A Dena'ina Alaska Native village at Tyonek was noted by the explorer James Cook in 1778.

The Lebedev-Lastochkin Company, a Russian fur trade venture, maintained a small trapping station on the site of Tyonek.

Whidbey found that the LLC maintained "one large house, about fifty feet long, twenty-four wide, and about ten feet high; this was appropriated to the residence of nineteen Russians..."[4] A smallpox epidemic in the late 1830s killed about half the population.

Tyonek became a major port during the Resurrection Creek gold rush of the 1880s, but declined after the founding of Anchorage on the other side of Cook Inlet in 1915.

Tyonek was moved to its current site when the original village, located on lower ground, flooded in the 1930s.

[6] The CDP extends from Trading Bay in the west to the mouth of the Chuitna River in the northeast.

It featured 117 residents, including 109 Tinneh, 6 Creole (Mixed Russian & Native) and 2 Whites.

[11] In the early 1930s, residents began to relocate 7 miles (11 km) northeast to a new site, the "new" Tyonek, situated on higher ground because of flooding.

Beginning with the 1940 census, the figures reflected the "New / Second Tyonek" or Tank'itnu ("fish dock stream").