Threats of depredations by warriors from native villages in northern British Columbia and southeastern Alaska spurred the US Army into building a fort at Bellingham Bay in 1855, and its presence stimulated settlement already begun with the economic promise of a sawmill. Three years later the discovery of gold in the lower Fraser River region of British Columbia brought hopeful miners streaming ashore en route to the new diggings.

    Some stayed to profit by supplying their erstwhile colleagues or to cut timber or dig coal; others trekked to the golf fields, then returned to carve out a living in the new towns fringing the bay. Some who had traveled through the San Juans on their way to the gold returned to claim homesteads and develop farms on the islands beautiful shores or--eventually--to work at canneries, quarries, and lime kilns. In 1859 the islands drew international attention when a jurisdictional dispute brought the United States and Great Britain to the brink of war. The issue was settled 13 years later when binding arbitration presided over by Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany favored the United States. The ruling settled the last of the boundary of questions that had begun nearly half a century earlier.

    On the Skagit River delta near today’s Mount Vernon and La Conner, agriculture played a dominant role after the 1870's when farmers successfully diked their fields to keep out seasonal floods and daily tides. Up the river, gold and other metals drew prospectors in the 1880s and 1890s and, at about the same time, loggers and sawmill operators tackled the awesome job of turning trees 30 feet in circumference into lumber.

    Everett and its mountain hinterland became an 1890s and early 1900s speculative playground for investors as first John D. Rockefeller and then James J. Hill developed industries. Gold from the Monte Cristo Mine east of the city spurred the first wave of excitement. Timber and sawmills produced the second, longer-lasting development.

    Descriptions of defensible harbors surrounded by the greatest timber in the world filled the accounts of English mariner Captain George Vancouver’s 1792 exploration of Puget Sound. Fifty-three years later at Tumwater (near Olympia), settlers founded the first American community on the sound’s shores, soon a handful of saw milling communities were dotting the waterways. Seattle’s founders stepped ashore in 1852; the following year Olympia became territorial capital; and in 1854 and 1855 Issac Stevens, the impetuous new young governor, hurried through a series of poorly conceived treaties with Native Americans. Uprisings began almost immediately.

    During the 1860s the Kitsap Peninsula dominated the regional economy as sawmill turned virgin timber into lumber that was shipped around the globe. California and New England investors supplied capital, and craftsmen built schooners to carry away the Northwest timber. In the 1870s California coal interests financed mines east of Lake Washington. Resulting payrolls and a shipping bonanza helped Seattle to grow into a major city.

    About the same time Tacoma outstripped other contenders by winning selection as the western terminus of the new transcontinental Northern Pacific Railroad. Wagon roads were still relatively crude, but the water highway of Puget Sound connected bustling communities around its shores. A fleet of small steamers carried freight and passengers between flag-stops and cities.

    In the 1880s Seattle’s population grew tenfold and other Puget Sound cities experienced similar gains. Populist politicians won votes, and utopian colonies sprang up. The region’s social milieu had been set on its course. With it came military emphasis starting with the 1890s establishment of a navy yard at Bremerton, continuing with the building of three cost artillery forts, the opening of Fort Lewis and McChord Airforce Base near Tacoma, the founding of an aircraft industry at Seattle, and--recently--the selection of Bangor as a nuclear submarine base. Vancouver’s eighteenth-century recognition of defensible harbors has found and expression that dominates the twentieth-century economy.