A Brief History of the Pacific Northwest

PREHISTORY Native American habitation in the Pacific Northwest dates back at least 10,000 years, perhaps 12,000 years. Before the arrival of Euro-Americans in the region that is today’s Washington and Oregon, there were hundreds of distinct Northwest tribes speaking over 50 languages. Between the 1780s, when white explorers and traders first began frequenting the Northwest coast, and the 1830s, when the first settlers began arriving, the Native American population of the Northwest was reduced to perhaps one-tenth of its historic numbers, wiped out by diseases such as smallpox, measles, malaria, and influenza. Native Americans had no resistance to these European diseases and entire tribes were decimated by fast-spreading epidemics.

Throughout the Puget Sound region, numerous small tribes subsisted primarily on salmon, halibut, shellfish, and whales. Seafood was a mainstay of the native diet. Cedar trees were the most important building material. Rot-resistant cedar wood and bark was used to build longhouses, large canoes, even clothing. The natural abundance of the region allowed many of tribes to develop complex cultures. The Columbia River tribes became the richest of the Oregon tribes through their control of Celilo Falls, the richest salmon-fishing area in the Northwest. Today, Celilo Falls are gone, inundated by the water impounded behind The Dalles Dam, completed in 1957, and the enormous fish runs that were a mainstay of Native American life have been reduced to a trickle of what they once were.

THE AGE OF EXPLORATION Though a Spanish ship reached what is now southern Oregon in 1542, the Spanish had no interest in the gray and rainy Northwest coast. Nor did famed British buccaneer Sir Francis Drake, who in 1579 sailed his ship the Golden Hind as far north as the mouth of Oregon’s Rogue River. Drake called off his explorations in the face of what he described as “thicke and stinking fogges.”

In 1775, Spanish explorers Bruno de Heceta and Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra charted much of the Northwest coast, and though they found the mouth of the Columbia River, they did not enter it. Four of the Oregon coast’s most scenic headlands—Cape Perpetua, Heceta Head, Cape Arago, and Cape Blanco—bear names from these early Spanish explorations.

Within a few years, Spanish claims to the region were challenged by English and Russian traders who found the native people eager to trade furs. The Chinese would pay astronomical prices for Northwest furs, especially sea otter pelts. By 1785, the fur trade between the Northwest and China was well underway, with the British asserting a claim to the Pacific Northwest. The Spanish and English teetered on the brink of war, but a settlement was reached in 1792 with Captain George Vancouver serving as English envoy. Vancouver (Vancouver, Washington; Vancouver, British Columbia; and Vancouver Island were all named for him) spent time exploring and mapping much of the Northwest. Though he passed off the Columbia River as unimportant, he sailed up the Strait of Juan de Fuca and discovered a large inland sea that he named Puget Sound, after one of his lieutenants.

A new player entered the Northwest arena of trade and exploration in the person of American trader Robert Gray. Risking a passage through treacherous sandbars, Gray sailed his ship, Columbia Rediviva, into the mouth of the long-speculated-upon Great River of the West, which he named the Columbia River after his ship. Gray’s discovery established the first American claim to the region.

Thomas Jefferson decided that the United States needed to find a better route overland to the Northwest and commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to lead an expedition up the Missouri River in hopes of finding a single easy portage that would lead to the Columbia River. Beginning in 1804, the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition (the Corps of Discovery) paddled up the Missouri, crossed the Rocky Mountains, and paddled down the Columbia River to its mouth. After spending the very dismal, wet winter of 1805 to 1806 at Fort Clatsop (p. ###), near today’s Astoria, Oregon, the expedition headed back east. Discoveries made by the expedition added greatly to the scientific and geographical knowledge of the continent.

In 1819, the Spanish relinquished all claims north of the present California-Oregon state line, and the Russians gave up their claims to all lands south of Alaska. This left only the British and Americans dickering for control of the Northwest.

