Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the United States customs office is here. Eagle is the supply center for a large
placer-mining area. It has a school, an Episcopal mission, and two general stores.
Three miles below the town is an Indian village of one-room cabins.
Eagle it was, up and down and around and around sixty-four miles of one-lane gravel
road. At first the road perched on the edge of a continuous precipitous chasm that fell to
the Fortymile River far, far below, producing beautiful if terrifying views. Then it plunged
what felt like straight down to run for a few miles right next to the river, we were close
enough to look for salmon (didn't see any) and then straight back up again over still more
mountains. We stopped at American Summit, a bald knob where the trees were sparse and
stunted and the woolly lousewort is thick on the ground. We felt like we could raise our
hands and touch the sky. There followed a steep, hairpin-turned and hair-raising descent
into Eagle (nowadays, population 152), once a hub of gold mining activity for the upper
Yukon drainage, and a tiny gem of a town perched at the very edge of the Yukon River it-
self.
I don't know what I was expecting here, but it wasn't this kind of beauty. A thousand
foot cliff to the west where eagles roost and where Eagle got its name. The Olgilvie
Mountains of Canada to far to the east, a hint of snow-capped peaks. The banks of the
Yukon, between which the river presses relentlessly westward in ripples and eddies and
swirling backwaters and swift currents.
In 1881 Eagle was one lone log cabin. By 1898, following the gold strikes in the
Klondike, Eagle's population was 1,700. In 1899 the US Army established Fort Egbert,
and the road in is courtesy of them, as it it wouldn't exist if in 1903 they hadn't run a tele-
graph cable from Valdez to Eagle. Eagle was the southern most section of the Yukon
River inside the United States and as such considered a strategic location.
On July 15th, 1900, James Wickersham stepped ashore to take up the duties of district
judge for the brand-new Third Judicial District of Alaska, created by Congress the month
before and encompassing 300,000 square miles of territory extending from Eagle to Den-
ali to the Aleutian Islands. Wickersham's court was authorized to build a courthouse and a
jail. He had no money, so he and his clerk set about collecting licensing fees from existing
