Anchorage Daily News

TYONEK

POPULATION: 199 (2006)

LOCATION: On a bluff on the northwest shore of Cook Inlet, 43 miles southwest of Anchorage.

DESCRIPTION: A Dena'ina Athabascan village practicing a subsistence lifestyle. More than 95 percent of the population is wholly or partly Alaska Native. Tyonek offers recreational fishing and hunting-guide services. Some residents trap during winter. The North Foreland Port Facility is the preferred site for export of Beluga coal. There is one school, attended by about 40 students.

HISTORY: Various settlements existed in the area by 1778, when Captain Cook journeyed through upper Cook Inlet. In his journal he described the Athabascans and concluded that the Natives, who possessed iron knives and glass beads, were trading indirectly with the Russians. Russian trading settlements were established at "Tuiunuk" and Iliamna before the 1790s but were destroyed due to conflicts between the Natives and the Russians. Between 1836 and 1840, half of the region's Indians died from smallpox. The Alaska Commercial Co. had a major outpost in Tyonek by 1875. After gold was discovered at Resurrection Creek on the Kenai Peninsula in the 1880s, Tyonek became a major disembarkment point for goods and people. The population began its decline with the founding of Anchorage in 1915. The flu epidemic of 1918-19 left few survivors among the Indians. The village was moved to its present location on high ground when the old site flooded in the early 1930s. After 1965, the tribe sold rights to drill for oil and gas beneath its reservation to a group of oil companies for $12.9 million. The reservation status was revoked with the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971.

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