Clifford Sifton (1861 – 1929)
Clifford Sifton was a descendant of Anglo-Irish gentry who settled in Upper Canada in 1818 and 1819. He was named attorney general of Manitoba and the provincial lands commissioner in 1891 and became the minister of education in 1892. In 1896 he became minister of the interior and superintendent general of Indian affairs in Laurier’s federal cabinet. The portfolio included responsibility for immigration and the settlement of the western prairies. His department aggressively sold western Canada and favored American settlers and successful farmers from central and eastern Europe. Urban dwellers, blacks and Orientals were actively discouraged. The Geological Survey of Canada was diverted from academic science to locating mineral deposits and encouraging their development. National parks were developed for tourism and mining. He was responsible in 1899 for approving arrangements for Treaty 8 resulting in the surrender of large tracts of the north to allow for the safe passage of Klondike prospectors. Sifton had the greatest responsibility for administering the Yukon during the Klondike gold rush, and he was involved in negotiations over disputed territory in the panhandle. In 1903 Laurier appointed him the agent preparing the British case for the Alaska Boundary Tribunal. The British had the weaker case and lost in all of the crucial decisions.1)
After gold was discovered in the Klondike, the federal Department of the Interior’s main concerns for the Yukon involved maintaining Canadian sovereignty, protecting the stampeders on their journey, and collecting revenues in taxes to pay for the northern administration. Minister Clifford Sifton set up a hastily assembled group of administrators.2)
Sifton was also concerned with trying to find a travel route from the coast that avoided American territory as much as possible. In October 1897, he landed at Skagway with his officials and found the North-West Mounted Police struggling with the mass of supplies they needed to get over the coastal mountains. One party had gone over the pass and on to Dawson and another had gone to establish a post at Tagish. Sifton travelled with Major Walsh and his party two days up to Tagish Post and then Sifton left Walsh to carry on while he, Sifton, returned to Skagway through the White Pass. Three alternate routes were being explored. A party of Mounted Police [led by Mooney] was travelling overland from Edmonton, another party was looking at a route from the Cariboo to Telegraph Creek on the Stikine River, and a party headed by engineer Charles Jennings and surveyor St. Cry was studying a route from Fort Wrangle on the coast to Telegraph Creek where a proposed road or railway would go to Teslin Lake and a water route to Dawson. Sifton liked this last route because Canada had rights to navigation at Wrangle under the treaty of 1825 between Great Britan and Russia, inherited by the United States.3) He subsequently supported a bill to charter the railway on the Stikine River route but it was defeated by the Senate in March 1898.4)
In 1899, Sifton was responsible for approving arrangements for Treaty 8 resulting in the surrender of large tracts of the north to allow for the safe passage of Klondike prospectors. Sifton had the greatest responsibility for administering the Yukon during the Klondike gold rush, and he was involved in negotiations over disputed territory in the panhandle. In 1903 Laurier appointed him the agent preparing the British case for the Alaska Boundary Tribunal. The British had the weaker case and lost in all of the crucial decisions.5)
Of the four Yukon commissioners Sifton selected before 1905 (Walsh, Ogilvie, Ross, and Congdon), only Ross was considered a success and his term ended when he had a stroke. Under pressure from the Yukon, Sifton frequently changed mining regulations and encourage large-scale mining that he thought would bring stability to the territory.6)