Yakutat Map
Yakutat City and Borough is a unified city-borough in the U.S. state of Alaska. As of the 2010 census, the population was 4035. The name is Tlingit, Yaakwdáat, meaning "the place where canoes rest", but it originally derives from an Eyak name diyaqudat and was influenced by the Tlingit word yaakw “canoe, boat”. Besides the original City of Yakutat 59°32?49?N 139°43?38?W / 59.54694°N 139.72722°W / 59.54694; -139.72722 (the urban part), described below, the only other significant population center in the borough is the community of Icy Bay, the site of the Icy Bay Airport, in the west-central part of the borough. Yakutat City is the largest city in the United States by area, and the twelfth largest city in the world by area. Yakutat is about six times as large as the state of Rhode Island.
The original settlers in the Yakutat area are believed to have been Eyak-speaking people from the Copper River area. Tlingits migrated into the area and assimilated the Eyaks before the arrival of Europeans in Alaska. Yakutat was only one of a number of Tlingit and mixed Tlingit-Eyak settlements in the region, although all the others have been depopulated or abandoned.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, English, French, Spanish and Russian explorers came to the region. The Shelikhov-Golikov company, precursor of the Russian-American Company, built a fort in Yakutat in 1795 to facilitate trade in sea otter pelts. It was known as New Russia, Yakutat Colony, or Slavorossiya. When the Russians cut off access to the fisheries nearby, a Tlingit war party attacked and destroyed the fort.
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