Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
History
In the pantheon of world cities, 163-year-old Seattle is still in its kinder-
garten years. Although native groups have lived in and around Puget
Sound for 12 millennia, the region was still covered in thick forest when
the first colonial settlers bushwhacked their way through in 1851. And so
began a historical trajectory marked by a mixture of bravery, folly, fire, re-
birth, bust, boom and an explosion of urban growth almost unparalleled in
US history. Hold tight!
Early Exploration
The first white expedition to explore the Puget Sound area came in 1792, when the Brit-
ish sea captain George Vancouver sailed through the inland waterways of the Straits of
Juan de Fuca and Georgia. In the same year, the USA entered the competition to claim
the Northwest when Captain Robert Gray reached the mouth of the Columbia River.
The first US settlers straggled overland to the Pacific Northwest in the 1830s on the
rough tracks that would become the Oregon Trail. Following in the footsteps of Lewis
and Clark, they founded the cities of Portland (1843) and Tumwater (1846) near present-
day Olympia and began to look further north.
Luther Collins staked a land claim near Georgetown on September 14, 1851, two weeks
before the Denny party arrived at Alki. Technically, it is he, not Denny, who was Seattle's
first settler.
'New York Pretty Soon'
Arthur and David Denny were native New Yorkers who, in 1851, led a group of settlers
across the Oregon Trail with the intention of settling in the Willamette Valley. On the
way, they heard stories of good land and deep water ports along Puget Sound. When the
Denny party arrived in Portland in the fall, they decided to keep going north. The settlers
staked claims on Alki Point, in present-day West Seattle. The group named their en-
campment Alki-New York (the Chinookan word alki means 'pretty soon' or 'by and
by'). After a winter of wind and rain, the group determined that their fledgling city
needed a deeper harbor and moved the settlement to the mudflats across Elliott Bay. The
colony was renamed Seattle for the Duwamish Chief Sealth (pronounced see -aalth, with
 
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