When Roosevelt became President, a perplexing controversy with
Great Britain over the boundary line between Alaska and Canada
was in full swing. The problem, which had become acute with the
discovery of gold in the Klondike in 1897, had already been
considered, together with eleven other subjects of dispute
between Canada and the United States, by a Joint Commission which
had been able to reach no agreement. The essence of the
controversy was this: The treaty of 1825 between Great Britain
and Russia had declared that the boundary, dividing British and
Russian America on that five-hundred-mile strip of land which
depends from the Alaskan elephant's head like a dangling halter
rope, should be drawn "parallel to the windings of the coast" at
a distance inland of thirty miles. The United States took the
plain and literal interpretation of these words in the treaty.
The Canadian contention was that within the meaning of the treaty
the fiords or inlets which here break into the land were not part
of the sea, and that the line, instead of following, at the
correct distance inland, the indentations made by these arms of
the sea, should leap boldly across them, at the agreed distance
from the points of the headlands. This would give Canada the
heads of several great inlets and direct access to the sea far
north of the point where the Canadian coast had, always been
assumed to end. Canada and the United States were equally
resolute in upholding their claims. It looked as if the matter
would end in a deadlock.

John Hay, who had been Secretary of State in McKinley's Cabinet,
as he now was in Roosevelt's, had done his best to bring the
matter to a settlement, but had been unwilling to have the