WAWashington History

The settlers who petitioned Congress in 1852 asked for a territory called Columbia, after the river Robert Gray had entered in 1792. Congress balked, worried that Columbia would be confused with the District of Columbia, and substituted the name of the first president instead. The result is the one state named for a president and, ever since, the one state that has to be called Washington State to be understood. The territory was created on March 2, 1853, and the confusion has outlasted every institution that caused it.

Salmon, cedar, and the nations of the coast and plateau

Two very different worlds met at the Cascade crest. West of the mountains, Coast Salish peoples including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Nisqually, Puyallup, Lummi and Skagit lived in cedar plank longhouses along the inlets of what became Puget Sound, working a calendar built around salmon runs, camas and shellfish. At Cape Flattery the Makah hunted whales from cedar canoes; the buried village at Ozette, sealed by a mudslide around 1750 and excavated between 1970 and 1981, preserved harpoons, looms and house planks in wet clay. The Chinook controlled the lower Columbia and the trade jargon that carried up and down the coast. East of the mountains, the drier plateau belonged to the Yakama, Spokane, Palus, Colville, Cayuse and the Nimiipuu, whom the French called Nez Perce, peoples who moved with the seasons between salmon fisheries and root grounds and who took up horses in the early 1700s.

Two empires and a line at the 49th parallel

Robert Gray crossed the Columbia bar on May 11, 1792, and named the river for his ship. George Vancouver charted the inland waters the same year and named Puget Sound for his lieutenant, Peter Puget. Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific in November 1805. The Hudson's Bay Company built Fort Vancouver on the Columbia in 1825 and ran the region as a fur preserve under John McLoughlin. Britain and the United States had agreed in 1818 to occupy the country jointly rather than fight over it, and expansionists spent the 1844 campaign shouting for the line at 54 degrees 40 minutes. The Oregon Treaty of June 15, 1846 settled it at the 49th parallel instead. One loose end remained: the San Juan Islands, where an American settler shot a company pig in 1859 and set off a standoff. Both armies camped on the island until 1872, when Kaiser Wilhelm I, acting as arbitrator, awarded the archipelago to the United States.

Treaties, wars, and a delayed statehood

Isaac Stevens, the first territorial governor, spent 1854 and 1855 pushing through a rapid series of treaties, at Medicine Creek, Point Elliott, Point No Point, Neah Bay and Walla Walla, that concentrated dozens of nations onto a handful of reservations while reserving their right to fish at accustomed places. Resistance followed almost immediately in the Puget Sound and Yakima wars of 1855 and 1856. Leschi, the Nisqually leader, was hanged in 1858 after two trials, and a state historical court exonerated him in 2004. Statehood came late and in company: Congress passed an enabling act on February 22, 1889 that produced four states in three days, and Washington entered on November 11, 1889 as the forty-second. Because it was admitted twenty-four years after Appomattox, the slave-and-free arithmetic that shaped so many admissions never touched it.

Rails, fire, gold, and a general strike

The Northern Pacific chose Tacoma over Seattle for its terminus in the 1870s and reached it in 1883; Seattle waited until January 1893 for James J. Hill's Great Northern. In between, on June 6, 1889, a pot of glue boiled over in a Front Street cabinet shop and burned twenty-five blocks of downtown Seattle, which the city rebuilt in brick and raised above the tideflats. The decisive event was the steamer Portland docking on July 17, 1897 with Klondike gold in its hold. Seattle marketed itself as the outfitting port for the Yukon and never looked back. Labour was equally combustible: the Industrial Workers of the World fought a lethal battle with deputies at Everett in November 1916, and in February 1919 some 65,000 Seattle workers walked out in the first citywide general strike in American history.

Dams, airplanes, and plutonium

Federal money remade the state in one generation. Grand Coulee Dam began generating in 1941, and the Bonneville Power Administration hired Woody Guthrie for a month that May to write songs about it. Cheap hydroelectricity drew aluminium smelters, which fed a company William Boeing had started on the Duwamish in 1916; by 1944 its Seattle plants were turning out B-17s at a rate of more than a dozen a day. In 1943 the Manhattan Project took 600 square miles of shrub steppe along the Columbia at Hanford, evicted the towns of Hanford and White Bluffs, and built the reactors that made the plutonium for the Trinity test and the Nagasaki bomb. The bill arrived later as the most contaminated site in the country. Aerospace concentration cut both ways: when Boeing employment collapsed after 1970, two men rented a billboard near the airport asking the last person leaving Seattle to turn out the lights. Microsoft moved home from Albuquerque to Bellevue in 1979 and shifted the centre of gravity again.

The Boldt decision and a mountain that came apart

On February 12, 1974, Judge George Boldt ruled in United States v. Washington that the treaties Stevens had written in the 1850s entitled the signatory nations to half the harvestable salmon, and that they were co-managers of the fishery rather than petitioners to it. The decision was furiously resisted, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1979, and remains the framework for salmon policy in the Northwest. Six years later, on the morning of May 18, 1980, the north face of Mount St. Helens slid away and the volcano erupted laterally, flattening 230 square miles of forest and killing fifty-seven people. The 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle produced a different kind of eruption, and the shorthand for a generation of protest movements.

Neighbouring and nearby states' history

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