Walking Washington's History

Ten Cities

Judy Bentley

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295806679
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

Walking Washington's History: Ten Citie s, a follow-up to Judy Bentley's bestselling Hiking Washington's History, showcases the state's engaging urban history through guided walks in ten major cities. Using narrated walks, maps, and historic photographs, Bentley reveals each city's aspirations. She begins in Vancouver, established as a fur trade emporium on a plain above the Columbia River, and ends with Bellevue, a bedroom community turned edge city. In between, readers crisscross the state, with walks through urban Olympia, Walla Walla, Tacoma, Seattle, Everett, Bellingham, Yakima, and Spokane. Whether readers pass through these cities as tourists or set out to explore their home terrain, they will discover both the visible and invisible markers of Washington history underfoot.

CHAPTER ONE

Vancouver

The First City

The towns were the spearheads of the frontier. Planted far in advance of the line of settlement, they held the West for the approaching population.

Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790–1830

Vancouver was Washington’s first city, a grand emporium on a plain above the lower Columbia River where Chinook traders, British and American explorers, fur company agents, voyageurs, Kanakas, missionaries, and settlers converged. The river made the plain an ideal location for a trading post and—in the next century—a good place to build ships during two world wars.

In the late 1700s, European and American explorers and traders sailed up and down the Northwest coast, searching for an entrance to a water route across North America. There were rumors of a mighty river of the West that led into the continent and might short-cut the long journey around Cape Horn from Europe and Boston. The offshore grayness of fog and mist made the river’s wide mouth hard to find. In April 1792, English captain George Vancouver sailed right past it. He noted in his journal a change in the sea to “river coloured water” but didn’t consider the opening “worthy of more attention” at that time.

When he returned a few weeks later, he was too late. American trader Robert Gray had noticed the outflow “of some great river” and named it after his ship, the Columbia Rediviva. Unlike Gray, however, Vancouver sent a tender—a smaller ship—over the treacherous sandbar at the river’s mouth. Under Lieutenant William Broughton, the Chatham sailed a hundred miles upstream to a point Broughton named for his captain, Vancouver Point. These explorations opened the vast watershed of the Columbia River to European trade and American settlement.

Intrigued by Gray’s discovery and still hoping for a water passage across the continent, President Thomas Jefferson sent William Clark and Meriwether Lewis overland in 1805. They followed the Missouri River west but found no easy water route until they could paddle down the Snake and Columbia Rivers to the Pacific Ocean. Returning east up the Columbia in 1806, they passed islands that obscured the Multnomah (Willamette) River coming in from the south but noticed a large plain on the north bank, a spot Lewis declared could maintain “40 or 50 thousand souls if properly cultivated.” More than a million people live on this plain today, first named Fort Plain and eventually Vancouver.

The Columbia River at Fort Plain was a confluence of cultures. Canoeing up and down the river to fish, trade, and socialize, some 16,000 Chinook-speaking Indians controlled the lower Columbia from its mouth at the Pacific Ocean to the rapids where the river flowed through the Cascade Mountains. Columbia Plateau tribes from the east followed the Klickitat Trail west over the Cascades to Alaek-ae, or “turtle place,” on the plain above the river. Long before Americans arrived, tribes had been trading with Europeans, adding scarlet and blue blankets, sailor jackets, overalls, shirts, and hats to their wardrobes.

Despite the ventures of Americans Gray, Lewis, and Clark, it was the British who first named and claimed Vancouver. The king of England had granted the Hudson’s Bay Company a monopoly on the fur trade of North America. That exclusive right had been challenged in the Oregon Country by the Northwest Company, owned by a collection of Scots without royal sanction. In 1825 the HBC merged with its rival and moved its headquarters from Hudson’s Bay 2,000 miles closer to the Pacific Ocean. Vancouver’s journal and the map Lieutenant Broughton had made when he sailed up the Columbia guided the location of the trading post. Fort Vancouver became the hub of a vast trade network that covered 700,000 square miles, from Russian Alaska to Spanish California.

