Vancouver, Whistler & Vancouver Island - Washington, Oregon and the Pacific Northwest - page 852

the settlers renamed their village 'Seattle', in the chief's honor. Today, his grave site
lies in the cemetery behind St Peter's Church in Suquamish, just outside Seattle.
More Recent Times
By the 1880s the Northwest's port cities boomed with the region's rich agricultural, fish-
ing and logging resources. The Northern Pacific Railroad linked the Northwest to the
eastern USA, making national markets more accessible and bringing in more settlers.
Seattle became the area's most important seaport in 1897 when gold was discovered in
the Canadian Klondike and prospectors poured into the city.
The World Wars brought further economic fortune to the Pacific Northwest, when the
area became the nation's largest lumber producer and both Oregon's and Washington's
naval yards bustled, along with William Boeing's airplane factory. The region continued
to prosper through the second half of the 20th century, attracting new migrations of edu-
cated, progressively minded settlers from the nation's east and south. In the 1980s and
'90s the economy shifted to the high-tech industry, embodied by Microsoft in Seattle and
Intel in Portland.
But growth has not come without cost. The production of cheap hydroelectricity and
massive irrigation projects along the Columbia have led to the near-irreversible destruc-
tion of the river's ecosystem. Dams have all but eliminated most runs of native salmon
and have further disrupted the lives of remaining Native Americans who depend on the
river. Logging of old-growth forests has left ugly scars, while 'Silicon Forest' had its
own economic collapse at the turn of the 21st century. And Washington's Puget Sound
area and Portland's extensive suburbs are groaning under the weight of rapidly growing
population centers.
Still, the Pacific Northwest's inhabitants generally manage to find a reasonable bal-
ance between their natural resources and continued popularity. The region continues to
be one of the USA's most beautiful places to visit…and settle down.
The incidents leading up to, during and after the tragic Whitman Massacre, which had
wide-ranging repercussions in Oregon's history, are detailed at
www.oregonpioneers.com/whitman.htm .
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