Idaho Falls, Idaho: The Town That Used to Be Eagle Rock

Before it was Idaho Falls, Idaho, this Snake River town was Eagle Rock, named for a rock in the river where eagles nested every year. It took the new name in 1890, from the rapids in the Snake River there.

An eagle’s nest and a toll crossing

The name started with a river crossing on the road to the Montana gold camps. The first volume of History of Idaho, edited by the former governor James Hawley in 1920, says Harry Ricketts set up a ferry over the Snake in 1864, a few miles above the present city. Near the ferry, a large rock stood in the middle of the stream, and “a family of American eagles made their nest every year” on it. So it became the Eagle Rock Ferry. It paid well: in the first year, Hawley says, Ricketts took in over $30,000 in greenbacks from wagons bound for Montana, worth only about half that in gold dust.

Then came a bridge. James M. Taylor and Robert Anderson got a charter in 1865 and opened a toll bridge at Black Rock Canyon, where the city now stands, in the spring of 1866. According to Hawley, the ferry people moved down to the bridge, “bringing the name of ‘Eagle Rock’ with them.”

Which rock?

That’s where the two old Idaho books part ways. John Rees, who compiled a dictionary-style list of the state’s names in 1918, quotes an Overland Route guidebook that puts the rock somewhere else: “Just above the bridge, in the middle of the stream,” where “an American eagle for many years built its nest and reared its young.” In that telling, the rock was at the bridge, and “the little community was christened ‘Eagle Rock.’”

So if you go looking for the original eagle rock, you’ll get two answers: up at the old ferry, a few miles upstream, or just above Taylor’s bridge. Both books agree on the eagles. Neither names the person who first called it Eagle Rock.

From Eagle Rock to Idaho Falls

The railroad turned the bridge station into a town. When the Utah & Northern was finished in 1881, Hawley says, Eagle Rock became a division point with the company’s repair shops. In 1887 the shops moved to Pocatello. Arthur Saunders, describing that railroad junction in his 1915 History of Bannock County, places it some 50 miles south of “Idaho Falls, then called Eagle Rock.”

Hawley and Rees both date the new name to 1890. Hawley says it came “from the rapids in the Snake River,” the same place where, he notes, Captain Bonneville “had to let his boats down by ropes held by men on the shore.” Rees describes the falls as the place where the river “falls over the edge of a lava flow” and has cut its way back about half a mile into a narrow canyon. What neither book tells you is who proposed the new name or why the town wanted it.

The old name didn’t vanish completely, though. On the 1948 map at the top of this page, a few blocks from the river, there’s still an Eagle Rock school.

Sources & further reading

• James H. Hawley, ed., History of Idaho, vol. 1 (1920), pp. 733–734. Harry Ricketts’s ferry in 1864, the eagles’ nest, the tolls in greenbacks, the Taylor and Anderson bridge of 1866, the railroad shops of 1881 and 1887, and the name change in 1890 “from the rapids in the Snake River.”
• John E. Rees, Idaho Chronology, Nomenclature, Bibliography (1918), entry “Eagle Rock.” The change to Idaho Falls in 1890, the lava falls and canyon, and the guidebook version that puts the eagle’s rock just above the bridge.
• Arthur C. Saunders, The History of Bannock County, Idaho (1915), chapter XL. The railroad junction at Pocatello, some 50 miles south of “Idaho Falls, then called Eagle Rock.”
• GNIS feature 396684 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Idaho Falls, with its location.