Chief factor John McLoughlin, the company’s agent, ruled the empire and its web of relationships with the Indians who supplied the furs. When the fur brigades plunged down the river, bringing beaver pelts from the hinterland to be packed and shipped to markets in China and London, the fort’s population swelled to a thousand.

Chinook people benefited from the trade until epidemics of fever and ague, probably malaria, broke out from contact with foreigners in 1829 and 1830. What began as a lively interaction of cultures ended with the death of up to 90 percent of the Indian population along the river. McLoughlin wrote that “the intermittent fever is making a dreadful havoc among the natives and at this place half our people are laid up with it.” He estimated that three-quarters of the Indians in the fort’s vicinity had been “carried off.” The Chinook would never rebound to their strength and numbers at the time of contact.

A progression of missionaries made Fort Vancouver their first stop in the Pacific Northwest and found a thriving metropolis. Reverend Herbert Beaver, clergyman of the Church of England, served for two years as chaplain, but he was often at odds with McLoughlin on issues of morality and propriety. Fathers Francis Norbert Blanchet and Modeste Demers came to serve the French-Canadian Catholics who had been voyageurs for the fur company. Reverend Samuel Parker came to scout mission sites for Protestant couples who would follow.

Arriving in 1836, Narcissa Whitman described the fort as “the New York of the Pacific.” By the 1840s, however, the Hudson Bay Company’s dominance had waned. Beavers throughout the Northwest had been depleted and American settlers were moving in, attracted by a series of government land acts that promised 640 acres to those willing to build homes, plant crops, and stay. McLoughlin regularly sent HBC boats up the river to assist exhausted and hungry immigrants approaching the fort. He generously offered them food for the winter and seeds for spring planting on credit as long as they settled south of the Columbia River. Most were headed for the fertile Willamette Valley.

The United States and Great Britain had jointly occupied the Oregon Country since 1818, but the Willamette Valley was filling up, and Americans wanted the land north of the Columbia River and the ports on Puget Sound, too. In James Polk’s jingoistic 1844 presidential campaign, expansionists adopted the slogan “54–40 or fight,” referring to the 54th parallel at the southern border of present-day Alaska. After the election, Americans decided not to fight and negotiated the boundary at the 49th parallel, placing the Columbia River and Puget Sound within U.S. territory. McLoughlin moved to a homestead across the river in the Willamette Valley, and the Hudson’s Bay Company moved north across the international border. Fort Vancouver became the Vancouver Barracks, a U.S. military post. In 1851, settlers north of the Columbia met at Cowlitz Landing, on the Cowlitz River north of Vancouver, and petitioned the United States Congress to become a territory separate from Oregon. Washington Territory was created two years later, encompassing a large area that stretched to present-day Idaho and part of western Montana.

When the British left, there was hardly a town of Vancouver, just disintegrating HBC structures and a pesky potato farm. Amos and Esther Short and their eight children had migrated from Pennsylvania in 1845 and claimed land on the Columbia on the fort’s western boundary. The HBC was much annoyed by having American settlers north of the river and close to its own property. Company men tried to evict the family, harrowed their potato fields, destroyed their fences, and refused to sell them supplies, but Amos held on to plat the town he named, somewhat defiantly, Columbia City. Other settlers trickled in, and by 1857, the town incorporated as Vancouver, its name changed by the territorial legislature, with 250 people and a similar number of cows. For a brief time, Vancouver vied with Olympia to be the territorial capital, but Vancouver was deemed too close to Oregon.

As the town grew, its location on the river remained important. In 1908 the Northern Pacific Railway reached Vancouver from Pasco, and a railroad bridge crossed the Columbia River to Portland. That placed Vancouver at the intersection of both north–south and east–west transportation routes. Soon railroads dominated the waterfronts in many Puget Sound cities, and in 1911 the state authorized municipalities to create public port districts. A year later, Vancouver voters established the Port of Vancouver, continuing the tradition of international trade started by the Hudson’s Bay Company. During World War I, the port leased land to Standifer shipyards, which turned out ten merchant ships. Spruce production on the plain above the river brought thousands of soldiers to town to work as lumbermen in the U.S. Army’s Spruce Production Division.

