|
Mount Rainier
National wildlife refuges
23 National Wildlife Refuges are
located (at least partly) in Washington including:
Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge
Little Pend Oreille National Wildlife Refuge
Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge
Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge
Saddle Mountain National Wildlife Refuge
San Juan Islands National Wildlife Refuge
Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge
Willapa National Wildlife Refuge
Other federally protected lands
Other protected lands of note include:
Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area
Ebey's Landing National Historical Reserve
Fort Vancouver National Historic Site
Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park
Lake Chelan National Recreation Area
Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area
Fort Worden State Park[8]
Ross Lake National Recreation Area
San Juan Island National Historical Park
Whitman Mission National Historic Site
17 National Natural Landmarks
History
Prior to the arrival of explorers from
Europe, the region had many established tribes of Native Americans,
notable for their totem poles and their ornately carved canoes and
masks. Prominent among their industries were salmon fishing and, notably
among the Makah, whale hunting. The peoples of the Interior had a very
different subsistence-based culture based on hunting, food-gathering and
some forms of agriculture, as well as a dependency on salmon from the
Columbia and its tributaries. The smallpox epidemic of the 1770s
devastated the Amerindian population.
The first European record of a landing
on the Washington coast was by Spanish Captain Don Bruno de Heceta in
1775, on board the Santiago, part of a two-ship flotilla with the
Sonora. They claimed all the coastal lands up to Prince William Sound in
the north for Spain as part of their claimed rights under the Treaty of
Tordesillas, which they maintained made the Pacific a "Spanish lake" and
all its shores part of the Spanish Empire.
In 1778, British explorer Captain
James Cook sighted Cape Flattery, at the entrance to the Strait of Juan
de Fuca, but Cook thought the strait did not exist. It was not
discovered until Charles William Barkley, captain of the Imperial Eagle,
sighted it in 1787. The straits were further explored by Spanish
explorers Manuel Quimper in 1790 and Francisco de Eliza in 1791, and
British explorer George Vancouver in 1792.
The British-Spanish Nootka Convention
of 1790 ended Spanish claims of exclusivity and opened the Northwest
Coast to explorers and traders from other nations, most notably Britain
and Russia as well as the fledgling United States. American captain
Robert Gray (for whom Grays Harbor County is named) then discovered the
mouth of the Columbia River. He named the river after his ship, the
Columbia. Beginning in 1792, Gray established trade in sea otter pelts.
The Lewis and Clark Expedition entered the state on October 10, 1805.
Explorer David Thompson, on his voyage
down the Columbia River camped at the junction with the Snake River on
July 9, 1811 and erected a pole and a notice claiming the country for
Great Britain and stating the intention of the North West Company to
build a trading post at the site.
The UK and the USA agreed to what has
since been described as "joint occupancy" of lands west of the
Continental Divide to the Pacific Ocean as part of the Anglo-American
Convention of 1818, which established the 49th Parallel as the
international boundary west from Lake of the Woods to the Rocky
mountains. Resolution of the territorial and treaty issues, west to the
Pacific, were deferred until a later time. Spain, in 1819, ceded their
rights north of the 42nd Parallel to the United States, although these
rights did not include possession.
Negotiations with Great Britain over
the next few decades failed to settle upon a compromise boundary and the
Oregon boundary dispute was highly contested between Britain and the
United States. Disputed joint-occupancy by Britain and the U.S. lasted
for several decades. With American settlers pouring into Oregon Country,
Hudson's Bay Company, which had previously discouraged settlement
because it conflicted with the fur trade, reversed its position in an
attempt to maintain British control of the Columbia District. Fur
trapper James Sinclair, on orders from Sir George Simpson, Governor of
the Hudson's Bay Company, led some 200 settlers from the Red River
Colony west in 1841 to settle on Hudson Bay Company farms near Fort
Vancouver. The party crossed the Rockies into the Columbia Valley, near
present-day Radium Hot Springs, British Columbia, then traveled
south-west down the Kootenai River and Columbia River. Despite such
efforts, Britain eventually ceded all claims to land south of the 49th
parallel to the United States in the Oregon Treaty on June 15, 1846.
