Bands of wanderers from Asia come to North America, according to available evidence, between 25,00 and 30,000 years ago. Some of their descendants, the ancestors of our Northwest Indian groups, arrived in this region between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago.

    The history of white men in Washington began when explorers searching for a Northwest Passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean searching for a Northwest Passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean found sea otters and fur seal whose pelts could be sold for huge profits in the markets of Europe and China. A steady parade of ships came and went, manned by Spanish, English, American, or occasionally French or Russian crews. Some were traders, and some explorers, and by 1815 they had charted and named most of the bays, rivers, sounds, and islands of the Northwest Coast. In the interior, overland expeditions were sent by British fur companies to establish trading posts along the inland rivers. The American governments sent a party of explorers under the command of Lewis and Clark to report on the animals, plants, inhabitants and geography of the area. After an arduous overland journey, they reached the Pacific Ocean in 1805. They returned in 1806 and reported their findings to the nation.

    Eventually, American fur trading companies also established posts at the mouths of the chief rivers leading from the interior. The partners of John Jacob Astor opened places for trading on the Columbia, Spokane, Okanogan, and Snake Rivers. At once their English competitors build rival posts, until the region north of the Columbia and the Snake were dotted with fur-trading establishments.

    After the failure of Astor’s enterprise, the Hudson’s Bay Company overcame all competition and set up its central headquarters at Fort Vancouver, on the banks of the Columbia, near the mouth of the Willamette River. The company built many inland posts for trade and encouraged farming around these forts. The Hudson’s Bay Company was the supreme authority in government and trade in the Northwest until 1843.

    Into the fur-trading paradise created by the Company, there came occasional Americans, starting in the late 1820’s. Some were traders, trappers, and mountain men, but many came as missionaries to convert the native Indians to Christianity. Around the mission stations there soon developed small, more or less permanent communities of American citizens. Many of the neighboring Indians died of diseases contracted from traders or missionaries, for they had little immunity from European diseases. As a result of one such epidemic of measles, the Whitman mission was destroyed by Cayuse Indians in reprisal for the deaths of the Indian children. Other settlements, however, developed rapidly, and the settler demanded that the United States assume governmental control over the whole Oregon country, which then stretched from California to Alaska.

    Because of a previous joint-occupation agreement, neither the United States nor Great Britain could set up a legal government which had exclusive control over the pacific Northwest. While the Americans waited for their country to do something about a boundary between themselves and the British, the settlers formed a provisional government for the whole Oregon region in 1843. Three years later, a treaty was signed between the United States and Great Britain which settled the boundary issue at the 49^th parallel except for the San Juan Islands. In 1848, Oregon was organized as a separate territory of the United States.

    The new territory was much too large, however, and too sparsely settled for efficient government. After three unsatisfactory years, the settlers living north of the Columbia asked Congress to divide Oregon and to form a new territory. In March, 1853, Congress agreed, and the Territory of Washington was organized.

    There were only a few thousand whites and perhaps thirty thousand Indians living in Washington Territory, which included what is now Washington, northern Idaho, and western Montana. Acute sectional rivalries began to develop due to mountain barriers and poor methods of communication. By the late 1850’s there were three main population centers in the Territory. One was located in the Snake and Clearwater Valleys, extending from Walla Walla to Lewiston. Another was centered in Vancouver, on the Columbia River, and the third center was situated in the Puget Sound basin. It included the towns of Olympia, Steilacoom, Port Townsend, Seattle, Coupeville, and Whatcom.

    Population growth was slow during these early days. In spite of generous land laws giving large portions of Indian lands to settlers (often without signing treaties with the Indians), not many people made the difficult trip across the Great Plains or came by ship around South America. Gold discoveries in California, Idaho, Montana, and British Columbia drained away many of the male settlers who were already living in Washington Territory. Trouble with the Indians over lands taken from them for which they had received no payment led to a brief but costly war in the late 1850’s and this, too, held settlement back. In 1863, Walla Walla, the largest town in the Territory, lost much of its political and economic power base to Boise when Idaho Territory was organized.

    The Civil War brought little prosperity to such a remote region, and the Depression of 1873 hurt the Territory badly. High hopes had been raise when the Northern Pacific Railroad had been chartered to build from Lake Superior to Puget Sound, but because of the Depression, the railroad ceased construction. The Puget Sound towns had no highways to the interior and no railroads, so they had to depend on ocean shipping to get raw materials to market. Even lumber, the region’s most abundant resource, was hard to sell at a profit, for freight rates were high. Consequently, homesteaders and merchants, alike, found themselves I financial difficulty.

    In 1876, a majority of voters approved the idea of becoming a state as the solution to their economic woes. In 1878, electors went farther and authorized a constitutional convention to meet in Walla Walla to write a charter of government. Their disillusionment with the Northern Pacific, however, strengthened by suspicions about railroads in general, led to opposition from all railroad officials and refused to accept the new constitution or to transfer North Idaho back to Washington.

    In 1879, Henry Villard, a German immigrant in Oregon, gained control of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company which had transportation rights in the lower Columbia Valley. Within two years, he and his financial backers had taken over the bankrupt Northern Pacific and Villard had been elected president. His plan was to join the Portland-Vancouver area with the town growing up around Spokane Falls. The land policies of Villard and the Northern Pacific Railroad incensed the farmers through whose properties the swiftly completed line passed. The road completely cut off Walla Walla and stopped before reaching Puget Sound. Nevertheless, after Villard was ousted and the railroad was finally finished across the Cascade Mountains in 1883, thousands of people moved to Washington.

