"The waste lands of the Crown" : the development and codification of free entry mining law in Yukon, 1886–1906

Although the Klondike Gold Rush is remembered as ending in 1899, the free entry mining regime it installed still governs the Yukon. In 1886, the first substantial strike on Canadian ground produced a mining camp governed by miners’ custom. By 1906, the Yukon Placer Mining Act had given that custom statutory form. This thesis argues that in the intervening decades, the Government of Canada entrenched both customary and government-enacted free entry—the right of any comer to enter mineral lands, prospect, and stake a claim without the consent of the Crown, surface owners, or Indigenous peoples—in the Yukon through deliberate non-enforcement, administrative accommodation, and finally codification. Ottawa did not replace the miners’ law with a law of its own. Instead, it codified theirs, translating miners’ construction of northern land as “wasteland,” land valued only for its mineral potential, into durable legal infrastructure. Contrary to accounts of a sharp 1894 rupture between American camp justice and British law and order, this thesis shows that the North-West Mounted Police enforced free entry rather than dismantling it, and that codification enlarged the miners’ entitlement while narrowing the Crown’s. Because customary and government-enacted free entry alike constituted the Yukon as vacant Crown waste, Ottawa’s choices settled not whether wastelanding would govern the creeks but whose version of it would. The collapse of the Yukon River fishery, deforestation, and mercury contamination fell first and hardest on the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in. Yukon remains an Indigenous homeland, but mineral tenure law has produced the wasteland it imagined.