Seattle, WA
Seattle, chief city of the state of Washington, U.S., seat (1853) of King County, the largest metropolis of the Pacific Northwest, and one of the largest and most affluent urban centers in the United States. A major port of entry and an air and sea gateway to Asia and Alaska, Seattle lies alongside Puget Sound, a deep inland arm of the northern Pacific Ocean, and is at the center of a conurbation that is defined roughly by Everett to the north, Bellevue to the east, and Tacoma to the south.
The city was settled on November 13, 1851, at what is now West Seattle. It was relocated the following year to a site across Elliott Bay near a Duwamish Indian village. It owes its name to the Native American leader Seattle, chief of the Duwamish, Suquamish, and other tribes of the Puget Sound area. Areas of great natural beauty, including the densely forested Olympic Peninsula and the Cascade Range, surround the city. Its urban center, dominated by tall skyscrapers that overlook Elliott Bay and enhanced by the city’s abundant parks and neighborhoods, also offers a handsome prospect.
Like other western cities in the United States, Seattle commands the resources of a broad hinterland, one that extends far east to the Great Plains of Montana. Linked by road, rail, ship, and air to global distribution networks, the city has grown to take on international economic importance, a development that owes much to Seattle’s role as one of the world’s leading centers for the manufacture of high technology and for Internet-based commerce. Inc. town, 1865; city, 1869. Area 83.9 square miles (217.3 square km). Pop. (2000) 563,374; Seattle-Bellevue-Everett Metro Division, 2,343,058; Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue Metro Area, 3,043,878; (2010) 608,660; Seattle-Bellevue-Everett Metro Division, 2,644,584; Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue Metro Area, 3,439,809.
People
Since Seattle’s settlement by Americans of European birth or descent in the mid-19th century, that population has remained in the majority. In the early 21st century they made up slightly more than two-thirds of the central city’s population, a figure that rose to more than about three-fourths in the neighboring suburbs of King County. Even so, Seattle is a mix of peoples, cultures, and religions and has a higher level of ethnic diversity than is to be found elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest.
There are few notable ethnic divisions or ongoing controversies today, although, like other major American cities, Seattle reveals a past marred by racial prejudice. This was true early on between settlers from the United States and the area’s Native American population, some of whom were removed from traditional territories to inland reservations in the wake of the Indian wars of the 1850s and ’60s. Native Americans were discouraged from living among the settlers throughout the 19th century. Even today, the Native American population is small, representing just a fraction of the city’s total population.
Similarly, Seattle’s African American population was small until World War II; it grew from about 3,800 in 1940 to more than 30,000 by 1945, the result of an abundance of jobs in the defense and transport industries. In the period immediately after the war, the African American population declined but remained significant at about 16,000. Largely confined in the 19th century to the harborside area of the city called Skid Road, African Americans faced a pattern of discrimination that was severe even by the discriminatory standards of the American West of the time. For example, they were forbidden to enter skilled-trade unions until the late 1940s, and segregation in housing and public services persisted until well into the 1950s. In the early 21st century, African Americans made up a little under one-tenth of greater Seattle’s population, with about half of them living in the suburbs.
Seattle’s Asian population is slightly larger than the African American population. The Chinese, who had settled in the area in small numbers in the early 1800s, first arrived in appreciable numbers in the 1870s to work in service jobs and in the lumber industry, which paid them substantially less than their European-descended counterparts; in later years they made great contributions to the building of the transcontinental railroad. During an economic downturn in the mid-1880s, these Chinese immigrants were accused of taking jobs away from the majority population and were subsequently driven out of the city through a series of destructive anti-Chinese riots. Most of the immigrants fled to San Francisco, where they faced somewhat less-violent, though still persistent, opposition. Seattle’s Asian population is concentrated in the downtown International District, but it has begun to extend throughout the metropolitan area. The majority are of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and Vietnamese origin or descent, though virtually all Asian nations are represented in Seattle. Hispanics account for a smaller proportion of the population, although their number is growing. Most Spanish-speaking newcomers are of Mexican descent or are recent arrivals from Mexico itself; others are from Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other Latin American countries. Many Hispanic immigrants have settled in the South Park neighborhood west of the Duwamish Waterway.
Among Seattleites of European extraction, the dominant religion is Protestantism; the Roman Catholic population is also large, and, owing to a well-established eastern European immigrant community, the Orthodox church has many adherents. Seattle also has a relatively large Jewish community, whose presence in the city dates to the 1860s. The first Jewish congregation was established in 1889 and built the city’s first synagogue in 1892. A significant proportion of Seattleites, however, profess no religion; although statistics on the question are inexact, statewide religious surveys reveal that anywhere from one-sixth to one-fourth of Washingtonians are atheists, agnostics, or otherwise unaffiliated, and Seattle’s liberal social and political milieu suggests that the city has at least the same proportion of nonreligious citizens.
History of Seattle
Early peoples and exploration
The Puget Sound region has been inhabited by humans for at least 12,000 years. By the time of the European arrival in North America, it was home to many distinct cultures, most of which had in common a fishing and hunting and gathering economy and some form of the gift-exchange system called the potlatch. When Europeans first explored the area of what is now Seattle, they encountered members of the Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka), Suquamish, Duwamish, Coast Salish, Makah, Quinault, and Chinook peoples, all of whom occasionally warred among themselves but were generally peaceful toward the newcomers.
The early modern history of the Seattle area, like that of the Northwest generally, is closely connected with expeditionary efforts to find the Northwest Passage and the subsequent development of the overseas trade with North Asia. Explorers in the service of Spain, notably Juan de Fuca, sailed along the Pacific coast of Washington and entered the far reaches of Puget Sound, as did Russian traders and explorers. However, Great Britain was the first European power to command the systematic exploration of the region. Spurred by Capt. James Cook’s reports of a thriving local market in sea otter skins that were traded with Russian and Chinese adventurers, the admiralty sent an experienced sailor, George Vancouver, to map the area and locate the Northwest Passage. Vancouver arrived in 1792 and named the inland sea for his second lieutenant, Peter Puget. Vancouver’s reports on the region’s economic possibilities and natural beauty encouraged further British exploration, but Britain’s nominal control over the area effectively ended with the arrival of American explorers, trappers, and traders in the following decade.
Settlement
In 1851 about two dozen settlers from Illinois, traveling aboard the schooner Exact via Portland in the Oregon Territory (where they had originally intended to settle), landed at Alki Point in what is now West Seattle. They soon established a community, the first permanent non-Native American settlement in the Seattle area, and began a logging operation. The beach at Alki Point proved to be too shallow to accommodate larger oceangoing timber transport vessels, so the following year the group searched for deeper anchorage in Puget Sound from Dash Point (near present-day Tacoma) to just beyond the mouth of the Duwamish River. They relocated their settlement near a Duwamish Indian village, Duwamps. (The site is now preserved at Pioneer Square, on the southern end of the modern downtown district.)
The new town was laid out in 1853 and initially was named for the neighboring Duwamish village, but it was later renamed to honor the leader of local Native American tribes, Seattle (Sealth), who had shown considerable hospitality to the settlers. City leaders faced disappointment that year when the Washington territorial government determined that its capital would be built in Olympia (although there was a short-lived movement in 1860 to make Vancouver the capital). Seattle, however, was named as the site for the University of Washington, founded in 1861, which proved to be of great significance to the city’s development. There were tense encounters with Native Americans, including an armed attack on the town of Seattle in 1856; the presence of the gunship Decatur and the arrival of U.S. ground forces ended the confrontation.
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