SETTLEMENT Only 6 years after Lewis and Clark spent the winter at the mouth of the Columbia, employees of John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company managed to establish themselves at the mouth of the Columbia River on the Oregon side at a site they called Fort Astoria. With the decline of the sea otter population, British fur traders turned to beaver and headed inland up the Columbia River. In 1824, the Hudson Bay Company (HBC) established its Northwest headquarters at Fort Vancouver, 100 miles up the Columbia near the mouth of the Willamette River (today’s Vancouver, Washington). Between 1824 and 1846, when the 49th parallel was established as the boundary between British and American northwestern lands, Fort Vancouver was the most important settlement in the region. (Today, a replica of the fort has been built and is part of the Vancouver National Historic Reserve.)

By the 1830s, the future of the Northwest had arrived in the form of American missionaries, and in 1840, a slow trickle of American settlers began making the 2,500-mile journey across the continent. Their destination was the Oregon Country, which was promoted as a veritable Eden with wide expanses of land just waiting to be claimed. The small population of retired trappers, missionaries, and HBC employees living at Fort Vancouver and nearby Oregon City formed a provisional government in anticipation of the land-claim problems that would arise with the influx of settlers to the region. The losers in the land grab that ensued were, of course, the Native Americans who had lived, fished, and hunted the land for untold generations.

In 1844, Oregon City became the first incorporated town west of the Rocky Mountains. This outpost in the wilderness, a gateway to the fertile lands of the Willamette Valley, was the destination of the wagon trains that began traveling the Oregon Trail, and which each year brought more and more settlers to the region. When all the land in the Willamette Valley was claimed, settlers began fanning out to different regions of the Northwest, and during the late 1840s and early 1850s many new towns, including Seattle and Portland, were founded.

Subsequent demand for territorial status and U.S. military protection brought about the establishment of the first U.S. territory west of the Rockies. Although the line between American and British land in the Northwest had been established in 1846 at the 49th parallel (the current U.S.-Canada border), it was not until 1848 that Oregon was finally given U.S. territorial status. Washington had to wait until 1853 to officially become a territory. Oregon became a state in 1859, Washington in 1889.

In 1881, the first transcontinental railroad reached Spokane, in eastern Washington, and finally linked the Northwest with the eastern United States. In 1893, trains reached Seattle. The arrival of the railroads (and, earlier, steam ships) led to a great leap forward for the development of Washington and Oregon No longer a remote wilderness, the Pacific Northwest began to attract industry.

INDUSTRIALIZATION & THE 20TH CENTURY From the very beginning of Euro-American settlement in the Northwest, the region based its growth on a short-sighted, resource-extractive economy. The early fur traders completely wiped out Washington’s and Oregon’s sea otter population (which has since been reestablished, with otters from Alaska, off the Olympic Peninsula) and the beaver population after that. Lumber and salmon, the two natural resources that Washington and Oregon had in the greatest abundance, were both exploited relentlessly, and the history of the timber and salmon-fishing industries ran parallel to one another for more than a century. At the close of the 20th century, both industries had arrived at similar situations—severely depleted wild resources that required government intervention to preserve the remaining old-growth forests and wild salmon populations.

The 1897 gold rush in Alaska and the Klondike brought great prosperity to Seattle. However, trees were still the foundation of the state’s economy. Nurtured on steady rains, Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, western red cedar, and hemlock grew as much as 300 feet tall. Washington’s first sawmill began operation near present-day Vancouver, Washington in 1828, and between the 1850s and 1870s, Washington sawmills supplied the growing California market as well as a limited foreign market. When the transcontinental railroads arrived in the 1880s, mills began shipping to the eastern states. Oregon, too, cut down its trees and overfished its rivers, exporting both by ship to San Francisco during the gold rush years and to worldwide markets for more than 100 years.

At the outbreak of World War I, more than 20% of the forestlands in the Northwest were owned and being clear-cut by three companies—Weyerhaeuser, the Northern Pacific Railroad, and the Southern Pacific Railroad—and more than 50% of the workforce labored in the timber industry.

