Location: Northwest Pacific coast

Area and rank: 66,582 square miles (172,447 square kilometers); 71,303 square miles (184,675 square kilometers) including water; twentieth largest state in area

Coastline: 157 miles (253 kilometers) on the Pacific Ocean

Shoreline: 3,026 miles (4,870 kilometers)

Population and rank: 6,897,012 (2012 estimate); thirteenth largest state in population

Capital city: Olympia (46,478 people in 2010 census)

Largest city: Seattle (608,660 people in 2010 census)

Became territory: March 2, 1853

Entered Union and rank: November 11, 1889; forty-second state

Present constitution adopted: 1889

Counties: 39

State name: Washington was named for President George Washington

State nicknames: Evergreen State; Chinook State

Motto: Al-ki (American Indian word meaning “by and by”)

State flag: Dark green background with state seal

Highest point: Mount Rainier—14,410 feet (4,392 meters)

Lowest point: Pacific Ocean—sea level

Highest recorded temperature: 118 degrees Fahrenheit (48 degrees Celsius)—Ice Harbor Dam, 1961

Lowest recorded temperature: –48 degrees Fahrenheit (–44 degrees Celsius)—Mazama and Winthrop, 1968

State song: “Washington, My Home”

State tree: Western hemlock

State flower: Coast rhododendron

State bird: Willow goldfinch

State fish: Steelhead trout

National parks: Mount Rainier; North Cascades; Olympic

Washington History

Like its southern neighbor Oregon, Washington is divided into two distinct geographical parts, a wet, forested western portion, and a semi-arid east. Washington’s forests made it one of the nation’s great timber producers, while its dry eastern portion requires extensive irrigation for agricultural productivity. While it shares geographical features with Oregon and Idaho, making up the Pacific Northwest region, Washington’s social and political complexion has its own unique qualities. One reason is that unlike Oregon, Washington was not first settled by farmers.

After the earliest period, in which its white inhabitants were predominantly trappers, Washington’s early history was dominated by extraction industries, such as gold mining and logging. Later, toward the end of the nineteenth century, large industry brought with it conflict between big business and big labor, which affected the state’s social character. Later still, after the middle of the twentieth century, industries that prospered in the state on account of the Cold War left their own indelible imprint on the state’s economy, society, and politics.

Early History. The early history of the area that became Washington was dominated by the struggle for control of the region by Great Britain, Russia, and Spain, followed by the United States. By 1775 Spain was sending expeditions up the Pacific coast, mainly to secure a buffer zone between Russian and British claims and its Mexican territory. Russia asserted claims far distant from Alaska, sending landing parties as far south as California. While Spain and Russia dropped out of the competition by the end of the eighteenth century, Britain opposed its former colonies, now a scrappy young republic. The Americans, for their part, strengthened their claims to the region when, after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark arrived and wintered by the Pacific at Fort Clatsop.

In 1792, the Americans sent Captain Robert Gray to the northwest, where he discovered the Columbia River and named it after his ship. In the same year, Britain sent an expedition led by George Vancouver to the region. Members of the expedition of British captain James Cook had already discovered the value of sea otter pelts bought from American Indians and sold profitably in China. By 1818 the two nations agreed to share the region. The Pacific North West Company dominated the fur trade until 1821, when it merged with Hudson’s Bay Company, which remained the most influential non-Indian power in the area until 1846.

Native American peoples occupied a key position in the fur trade, especially in the beginning, before white trappers appeared in any numbers and before native populations became depleted. Native Americans provided sea otter pelts and other furs to white traders in exchange for manufactured goods, especially those made of metal, unknown in American Indian cultures. These included tools that added to the Native Americans’ ability to produce goods for themselves. Indians benefited from material goods, but their contact with whites proved catastrophic, since they contracted small pox and other diseases that decimated their numbers. It has been estimated that the population of Native American peoples on the northwest coast declined during the century following 1774 from about 200,000 to about 40,000, or some 80 percent. Moreover, by the 1820’s sea otters were nearly extinct.

