Why It Started and What People Did There

A small settlement called Yakima City had existed near Ahtanum Creek since the 1860s, serving the scattered ranchers of the valley and functioning as the county seat after Yakima County was organized in 1865. Then in 1885 the Northern Pacific Railway arrived in the valley and laid out a new townsite four miles to the north — platting streets, selling lots, and offering to pay the moving costs of any resident or business from the old town willing to relocate to the new one. Most of them took the offer. The railway's town, initially called North Yakima, was incorporated in 1886 and became the real city of the valley, absorbing the commercial gravity that the old Yakima City had accumulated. In 1918 the "North" was dropped and the city became simply Yakima.

What the Northern Pacific saw in the valley was what irrigation would eventually reveal to everyone: one of the most productive agricultural environments in North America, held back only by the absence of water. The east slope of the Cascades sits in a rain shadow that makes it a near-desert — the Yakima area receives only eight inches of rainfall a year — but the Yakima River carries snowmelt from the Cascade summits all through the growing season, and the volcanic soils of the valley floor are extraordinarily fertile once that water reaches them. The first commercial fruit orchard was planted in 1887. The first irrigation canals followed in the 1880s and 1890s. The Bureau of Reclamation's Yakima Project, begun in 1906, brought engineered irrigation infrastructure that transformed the scale of what was possible.

What People Do There Now

Yakima today is the agricultural capital of eastern Washington, a city of about 100,000 that exists almost entirely in service of the extraordinary productivity of the valley around it. Washington State produces more apples than any other state in the country — a position it has held since the 1930s — and the Yakima Valley grows a disproportionate share of them, along with pears, cherries, hops (the Yakima Valley produces about three-quarters of all American hops), wine grapes, and a dozen other crops. The warehouses and packing houses and cold-storage facilities that handle this production are the valley's industrial infrastructure.

The wine industry, which began developing in the 1980s, has added a new dimension to the valley's reputation — Yakima Valley and Red Mountain appellations are now among the most respected in Washington's acclaimed wine country. The city itself reflects the diversity of the agricultural workforce: Yakima has a large Hispanic and Latino population, many of them descended from the Mexican and Mexican-American workers who came to harvest the crops and stayed to build community, and Spanish is as commonly spoken on Yakima's main streets as English. The tension between the valley's agricultural wealth and the economic conditions of its farm workforce is a persistent feature of the city's civic life.

The Yakima River still runs through the valley. The irrigation canals still carry the mountain water to the orchards. On a clear July morning, with the apples set on the trees and the hops climbing their strings and the Cascades white to the west, the valley looks exactly like what it is: one of the most productive p