Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
stores (a fixed percentage of sales) and saloons ($1000 each) to pay for a courthouse and a
jail. His first case was that of Chief Charley of the Charley River band of Tena Indians.
Eagle Jack had stolen Chief Charley's dog. As Chief Charley put it to Judge Wickersham,
“You big chief you get my dog; bring him me. If you not get my dog I get my dog. Maybe
some Indian get hurt. Maybe you get my dog?”
A lesson in simplicity and directness for a plaintiff of any era. Wickersham issued a
writ, it was served by a deputy on Eagle Jack and the dog was returned forthwith, which
action, Wickersham wrote, “prevented an unhappy quarrel and probably a fight between
the Eagle and the Charley River people, and possibly the death of Jack, for we learned
that each Charley River Indian had his gun hidden in his canoe, and the old chief was in a
fighting mood.”
Eagle's main street is called Amundsen Avenue, after the Norwegian explorer who,
when his ship Gjoa got stuck in the ice in 1905, got out the dogs and mushed five hundred
miles inland. He arrived in Eagle on December 5th, where, courtesy of the U.S. Army
Signal Corps, the news of his team's transition of the Northwest Passage, not to mention
survival, was telegraphed to the world.
The army may have abandoned Fort Egbert in 1932 but the National Park Service has
not, and Fort Egbert has been declared a National Historic Landmark. Five of the original
buildings, the quartermaster storehouse, the mule barn, the water wagon shed, the granary
and the
NCO
quarters were restored by the Bureau of Land Management between 1974
and 1979. They sit at one end of the grassy airstrip that used to be the mule pasture.
The well hand dug in 1903 still pumps water for the people of Eagle. A walking tour
during the summer will take you to the well house, the customs house, Judge's Wicker-
sham's courthouse, and the remaining buildings of Fort Egbert.
For all its remoteness, Alaska is home to a lot of human history, and Eagle seems to
have more than its share. Somehow, even over that road, people find it. John McMphee
wrote about it in
Coming Into the Country
. It's a stop on the Yukon Quest Sled Dog Race.
The Han River people still live in their village three miles up the road, although the one-
room cabins Mr. Colby wrote of have turned into ranch-style homes with four-wheelers
parked in the yards.