By 1810 a second phase of the fur trade began, increasingly dominated by Europeans and centered on beaver and similar mammals. This trade was focused on inland areas and required European trading companies to establish forts and interior avenues of transportation. News of the area finally took hold of the American imagination in the East and Midwest after the success of fur-trading companies illustrated the possibilities of internal development. The stage was set for the arrival of immigrants in large numbers.

The Anglo-American condominium begun in 1818 lasted into the 1840’s. By then, however, the U.S. westward expansion, with its drive to possess the continent as its manifest destiny, brought hundreds, then thousands of American settlers to the region. During the early 1840’s, Hudson’s Bay Company, which was interested in commerce, not settlement, moved its base of operations northward, focusing on the area that became British Columbia.

Although American nationalists sought lands north of the fifty-fourth parallel, the United States, negotiating in 1846 with far-stronger Britain, settled for the forty-eighth parallel as the new boundary. Two years later the Oregon Territory, including what became Washington, was established.

From Territory to State. After the establishment of Oregon Territory in 1848, the population north of the Columbia River grew rapidly. Accordingly, in 1853 the Territory of Washington was formed. A decade later, gold strikes in the eastern portion led to its breaking off to become separately organized as Idaho Territory. Except for adjustments in Puget Sound’s San Juan Islands, Washington’s boundaries were now fixed. Sentiment for statehood strengthened during the Civil War, and in 1867 the territorial legislature urged Congress to admit a new state. Not until 1889, however, did Congress pass the required legislation for statehood, admitting Washington into the Union.

As it was growing toward statehood, Washington experienced an ugly social and moral pathology, in the form of anti-Chinese racism. When economic downturns arrived, labor unions made scapegoats of Chinese laborers, who arrived after 1840. Chinese were reviled for driving down wages, and serious incidents occurred, especially during the mid-1880’s in Seattle, Tacoma, and other cities, when Chinese were driven out. As a result, the Chinese population in the Pacific Northwest dropped sharply.

If few Chinese could resist ill treatment, the same was not always true of the state’s Native American peoples. Prophetic religious visions encouraging American Indians to live by their old customs were one form of resistance. Suing in the courts was another. Such attempts at peaceful resolution of disputes followed the armed conflicts that occurred, for example, between 1855 and 1859, when the influx of miners after gold strikes alarmed the native peoples. Relations between settlers and Native Americans were complicated by the fact that there were different points of view not only among the federal government, the settlers, and the Indians, but within each group as well. Tribes or subtribal bands sometimes fought among themselves over policy toward white society.

Policy toward the American Indians reflected both idealism and self-interest, resulting in the reservation system. Reservations were designed both to separate tribal societies from the settlers and to “civilize” them, that is, to adapt them to the European ways, “detribalizing” and assimilating them to American society. Native American children were taken to boarding schools for this purpose.

The treaty system that reflected this policy was unreliable, however, partly because the U.S. Senate frequently rejected treaties. Moreover, not all tribal members agreed with the treaties as negotiated, and discontent and confusion sometimes followed their signing. Treaties signed in 1854 and 1855 failed to prevent the conflicts of 1855–1858. Both wars and considerable crime broke out among American Indians and settlers between 1850 and 1880. Efforts were made to reform the reservation system and assimilation policy, to little effect. After the 1930’s, however, the goal of assimilation was reconsidered. By the 1970’s, Native Americans were having considerable success defending tribal rights in the courts.

1880’s to 1945. Washington inaugurated its statehood with a government that reflected its past as a frontier society. As the frontier distrusted political power, especially executive power, so did the state. Accordingly, Washington’s constitution called for a plural executive, with a number of elected offices, rather than a single, all-powerful governor. These included, besides governor and lieutenant governor, a secretary of state (chief elections officer), attorney general, treasurer, auditor, and others.

The state’s politics in the next decades followed national trends as well as home-grown movements. Populism and radical parties and sects arose between 1880 and 1920, making a lasting impact. Reformers were influential because the state saw itself in a formative, malleable stage of collective life. The state’s constitution showed strong Populist influence, distrusting big business by banning gifts or loans of public money and credit to private enterprise. The constitution’s bill of rights protected individual rights even more than the federal Bill of Rights. Not surprisingly, the People’s Party candidate for president received 22 percent of the vote in 1892.

