Randa Abdel-Fattah

Good luck, you know, finding another housing out there.

But it turns out building a new society was hard.

So there were two kinds of conflicts that took place.

One was between the management and the workers.

So John Monroe Longyear and the local guys that he hired, they didn't like the food.

He didn't like how lazy they were.

A classic tale.

And the other conflict was between him and other people like him, other people who were trying to start businesses and mine coal.

And these were essentially disputes about property.

Who owns what?

Who can go where?

Who planted the stake first?

It got a little messy.

But Svalbard had no courts, no police, no property law.

There was no authority to really rule on these things.

It seemed only a matter of time before some nation or empire would claim sovereignty over Svalbard and threaten his business.

Longyear wanted to get ahead of that.

So he reached out to his country of origin, the United States, and lobbied the government to get involved to protect his property rights in Svalbard.

He did so under an older law called the U.S.

Guano Act,