Eastend has been home to many famous residents, including the writer Wallace Stegner, who lived in the town between 1917 and 1921 and featured it as the village Whitemud in his book Wolf Willow.

A Métis settlement developed north of Eastend, and in the 1870s a Hudson's Bay Company trading post was established in the region.

In the mid 1880s as bison populations were being decimated on the eastern plains, the area became an important hunting ground that nearby First Nations tribes regularly fought over.

When the Mounties moved to the nearby townsite years later, they condensed the name into one word, and the town was Christened "Eastend".

J.C. Strong, the original owner of the townsite, donated land to build the first church, cemetery, and a lot for the first baby born in Eastend.

[citation needed] On August 16, 1991, then high school teacher, Robert Gebhardt from Eastend joined local palaeontologists on a prospecting expedition to the exposed bedrock along the Frenchman River Valley to learn how fossils are found and identified in the field.

The Eastend Formation, a stratigraphical unit of the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin was named for the town and was first defined in outcrops close to the settlement.