More growth came during World War II. In 1940, the first aluminum plant in the West was opened by Alcoa in Vancouver. It benefited from the hydropower of the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams, completed on the Columbia in 1937 and 1941, respectively. The aluminum, in turn, supported the manufacture of airplanes and ships during World War II. Thousands of workers streamed to work in shipyards built by industrialist Henry Kaiser on both sides of the Columbia River.

In Vancouver, Kaiser dredged and built up land on the waterfront on the southern edge of Fort Plain. The Vancouver shipyard—or “Vanship”—produced more than 140 “Victory Ships” during the war. Of the 38,000 workers, more than half were women. The population of Clark County grew from 18,000 people in 1941 to more than 95,000 in January 1944. Workers first lived in a 7,000-bed dormitory, then in temporary housing constructed in McLoughlin Heights just north of the shipyards. After the war, wartime housing was removed, but many of the newcomers stayed. Family housing continued to fan out beyond the city’s core and away from the river. Vancouver is now the fourth-largest city in Washington, after Seattle, Tacoma, and Spokane.

As the city grew, the mighty river at its doorstep was tamed. In its natural state, the Columbia flooded often, surging across the west side of town in 1894 during its highest recorded crest, 34.4 feet above flood stage. On May 30, 1948, a flood wiped out Vanport, a wartime city just across the river in Oregon, resulting in the death of twenty Vancouver residents. That disaster led to the construction of new dams; now engineers at computers control water levels for both transport and flood control.

The Columbia bar, however, continued to impede commerce. Despite the use of pilots and the construction of jetties at the mouth of the river as early as the 1880s, the bar remains treacherous to cross and notorious for shipwrecks. Puget Sound ports eventually provided more placid access to the ocean, but Vancouver is still the third-largest port in Washington. A proposal to build a major terminal for the transfer of oil from railroad cars to barges would greatly increase the port’s capacity for oil storage, but opposition to increasing the number of coal and oil trains rumbling along the banks of the Columbia River is strong.

The river separates Washington from Oregon but also connects the two states in joint use and management. The first trains crossed the Columbia River on a bridge in 1908, replacing the ferries that had carried railcars. Automobiles crossed in 1917 on the last link in the Pacific Highway from Canada to Mexico. In 1958, another span was built alongside the original bridge; both remain today, one for northbound traffic and one for southbound, with vertical lifts and humpbacks to accommodate shipping traffic. A new bridge opened on Vancouver’s east side in 1982 to carry I-205 to Portland. Washington, Oregon, and the federal government have considered constructing a new bridge to replace the spans that carry I-5 over the river.

As Washington’s first city, Vancouver claims many firsts: first town square, first civilian hospital, and first homes for orphans, the homeless, the aged, and the insane. A walk through Vancouver begins on the river, ascends a land bridge over Highway 14, wanders through the old fur trade fort and army housing, crosses the town square and shipyard sites, and passes a commemorative boat of discovery on its return to the river, the ancient avenue of commerce. An extended walk, the Columbia River Renaissance Trail, follows the riverfront east along the water routes traveled by traders, explorers, settlers, and ships launched from the shipyards.

Cathlapotle

When Lewis and Clark canoed downriver in 1805, they saw a large village called Cathlapotle at the confluence of the Lake and Lewis Rivers with the Columbia. Fourteen houses and an estimated 900 inhabitants were spread out northwest of what is now Vancouver. Salmon, steelhead, and wapato root were plentiful; Chinook women would loosen the wapato roots underwater with their feet to harvest the nutritious tubers. On their return trip in 1806, the Corps of Discovery camped about a mile upstream from the village at a site known today as Wapato Portage.

As epidemics decimated the Chinook,...