The Progressive movement also deeply affected Washington, as it did its southern neighbor. Around the turn of the century, like Oregon, Washington voters gained the powers of initiative, referendum, and, later, recall elections. Municipal ownership of utilities and urban planning became public policy, and nature conservation, a recurring feature of the state’s politics, appeared. In addition, radicalism and utopianism had some influence; the International Workers of the World (IWW), a Marxist party founded in Chicago in 1905, was active on the political fringes prior to and just after World War I.

By the Depression years of the 1930’s, radicalism was a spent force, and, as elsewhere in the nation, federal policies attempted to come to the state’s rescue. In building dams and in other projects, federal spending became an essential element in the state’s economy, prefiguring what was to come. The most important single project was the Grand Coulee dam, but other dams were constructed. In addition, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was active in parks and forests; and there existed public housing and irrigation projects, among other federal programs.

Power generated from the Columbia River Basin was essential for the defense industries that sprang up during the war years. Among them were atomic development works at Hanford, where the plutonium for the nation’s first atomic weapons was produced. Later it was discovered that the Hanford nuclear reactor also produced much radioactive waste that endangered both people and the natural world.

Postwar Economy and Politics. After World War II, many thought the state’s economy would suffer badly from the nation’s military stand-down, but they were mistaken. The advent of the Cold War brought further defense spending to Washington, including additional development of the Hanford atomic facility. By the 1950’s the Boeing Company near Seattle was receiving large contracts from the Pentagon. Federal spending also helped the state with the continuing development of hyroelectric power and crop-irrigation facilities through dam construction. Thanks to voter loyalty, the state was gaining influence in Washington, D.C., through the reelection of its senators Warren Magnuson and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, sometimes called “the senator from Boeing.” Later, Representative Tom Foley became Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

To celebrate the success of the state and its principal city, a world’s fair was held in Seattle in 1962. Its futuristic free-standing tower, known as the Space Needle, became an icon of forward-thrusting technological prowess and self-confidence and was widely imitated around the world. As might be expected, the influence of the Boeing Company on the exposition was widely noticeable.

Later decades, however, saw a different side of Washington’s success, as environmentally conscious activists sought to counterbalance the influence of timber and other industries. This was especially evident as the state’s nuclear-power board defaulted on bonds used to build nuclear reactors, all but one of which were never completed. This was also evident as early as 1974, when Spokane opened Expo ’74, the world’s first environmental world’s fair. By the end of the century, Washington was economically thriving on a balance of “hightech” industries such as Boeing and Microsoft, tourism, and agriculture. Although anti-Asian sentiment was long outdated, civil rights issues for African Americans remained. Environmental problems, such as the decline of salmon, a state icon, also remained, and there was marked resistance to further economic development that would endanger the state’s natural environment.

Terrorism Investigations. Around the dawn of the new millennium, Washington was a focus of Islamic terrorism investigations. The state was jittery after a suspicious customs official at the border crossing in the small town of Port Angeles in late 1999 arrested a Middle Eastern man with explosives in his car. In 2002, a federal grand jury probed whether two defunct Seattle mosques had ties with the terrorist organization al-Qaeda. In July of the same year, federal agents had arrested two men said to have documents in their possession describing methods of poisoning water supplies. One of those arrested had close relations with one of the closed Seattle mosques. There were a series of other raids, indictments, and accusations of terror connections. Thus, U.S. Customs raided a Seattle-area money transfer office run by Somalis, who were also said to be linked with al-Qaeda.

Moreover, in May, 2003, Seattle held a biological and radiological terrorism drill. The terrorist threat that affected the entire West Coast of the nation erupted again in August, 2006, when part of the port of Seattle was closed after bomb-sniffing dogs reacted to shipping containers from Pakistan, though no explosives were found. The state was also subject to homegrown terrorism. In June, 2001, a bomb went off at a Tacoma clinic where abortions were sometimes performed, but no one was hurt.

