rush – it also restarted that old disagreement over where the US ended and Canada began.

“An estimated 100,000 prospectors migrated to the area, and it turned out that one of the easiest ways to reach the gold fields was to travel by sea through Dixon Entrance, into the fjords and then inland across the Panhandle,” BBC Travel explains. “Canada wanted unimpeded travel to their territory, but the US wasn’t prepared to give up any of the land they’d recently considered too insignificant to map.”

Eventually, in 1903, the two countries outsourced the dispute, entrusting the decision to a six-person tribunal in London. Much to Canada’s chagrin, the result came out mostly in the US’s favor; the Yukon was left with no access to the Pacific, and the US had a few more square kilometers to its name.

The newly established boundary line ran east from Cape Muzon, at the southern tip of Alaska’s Dall Island, all the way over to Canada’s Wales Island, and from there following the Portland Canal inland. Canada may have been pissed about it, but the case was officially settled. Kind of.

See, while the arbitration tribunal had been pretty specific regarding the land border, they’d somehow completely ignored the whole “we’re literally right next to the ocean” issue.

“There is no record of any discussion between Canada, Great Britain, or the United States as to the legal status of the sea to the north of the 1825 Treaty boundary,” wrote Mary Kathleen Morrissey, a student at the University of Rhode Island, in her 1990 thesis on the Dixon Entrance dispute. 

“However, one particular incident spurred the interest of the United States south of the boundary line,” she explained: a warning, sent from a Canadian Fisheries protection vessel to an American fishing vessel in 1909, similar to a previous assertion made in 1897, that “U.S. vessels are not allowed to fish anywhere in Hecate Strait or in any other territorial waters of the Province of British Columbia.”

The rebuke came as a surprise to the US, who had evidently spent the last six years or so under the impression that they had inherited a decent amount of ocean around their now Officially Alaskan islands. That’s what maritime law said, after all: the US had long kept to the “three-mile limit”, defining their territorial waters as extending three nautical miles (about 5.6 kilometers) from the land.

But from Canada’s perspective, the case was cut-and-dry: the arbitration tribunal had split the countries with a ruler and pencil. The resulting line was the border – it wasn’t Canada’s fault that it went straight across the water like that. You all were the ones who signed it, not us, eh.

The resolution… or not

So, how would the situation be resolved? Well… it wouldn’t. 

In fact, it kind of got worse. Not only do both countries still maintain their own mutually overlapping definitions of their maritime borders, but the US has actually extended its claims further out into the ocean – making the area disputed much larger. Tempers have flared in the time since so much that, in 1997, Canadian fishermen effectively took a full Alaska State ferry hostage for three days as punishment for its supposed trespassing.

And you might be wondering: why does anybody care about this in any case? We don’t mine gold in the Klondike anymore; we aren’t hunting sea otters for their fur or fighting the redcoats. But there is something in the water today that’s massively overtaken all of that in importance, and it’s something you might not expect: salmon.

“Fishing [is] a key industry in the Pacific Northwest’s economy,” the BBC points out. “From the 1880s to 1950s more than 100 canneries and fishing villages sprang up throughout British Columbia, and in recent years, wild salmon from the province has been exported to 53 different countries.” 

And “in this aquatic gold rush, Dixon Entrance is the jackpot,” it explains. “Through it flow five species; sockeye, coho, chinook, chum and pink, each returning from the ocean intent on reaching their specific home river in Alaska, British Columbia, Washington or Oregon where they spawn and die.”

Figuring out who “owns” the salmon isn’t just important for the GDP of each country – it’s an ecological and civil liberties issue, too. For generations, the local First Nations peoples have relied on the salmon for their livelihood, but overfishing has made survival ever harder. Meanwhile, the orcas, bears, and eagles that live off wild salmon are also suffering, especially as unregulated fishing has driven some salmon runs into local extinction.

So, is there any hope for the poor fish? Maybe – if they know their international maritime law. There’s one part of the disputed area – that little triangle in the middle – where the claims actually overlap in the other direction. In other words, both countries say the other one owns it. 

So, should you fail to avoid the political chatter at the Christmas table this year, and get asked what you think about the border crisis, just say this: yes, it’s a problem – and you hope the salmon find their way to their anarchist kingdom in the sea.