During the Klondike Gold Rush, prospectors disembarked at its port and used the Chilkoot Trail, a Tlingit trade route over the Coast Mountains, to begin their journey to the gold fields around Dawson City, Yukon, about 800 km (500 mi) away.

Use of the name Dyea for its present location first occurred in 1886, when John J. Healy (1840–1908) and Edgar Wilson (1842–1895) opened their trading post there.

[4] However, the presence of the initial \d\ sound in Dyea casts doubt on those latter possibilities and suggests that the first syllable was in fact dei (as in dei-yi).

All that remains are a number of foundations surrounded by scraps of lumber and metal, three cemeteries, including one where almost every person buried died on the same date in 1898 in an avalanche on the gold rush trail,[5] and the ruins of the wharf.

Brown bears tend to use the Dyea inlets to feed during salmon spawning season (July–August).