Eagle Rock Ferry and the Railroad Bridge

The city you are driving through was not always called Idaho Falls. For the first two decades of its existence it was Eagle Rock, named for the volcanic basalt outcropping in the Snake River where a wooden footbridge was strung across the current in eighteen sixty-five. That bridge, built by an Idaho Territory entrepreneur named Matt Taylor, was crude but essential. Emigrants heading to the Montana goldfields needed a crossing at the upper Snake, and Taylor charged them for it. Within a few years the structure was upgraded to carry wagons, and a small community of ferrymen, merchants, and ranchers took root on the south bank.

The transformation from remote crossing to company town happened in the spring of eighteen seventy-nine, when the Utah and Northern Railway, a subsidiary of the Union Pacific, decided to bridge the Snake here and push its narrow-gauge line north toward the Montana silver camps. The railroad hired hundreds of workers, platted a town site on the benchland above the river, and the population exploded overnight. By eighteen eighty Eagle Rock had a population of roughly six hundred, a land office, a post office, and every variety of frontier commerce.

The Utah and Northern converted to standard gauge in eighteen eighty-seven, and the Union Pacific absorbed the line entirely. Eagle Rock became the division headquarters, the place where locomotives were serviced, crews changed, and payroll was distributed. For a brief moment in the early eighteen eighties it was the largest town in Idaho Territory, outpacing even Boise. The railroad bridge that made all of this possible still carries freight trains across the Snake today, a descendant of the original trestle that Matt Taylor could never have imagined when he first stretched timber across the current sixty years before.