Alaska-Yukon Cruise Tour

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Eagle, Alaska

 History

Eagle City (founded in 1897) is a living museum and many of the residents are historians of one kind or another. Thanks to the Eagle Historical Society buildings, like the old church, City Hall and Waterfront Customs House have been restored and preserved with care. The photogenic town of 140 breathes authenticity and seems relatively untouched. Visitors come in on the Taylor Highway or by riverboat.

Eagle was named after the many nesting eagles on nearby Eagle Bluff.

In the center of Eagle on First Street stands a wooden 'wellhouse' from 1903. The hand-dug well still provides water for half of Eagle's population.

Across the street is the Power and Telephone Company. And on Front Street, that runs along the Yukon River, the old Eagle Trading Company provides groceries and supplies for both locals and visitors.

A highlight of the city tour is Fort Egbert with its granary and mule barn full of relics from the past, located on the far side of the grassy Eagle airstrip. The remains of Fort Egbert (1900-1911) were restored in the seventies by the BLM.

A few gold miners still make a living on their claims around Eagle. In the goldrush days the town was a supply center for miners and stampeders, until they moved on to Fairbanks or Nome.

Geography

Eagle is located 8 miles (13 km) west of the border between Alaska and the Yukon Territory of Canada on the Taylor Highway.  A geographically isolated community, Eagle offers the visitor a rare opportunity to glimpse Alaska's past as well as observe and participate in today's unique northern lifestyle.

Some More History

The Eagle area has been the historical home to Han Athabascan people since before the arrival of Europeans in Alaska.  Late in 1897,twenty-eight miners settled in a new mining area and called it eagle City for the bald eagles that nestled on the nearby bluff.  The first structure in present-day Eagle was a log-trading post called "Belle Isle," built around 1874.

In the late 1800s, Eagle became a supply and trading center for miners working the upper Yukon River and its tributaries. By 1898, its population had exceeded 1,700. In 1901 Eagle was the first incorporated city in the Alaska Interior. It was named after the eagles that nested on nearby Eagle Bluff. A United States Army camp, Fort Egbert, was built at Eagle in 1900. A telegraph line between Eagle and Valdez was completed in 1903.

The gold rushes in Nome and Fairbanks lured people away from Eagle. Judge Wickersham moved his court from Eagle to Fairbanks in 1903. By 1910, Eagle's population had declined to its present-day level (below 200 people). Fort Egbert was abandoned in 1911.

Present-day Eagle is home to mostly people of European descent, but Eagle Village has a small population that is about 50 percent Gwichin. The town enjoyed some notoriety as the location of the popular John McPhee book "Coming into the Country" which was published in the 1970s. Many of the buildings from the Gold Rush years are preserved as part of the Eagle Historic District, a National Historic Landmark district.

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