The Story of Washington.
The Coast Salish, the Makah, the Quinault, the Yakama, the Spokane, the Colville — Washington’s Indigenous nations built their civilizations around the most productive salmon runs on earth. The Columbia and the Snake and the rivers draining the Cascades carried fish in numbers that early explorers described as impossible. The treaties of the 1850s took the land but guaranteed the fishing rights. Those rights are still being litigated and defended, and the salmon are still running, though in smaller numbers than any elder remembers.
Washington became a territory in 1853, carved out of the Oregon Territory, and a state on November 11, 1889 — the same day as Montana, North and South Dakota. The economy was timber, then wheat, then the railroads that moved both. Boeing arrived in 1916, building seaplanes in a warehouse on the Duwamish River, and the company and the state grew up together through two world wars and the jet age. Seattle was a company town before it was anything else.
The eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 reminded the state that the Cascades are active volcanoes and that the landscape can be remade in a morning. The technology revolution of the 1990s remade Seattle almost as completely — Microsoft in Redmond, Amazon on the waterfront, the dotcom boom turning a timber and aerospace city into a global capital of software. Eastern Washington watched from across the mountains and continued growing wheat and apples and grapes, which is its own kind of quiet revolution.
Vancouver Charts the Sound
Captain George Vancouver of the Royal Navy enters Puget Sound and charts it systematically, naming its features for his officers. The Salish people watching from shore are not consulted about the names.
The Point Elliott Treaty
Isaac Stevens signs treaties with the Coast Salish tribes, taking most of their land while guaranteeing fishing rights “in common with all citizens.” The fishing rights clause becomes one of the most litigated in American history.
The 42nd Star
Washington enters the Union on November 11th, the same day as Montana and the Dakotas. Four new states in one day — a record that has never been matched.
Boeing’s First Plane
William Boeing and Navy engineer Conrad Westervelt build the B&W seaplane in a boat hangar on the Duwamish River. The company that will define Seattle for a century has begun.
St. Helens Erupts
Mount St. Helens erupts on May 18th, killing 57 people and removing 1,300 feet from its summit. The lateral blast flattens 230 square miles of forest in three minutes. The mountain is still rebuilding.