    Throughout the 1880’s Congressional and Presidential control was equally divided between Republicans and Democrats. The Democrats were afraid of this uneasy balance and took steps to refuse admission to any petitioning territories. In the election of 1876, shortly after Colorado had been admitted to the Union, the electoral votes of that state had cost the Democratic Party did not want to allow the admission of any more western states, lest they also vote Republican.

    While Congress was debating various admission bills, the labor policies of the Northern Pacific Railroad company began to cause serious rioting in Washington Territory. Chinese laborers had been imported to work in the railroad-controlled coal mines, and Caucasian miners had lost their jobs. The latter, infuriated when they and their families were evicted from Company-owned towns, drove the Chinese from mines in Tacoma and Seattle. In Congress, Democrats cited the riots as proof that Washington was too unruly to be able to govern itself. No prospective western states were given consideration for statehood through the first administration of President Grover Cleveland.

    After the election of 1888, however, which the Republicans won, a bill was passed in both houses of Congress which provide that North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington were eligible to be considered for admission to the Union. A constitutional convention for Washington territory met in Olympia during the summer of 1889. After a delay caused by severe fires in the business districts of Spokane, Ellensburg, and Seattle, a general election was held and the voters approved the work of the Convention. The only articles that were rejected were those dealing with women’s suffrage and prohibition. Congress and President Benjamin Harrison approved the Constitution as well, and Washington entered the Union on November 11, 1889. Montana and the two Dakotas were also admitted in 1889, and Idaho and Wyoming joined the Union the following year.

    1890 was a good year economically for Washington. Several towns grew to become small cities, and the reconstruction of the burned areas of Spokane, Seattle, and Ellensburg provided jobs and markets for many workmen and suppliers. The Great Northern Railroad would connect with Seattle in January, 1893, and the anticipation of a competitor to the Northern Pacific line brought land speculators to Puget Sound in droves. The panic of 1893 a few months later, however, hit Washington very hard. Silver mines closed, lumber mills went out of business, banks failed by the scores, farm produce wouldn’t sell, and the railroads, which had caused the brief flurry of the prosperity were blamed for the hard times. The railroads, coupled with other forms of "Big Business", were accused of destroying both public virtue and prosperity in America, causing the rise of political radicalism.

    In 1890, gold discoveries in the Yukon Valley in Canada changed the dismal picture dramatically. Almost immediately after the news of the Klondike strikes, Seattle changed from a quiet, depression-ridden seaport to a boisterous center for gold crazed adventures, determined to get to the Yukon by any means possible. Gold brought a tremendous and permanent growth to Seattle and to all of western Washington, while the Klondike served as a market for the produce of eastern Washington. The population of the State more than doubled in a decade. The importance of the Alaskan and Yukon strikes was highlighted by a world’s fair, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition held in Seattle in 1909 to celebrate the exciting developments of the previous ten years.

    Barely had the Alaskan excitement subsided when the First World War struck the economy of the State. Again there was feverish activity. Airplane manufacturers searched the forests of the region for the kinds of lumber suitable for the construction of fighting aircraft. Shipbuilding eclipsed even the furious construction schedules of the late 1890’s. The permanent population continued to increase, and, by 1920, it appeared that Washington was on the way to economic independence and political maturity.

    In the early 1920’s, however, a collapse in agricultural markets adversely affected the economy of Washington. The deforestation of the seemingly inexhaustible timber stands of the western mountains forced the mills to operate further and further from their sources of supply, increasing costs considerably. There was no heavy industry to compensate for the reduction of lumbering employment and profits, since shipbuilding had dropped abruptly after the War ended, and dockyard strikes in 1919 contributed to closing the shipyards. Several years before the Depression of 1929-1940, Washington found itself faced with a real problem of unemployment, with consequent political and social unrest. Population during the 1920’s hardly increased at all.

    The nationwide business depression struck Washington with the same savage force that those of 1873 and 1893 had done, but it lasted much longer. Agriculture, already hurting, was prostrated. Almost all lumber mills either cut back on production or closed entirely; many never reopened. Millions of dollars of federal money were poured into the State for welfare or public works to put the jobless back to work. Many of the unemployed journeyed to the Grand coulee, where they built the largest dam in the world, as a part of an enormous hydro-electric and reclamation project in the Columbia Basin. The production of cheap electric power in turn made possible the development of a light metals industry in the Pacific Northwest.

    Federal public works expenditures were further expanded after the outbreak of World War II, when, in addition to federal appropriations for power productions and reclamation, billions of dollars worth of war contracts for shipbuilding, aircraft construction, and atomic energy projects were awarded to industries in the State. Population in actual numbers exceeded even those that came during the Klondike gold rush, although the impact of the increase was not as great.

    The reclamation phase of the Columbia Basin project made startling changes in eastern Washington. In the early 1950’s, the Boeing company began producing commercial jet planes, and within fifteen years, was the largest employer in the State. By the 1970’s, the Alaskan oil discoveries added new refineries and new jobs to the economy.

    In the early 1980’s, as Washington approached the centennial of its statehood, another downturn in employment coupled with high inflation of prices again hit the State. This time, however, there was a better cushion of unemployment benefits and welfare than in any of the earlier depressions. The nuclear power industry, at one time thought to be the key to future prosperity, turned into a nightmare, with concerns about safety and the failure of the Washington Public Power Supply System.

    No one can predict the future of power production, the lumber industry, or production of airplanes. The "boosterism" of a century ago has given way to pessimism. Yet Washington still retains what it always had — a good climate, plenty of water, and recreational facilities — elements which make it one of the most attractive places in the world to live.

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