Portland Canal

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The Portland Canal is an arm of Portland Inlet, one of the principal inlets of the British Columbia Coast. The Portland Canal forms part of the border between southeastern Alaska and British Columbia, at about 55°-56° North 130°' West.

Despite its name, it is a completely natural geographic feature and extends 114.6 km (70 miles) northward from the Portland Inlet at Pearse Island, British Columbia, to Stewart, British Columbia and Hyder, Alaska. Observatory Inlet joins the Portland Canal just where it merges with Portland Inlet. At its head is the abandoned smelter town of Anyox.

The use of the word canal to name inlets on the British Columbia Coast and the Alaska Panhandle is a legacy of the Spanish exploration of the area in the 1700s. For example, Haro Strait between Victoria and the San Juan Islands was originally Canal de Haro. The English cognate to the Spanish canal is "channel", which is found throughout the coast, cf. Dean Channel.

The placement of the international boundary in the Portland Canal was a major issue during the negotiations over the Alaska Boundary Dispute, which heated up as a result of the Klondike Gold Rush and ended by arbitration in 1903. According to the treaty, the international boundary is to follow the shoreline of the American side of the inlet, but American maps continue to show the boundary as being down the centre of the inlet. The same issue still remains with the A-B Line on the north side of the nearby Dixon Entrance.