The timber industry has always been extremely susceptible to fluctuations in the economy and experienced a roller-coaster ride of boom and bust throughout the 20th century. Boom times in the 1970s brought on record-breaking production that came to a screeching halt in the 1980s and 1990s, first with a nationwide recession, and then with the listing of the northern spotted owl as a threatened species. By the 1980s, environmentalists, shocked by vast clear-cuts on public lands, began trying to save the last old-growth trees. Today the battle between the timber industry and environmentalists continues.

Just as trees in the Northwest were huge and plentiful, so too were the salmon. These fish, which spend their adult lives in the ocean before returning to fresh water to spawn, were the dietary mainstay of Northwest Native Americans for thousands of years before the first whites arrived in the region. However, within 10 years of the opening of the first salmon cannery in the Northwest, the fish population was severely depleted. In 1877, the first fish hatchery was developed to replenish dwindling runs of salmon. Salmon canning reached a peak on the Columbia River in Astoria in 1895 and on Puget Sound in 1913. Later in the 20th century, salmon runs would be further reduced by the construction of numerous dams on the Columbia and Snake rivers. Although fish ladders help adult salmon make their journeys upstream, the young salmon heading downstream have no such help, and a large percentage are killed by the turbines of hydroelectric dams. One solution to this problem has been the barging and trucking of young salmon downriver. Today the salmon populations of the Northwest are so diminished that entire runs of salmon have been listed as threatened or endangered.

For over 150 years, agriculture has played a major role in Oregon’s economy. Tree-cutting in the Willamette Valley south of Portland began in the 1850s and turned what had been a vast oak savannah into some of the richest farmland in the world. The subsequent damming of Northwest rivers for hydropower and irrigation also made it possible to farm high-desert lands east of the Cascades in both Oregon and Washington. Crops in the Willamette Valley now include vegetables, hazelnuts and grass seed. Orchards in the Hood Valley continue to produce rich harvests of cherries, peaches, apples, apricots and pears. Giant agribusiness is taking over much of the farming, but smaller, independent, artisanal farms are also flourishing: you’ll find their products and produce at farmer’s markets throughout the summer. In recent decades, Willamette Valley plant nurseries have become a multi-billion-dollar industry, supplying trees, shrubs, bulbs and innumerable garden plants to gardeners throughout the world.

In 1916, William Boeing launched a small seaplane from the waters of Seattle’s Lake Union and laid down the foundation for what would become the Seattle area’s single largest employer: Boeing. The company became a major employer in Seattle when it began manufacturing B-17s and B-29s during World War II and today continues to be one of the largest employers in Washington state. However, this has had its drawbacks for Seattle. The city’s fortunes were for many years so closely linked to the aircraft manufacturer that any cutback in production at Boeing had a devastating ripple effect on the local economy. And Boeing, because of its power, holds Seattle hostage in terms of tax breaks, threatening to move elsewhere if their demands are not met. However, with the global ascendancy of Bill Gates’s software giant Microsoft (based just outside Seattle), and the arrival of online shipping giant Amazon, which now has its world headquarters in the South Lake Union area of Seattle, the Seattle economy has become more tech-driven.

In Portland, Kaiser Steel played a major role in the shipbuilding boom of World War II. The war brought over 100,000 workers to the Portland shipyards—including the city’s first African-Americans—and many of the new arrivals stayed after the war was over. Today, the Portland economy is a mixture of high-tech, advertising, health care, and sports apparel and equipment. International swimwear giant Jantzen started in Portland in 1916 and for decades its name and logo were emblazoned on a famous sign at the west end of the Burnside Bridge (today Jantzen is owned by Perry Ellis International). Portland-based Columbia Sportswear began in 1938 and became a nationally recognized brand in the 1990s. Nike was founded in Portland in 1971. Underarmour is now building a headquarters in Portland, too.