During this period, officials also grew concerned over Washington’s border and its penetration by illegal immigrants. The Seattle-Vancouver, Canada, area functioned as a major port of entry for human smugglers. In 2000, the U.S. and Canada signed a border security pact. However, in the same year, continued smuggling of aliens led to the deaths of several Chinese immigrants found in Seattle shipping containers.

Boeing. Among economic problems in the state, the Boeing Company, one of the state’s principal employers, was cited by Federal Aviation Administration inspectors as having more than one hundred specific problems said to be “deeply rooted” and “systemic.” The following year, Boeing announced it was relocating corporate headquarters from Seattle, its base since 1916, to Chicago.

Politics. A controversy over the official recognition of an Indian tribe, making it eligible to open gambling facilities, erupted in 2001. In January, the outgoing Clinton administration recognized the Duwamish tribe, but the incoming Bush administration voided the decision, citing procedural errors. Privately, it was suggested that the tribe received recognition as a payoff after it contributed to the Democratic Party. The tribe traces its lineage to renowned Chief Seattle.

In electoral politics, Gary Locke, the nation’s first Chinese American governor, was reelected in 2000. In that election, Democrat Al Gore took the state’s presidential electoral votes. After confirmation by a recount, Republican U.S. senator Slade Gorton was defeated by Democrat Maria Cantwell, who spent $10 million of her own money, by just 2,229 votes, or .09 percent. Nationally, the state went to Al Gore, who received the state’s eleven electoral votes by a 50-45 percent margin.

In the 2004 governor’s race, when term limits stopped incumbent Locke from running, an exceptionally close contest put Democrat Christine Gregoire in the statehouse. Several disputed recounts found her the winner over former state senator Dino Rossi by just 129 votes. In the presidential balloting, the Democrats, headed by John Kerry, again won the state’s electoral votes, defeating George W. Bush by 53 to 46 percent.

Marijuana. In 2011, Washington decriminalized the sale of marijuana for medical purposes, and across the state, numerous dispensaries opened. However, in 2011, federal agents of the Drug Enforcement Agency began raiding several of the stores, seizing records and assets.

Fourteen Seattle-area dispensaries were raided. Advocates of the medical marijuana law noted that these raids were surprising considering that support for safe and legal access to medical marijuana runs about 85 percent in polling, while nationwide, support for such programs has been running at 70 to 80 percent. Advocates also point out that the Obama administration spent nearly $300 million on enforcement efforts in medical marijuana states, outspending the Bush administration by $100 million in under five years.

The state–federal jurisdiction issue promised to get more serious in November 2012, when Washington voters approved a plan to legalize recreational marijuana as distinct from medical marijuana. Fearing that the federal government would seek a court ruling overturning the state law, Washington members of Congress petitioned U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to adopt a moderate policy and respect the will of the voters in Washington state. However, many officials in the federal Department of Justice and in the Drug Enforcement Administration regard state recreational marijuana laws to be a major assault on federal law.

Washington Time Line

Notes for Further Study

Published Sources. Several older but still useful titles are a good option for readers interested in Washington’s history: Robert Ficken and C. P. LeWarne’s Washington: A Centennial History (1988), Mary W. Avery’s Washington: A History of the Evergreen State (1965), and Norman Clark’s Washington: A Bicentennial History (1976). Washington: A State of Contrasts (2001) by Dale A. Lambert examines the complex past and present history of Washington and its unique geographic regions. Washington’s History: The People, Land, and Events of the Far Northwest (2003)by Harry Ritter explores the events and people who helped in the development of Washington State.

A brief introduction to the study of local history is Discovering Washington: A Guide to State and Local History (1989) by Keith Petersen and Mary Reed. Resources on recreation include Ira Spring and Harvey Manning’s One Hundred Classic Hikes in Washington (1998) and Archie Satterfield and Dale Swensson’s Natural Wonders of Washington: A Guide to Parks, Preserves, and Wild Places (1996). For those touring the state or a locality, an excellent work is A Traveler’s History of Washington (1996) by Bill Gulick or Exploring Washington’s Backroads: Highways and Hometowns of the Evergreen State (2005) by John J. Deviny. The state’s geography is discussed in James Scott and R. L. Delorme’s Historical Atlas of Washington (1988). Native Seattleite Fred Moody, in his fascinating Seattle and the Demons of Ambition (2003), details the city’s boom-bust economic cycles in the last three decades of the twentieth century and their influence on social and political factors within the city, the state, and across the country.