In 1836, a group of missionaries
including Marcus Whitman established several missions and Whitman’s own
settlement Waiilatpu, in what is now southeastern Washington state, near
present day Walla Walla County, in territory of both the Cayuse and the
Nez Perce Indian tribes. Whitman’s settlement would in 1843 help the
Oregon Trail, the overland emigration route to the west, get established
for thousands of emigrants in following decades. Marcus provided medical
care for the Native Americans, but when Indian patients – lacking
immunity to new, ‘European’ diseases – died in striking numbers, while
at the same time many white patients recovered, they held ‘medicine man’
Marcus Whitman personally responsible, and murdered Whitman and twelve
other white settlers in the Whitman massacre in 1847. This event
triggered the Cayuse War between settlers and Indians.
Fort Nisqually, a farm and trading
post of the Hudson's Bay Company and the first European settlement in
the Puget Sound area, was founded in 1833. Black pioneer George
Washington Bush and his Caucasian wife, Isabella James Bush, from
Missouri and Tennessee, respectively, led four white families into the
territory and founded New Market, now Tumwater, in 1846. They settled in
Washington to avoid Oregon's discriminatory settlement laws. After them,
many more settlers, migrating overland along the Oregon trail, wandered
north to settle in the Puget Sound area.
In 1852, people from all over what was
to become Washington state gathered in Monticello (now Longview) to
draft a memorandum to Congress. The memorandum expressed a desire to be
granted statehood under the name of Columbia. This meeting came to be
known as the Monticello Convention. The Convention's requests were met
favorably in Congress, but it was decided that a state named Columbia
might be confused with the preexisting District of Columbia. In a manner
which strangely enough did not solve the problem of being confused with
the nation's capital, the state was instead named Washington in honor of
the first U.S. president. Washington became the 42nd state in the
United States on November 11, 1889.
Early prominent industries in the
state included agriculture and lumber. In eastern Washington, the Yakima
River Valley became known for its apple orchards, while the growth of
wheat using dry-farming techniques became particularly productive. Heavy
rainfall to the west of the Cascade Range produced dense forests, and
the ports along Puget Sound prospered from the manufacturing and
shipping of lumber products, particularly the Douglas-fir. Other
industries that developed in the state included fishing, salmon canning
and mining.
For a long period, Tacoma was noted
for its large smelters where gold, silver, copper and lead ores were
treated. Seattle was the primary port for trade with Alaska and the rest
of the country, and for a time it possessed a large shipbuilding
industry. The region around eastern Puget Sound developed heavy industry
during the period including World War I and World War II, and the Boeing
company became an established icon in the area.
During the Great Depression, a series
of hydroelectric dams were constructed along the Columbia river as part
of a project to increase the production of electricity. This culminated
in 1941 with the completion of the Grand Coulee Dam, the largest
concrete structure in the United States.
During World War II, the state became
a focus for war industries, with the Boeing Company producing many of
the nation's heavy bombers and ports in Seattle, Bremerton, Vancouver,
and Tacoma were available for the manufacture of warships. Seattle was
the point of departure for many soldiers in the Pacific, a number of
which were quartered at Golden Gardens Park. In eastern Washington, the
Hanford Works atomic energy plant was opened in 1943 and played a major
role in the construction of the nation's atomic bombs.
On May 18, 1980, following a period of
heavy tremors and eruptions, the northeast face of Mount St. Helens
exploded outward, destroying a large part of the top of the volcano.
This eruption flattened the forests, killed 57 people, flooded the
Columbia River and its tributaries with ash and mud, and blanketed large
parts of Washington and other surrounding states in ash, making day look
like night.
|
