Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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Eagle
A WHILE AGO A FRIEND
gave me a copy of
A Guide to Alaska
by Merle Colby, one of the
state guides written by the Federal Writer's Project during the 30s. Of course I turned im-
mediately to the index and looked up Seldovia, my home town, where I discovered that in
1939 it didn't even merit it's own paragraph. Well.
I looked up Cordova, where my cousins live, and found a recipe for the Chugach love
potion made from Alaska cotton and seal oil. I looked up Anchorage (in 1939, pop. 2,277),
which at that time was only twenty-five years old, but which, Mr. Colby allowed, was “be-
ginning to take on the appearance of a town.”
Mr. Colby wrote about Alaska back when the Richardson Highway was a trail and to get
from Seward to Bristol Bay you took an ocean steamer. It's a delightful little tome and
whenever I go somewhere new in Alaska I look it up first in Mr. Colby's topic. I had it with
me on the way home from Outside the first week of June, driving the Alcan Highway as far
as Whitehorse and then heading north to Dawson City and the Top of the World Highway,
which links to the Taylor Highway, which links to the Glenn Highway to Anchorage. It was
our last day on the road and we were in a hurry to get home.
But then there was this fork in the road. Did we keep left and go on to Chicken, and
pavement, and home? Or did we hunger for one last sight of the mighty Yukon and take the
right fork, to Eagle?
Hmmm. What did Mr. Colby have to say about Eagle?
EAGLE
(54 pop.) is ten miles from the international boundary on the left bank of the
Yukon. It is the first settlement in American Alaska to be reached on the Yukon, and