Web Resources. For government and public resources on the Web, the state of Washington home page is a good starting point (access.wa.gov/). The Washington State Legislature site (www1.leg.wa.gov/legislature/) is extensive, offering links to elected officials, laws and agency rules, and history sites. The Washington State History Museum (www.wshs.org/) is an excellent resource for information on the state’s past, as is History Link (www.historylink.org/this_week/index.cfm), an extensive online encyclopedia.

Information on state parks may be found at Washington State Parks (www.parks.wa.gov). For resources on the history of Native Americans, including Washington’s tribes, on the Internet, users should consult the Northwest Indian Country site (www.tribaltourism.com/) or (www.kstrom.net/isk/maps/wa/wamap.html). The city of Seattle is important to the state for economic, cultural, and tourist reasons. A good site at which to learn more about the city is the official city page (www.seattle.gov/) or the city’s Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (www.seeseattle.org/).

Counties

Cities

With 10,000 or more residents

Survey Says…

This section presents current rankings from dozens of public and private sources. It shows how this state ranks in a number of critical categories, including education, job growth, cost of living, teen drivers, energy efficiency, and business environment. Sources include Forbes, Reuters, U.S. News and World Report, CNN Money, Gallup, and Huffington Post.

Demographics

Resident State and National Population, 1950–2012

Projected State and National Population, 2000–2030

Population by Age, 2012

Population by Race, 2012

Population by Hispanic Origin and Race, 2012

Vital Statistics

Death Rates by Leading Causes, 2010

Death Rates by Selected Causes, 2010

Abortion Rates, 2009

Infant Mortality Rates, 1995–2009

Marriage and Divorce Rates, 2000–2011

Economy

Nominal Gross Domestic Product by Industry, 2012

In millions of current dollars

Real Gross Domestic Product, 2000–2012

In millions of chained 2005 dollars

Personal Income Per Capita, 1930–2012

Non-Farm Employment by Sector, 2012

In thousands

Foreign Exports, 2000–2012

In millions of dollars

Energy Consumption, 2011

In trillions of BTUs, except as noted

Land and Water

Surface Area and Federally-Owned Land, 2007

In thousands of acres

Land Cover/Use of Non-Federal Rural Land, 2007

In thousands of acres

Farms and Crop Acreage, 2012

Health and Medical Care

Medical Professionals, 2012

Health Insurance Coverage, 2011

HIV, STD, and Tuberculosis Cases and Rates, 2011

Cigarette Smoking, 2011

Housing

Home Ownership Rates, 1995–2012

Home Sales, 2000–2010

In thousands of units

Value of Owner-Occupied Homes, 2011

Education

School Enrollment, 2011

Educational Attainment, 2011

Public College Finances, FY 2012

Transportation and Travel

Motor Vehicle Registrations and Drivers Licenses, 2011

Domestic Travel Expenditures, 200

In millions of dollars

Retail Gasoline Prices, 2013

Public Road Length, 2011

Crime and Law Enforcement

Full-Time Law Enforcement Officers, 2011

Prison Population, 2000–2012

Crime Rate, 2011

Incidents per 100,000 residents

Government and Finance

Local Governments by Type, 2012

State Government Revenue, 2011

In thousands of dollars, except for per capita figures

State Government Expenditures, 2011

In thousands of dollars, except for per capita figures

State Government General Expenditures by Function, 2011

In thousands of dollars

State Government Finances, Cash and Debt, 2011

In thousands of dollars, except for per capita figures

Politics

Composition of the Senate, 1995–2013

Composition of the House of Representatives, 1995–2013

Composition of State Legislature, 2004–2013

Voter Participation in Presidential Elections, 1980–2012

Governors Since Statehood