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How It Began and Why It Got So Big
Seattle was not inevitable. It is easy, looking at a map and seeing the deep harbor of Elliott Bay and the freshwater lakes behind it and the position astride the narrowing of Puget Sound, to think that a great city had to grow here, that the geography demanded it. But there were other harbors on the Sound, other sites that looked equally promising, and the history of Puget Sound settlement in the 1850s is full of places that had their moment and then yielded to the one that happened to be in the right position at the right time with the right connections.
What Seattle had was coal, and then timber, and then the railroad — not the main line, which went to Tacoma, but eventually enough rail connection to participate in the larger economy — and then, definitively, the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897. When news of the gold strike in the Yukon reached the Pacific Coast, Seattle's business community moved faster than any of its competitors to establish itself as the outfitting point for the tens of thousands of men who were going to need everything from boots to bacon to get to the goldfields. Prospectors flooded into the city, spent money in its stores, shipped out through its harbor, and when they came back — many of them broke, some of them rich — they came back through Seattle. The city's population, which had stood around 40,000 before the rush, was approaching 80,000 by 1900 and would reach 237,000 by 1910. The Klondike made Seattle the dominant city of the Pacific Northwest, a position it has never since relinquished.
The foundation was laid earlier, by the mill that Henry Yesler built at the foot of what would become Yesler Way — the original "Skid Road," down which logs were skidded to the waterfront — in 1853. The sawmill was the economic anchor for the first generation of the town, cutting the enormous Douglas fir of the surrounding hills into lumber for the California market and, later, for the construction of the city itself. The city burned in 1889 — the Great Seattle Fire, which destroyed the entire downtown — and was rebuilt in brick almost overnight, a reconstruction that changed the city's character from a rough timber town into something more permanent and more ambitious.
The 1909 Speculation Boom and the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition
By 1909, Seattle was a city in full confidence of its own future, and the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition — held that summer on the grounds of the University of Washington — was the formal announcement of that confidence to the world. More than three million visitors came between June and October. The exposition celebrated Seattle's position as the gateway to the Pacific, to Alaska, and to the trade routes of Asia; it showcased the agricultural and industrial development of the Pacific Northwest; and it left behind a permanent physical legacy in the planning framework of the University of Washington campus, which was designed around the fair's grounds by the Olmsted Brothers firm and has shaped the campus ever since.
The years around the exposition were also years of intense land speculation, the kind that the promise of continued growth always generates and that the Pacific Northwest had already experienced in several waves. The 1909 boom was built on the assumption that Seattle's growth trajectory of the previous decade — a doubling or tripling of population in a few years — would continue indefinitely, and that land in and around the city would be worth correspondingly more in five years than it was today. Subdivisions were platted in the hills surrounding the city, lots were sold on installment plans to buyers who had never seen the property, and the machinery of promotion worked overtime to assure investors that they were participating in the founding of the greatest city in the American West.
The speculation was real, and some of it was justified — Seattle did continue to grow. But the pace of the boom years could not be sustained, and the inevitable correction in the early 1910s left many investors holding lots on hillsides that the streetcar lines had not reached and might not reach for years. King County's landscape still carries the traces of those 1909 subdivisions: streets platted on grades too steep for practical construction, lot lines that run at odd angles to the actual terrain, the ghost infrastructure of a speculation that was only partly realized.
Seattle Today
Seattle is a city of nearly 750,000, the center of a metropolitan area of four million and the economic heart of one of the most productive regional economies in the world. The aerospace industry — Boeing, headquartered here since 1916, still manufacturing here in diminished but real form — was the city's industrial foundation for most of the twentieth century. The technology industry, centered on Microsoft in the suburbs and Amazon in the South Lake Union neighborhood and the extraordinary cluster of tech companies that followed them, has defined the city's economy since the 1990s and transformed its landscape almost as dramatically as the 1889 fire. Elliott Bay is still a working port. The Pike Place Market still sells fish and flowers and produce above the waterfront. The Olympic Mountains still rise across the Sound on clear days, blue-white with winter snow.
The city that Henry Yesler's mill made is now one of the fastest-growing and most expensive cities in the United States, a transformation that its original settlers — men who were trying to get a timber town established on the edge of the known world — could not have imagined. But the essential fact that drove the original settlement is still true: this is an extraordinary piece of geography, on
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