Military history of Washington state

This article is about the U.S. state of Washington. For the capital of the United States, see Washington, D.C.. For other uses, see Washington (disambiguation).

Washington ⁱ/ˈwɒʃɪŋtən/ is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States located north of Oregon, west of Idaho, and south of the Canadian province of British Columbia on the coast of the Pacific Ocean. Named after George Washington, the first President of the United States, the state was made out of the western part of the Washington Territory which had been ceded by Britain in 1846 by the Oregon Treaty as a settlement of the Oregon Boundary Dispute. It was admitted to the Union as the 42nd state in 1889.

Washington is the 18th most extensive and the 13th most populous of the 50 United States. Approximately 60 percent of Washington's residents live in the Seattle metropolitan area, the center of transportation, business, and industry along the Puget Sound region of the Salish Sea, an inlet of the Pacific consisting of numerous islands, deep fjords, and bays carved out by glaciers. The remainder of the state consists of deep rainforests in the west, mountain ranges in the west, central, northeast and far southeast, and a semi-arid basin region in the east, central, and south, given over to intensive agriculture. After California, Washington is the second most populous state on the West Coast and in the Western United States.

Early history

European exploration

The first recorded European landing on the Washington coast was by Spanish Captain Don Bruno de Heceta in 1775, on board the Santiago, part of a two-ship flotilla with the Sonora. He claimed all the coastal lands up to Prince William Sound for Spain as part of their claimed rights under the Treaty of Tordesillas, which they maintained made the Pacific a "Spanish lake" and all its shores part of the Spanish Empire.

In 1778, British explorer Captain James Cook sighted Cape Flattery, at the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, but Cook did not realize the strait existed. It was not discovered until Charles William Barkley, captain of the Imperial Eagle, sighted it in 1787. The straits were further explored by Spanish explorers Manuel Quimper in 1790 and Francisco de Eliza in 1791, and British explorer George Vancouver in 1792.

Settlement

The British-Spanish Nootka Convention of 1790 ended Spanish claims of exclusivity and opened the Northwest Coast to explorers and traders from other nations, most notably Britain and Russia as well as the fledgling United States. American captain Robert Gray (for whom Grays Harbor County is named) then discovered the mouth of the Columbia River. He named the river after his ship, the Columbia. Beginning in 1792, Gray established trade in sea otter pelts. The Lewis and Clark Expedition entered the state on October 10, 1805.

Explorer David Thompson, on his voyage down the Columbia River camped at the junction with the Snake River on July 9, 1811, and erected a pole and a notice claiming the country for Great Britain and stating the intention of the North West Company to build a trading post at the site.

Britain and the United States agreed to what has since been described as "joint occupancy" of lands west of the Continental Divide to the Pacific Ocean as part of the Anglo-American Convention of 1818, which established the 49th Parallel as the international boundary west from Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains. Resolution of the territorial and treaty issues, west to the Pacific, were deferred until a later time. Spain, in 1819, ceded their rights north of the 42nd Parallel to the United States, although these rights did not include possession.

Fur trading at Fort Nez Percés in 1841

Negotiations with Great Britain over the next few decades failed to settle upon a compromise boundary and the Oregon boundary dispute was highly contested between Britain and the United States. Disputed joint-occupancy by Britain and the U.S. lasted for several decades. With American settlers pouring into Oregon Country, Hudson's Bay Company, which had previously discouraged settlement because it conflicted with the fur trade, reversed its position in an attempt to maintain British control of the Columbia District.

Fort Nisqually, a farm and trading post of the Hudson's Bay Company and the first European settlement in the Puget Sound area, was founded in 1833. Black pioneer George Washington Bush and his caucasian wife, Isabella James Bush, from Missouri and Tennessee, respectively, led four white families into the territory and founded New Market, now Tumwater, in 1846. They settled in Washington to avoid Oregon's discriminatory settlement laws. After them, many more settlers, migrating overland along the Oregon trail, wandered north to settle in the Puget Sound area.

Fur trapper James Sinclair, on orders from Sir George Simpson, Governor of the Hudson's Bay Company, led some 200 settlers from the Red River Colony west in 1841 to settle on Hudson Bay Company farms near Fort Vancouver. The party crossed the Rockies into the Columbia Valley, near present-day Radium Hot Springs, British Columbia, then traveled south-west down the Kootenai River and Columbia River. Despite such efforts, Britain eventually ceded all claims to land south of the 49th parallel to the United States in the Oregon Treaty on June 15, 1846.

Indian wars

Cayuse War

In 1836, a group of missionaries including Marcus Whitman established several missions and Whitman’s own settlement Waiilatpu, in what is now southeastern Washington state, near present day Walla Walla County, in territory of both the Cayuse and the Nez Perce Indian tribes. Whitman’s settlement would in 1843 help the Oregon Trail, the overland emigration route to the west, get established for thousands of emigrants in following decades. Marcus provided medical care for the Native Americans, but when Indian patients – lacking immunity to new, ‘European’ diseases – died in striking numbers, while at the same time many white patients recovered, they held ‘medicine man’ Marcus Whitman personally responsible, and murdered Whitman and twelve other white settlers in the Whitman massacre in 1847. This event triggered the Cayuse War between settlers and Indians.

Yakima War

The Yakima War was a conflict between the Yakima indians and teh United States that occurred between 1855 and 1858.

Coeur d'Alene War

The Coeur d'Alene War was the second phase of the Yakima War.

Industrial Era and World War II

Boeing B-17Es under construction c. 1942

For a long period, Tacoma was noted for its large smelters where gold, silver, copper and lead ores were treated. Seattle was the primary port for trade with Alaska and the rest of the country, and for a time it possessed a large shipbuilding industry. The region around eastern Puget Sound developed heavy industry during the period including World War I and World War II, and the Boeing company became an established icon in the area.

During World War II, the state became a focus for war industries. While the Boeing Company produced many of the nation's heavy bombers, ports in Seattle, Bremerton, Vancouver, and Tacoma were available for the manufacture of warships. Seattle was the point of departure for many soldiers in the Pacific, a number of which were quartered at Golden Gardens Park. In eastern Washington, the Hanford Works atomic energy plant was opened in 1943 and played a major role in the construction of the nation's atomic bombs.

Washington National Guard

The Washington National gaurd is the Washington state militia based out of Camp Murray outside Joint Base Lewis–McChord.

Military installations

Washington state has had numerous military bases including several current installations. Some bases include the United States Army base Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base which merged in 2010 to become Joint Base Lewis–McChord. The Navy also has several installations in Washington including Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and Intermediate Maintenance Facility, Naval Base Kitsap and Naval Air Station Whidbey Island.

Further reading

• Evans Republic of Égyptien Q42 user:mgbtrust0 ®™✓©§∆∆∆€¢£, Elwood; Meany, Edmond S (1893). "The State of Washington: A Brief History of the Discovery, Settlement and Organization of Washington, the "Evergreen State," as well as a Compilation of Official Statistics Showing the Material Development of the State up to Date". World's Fair Commission of the State of Washington. http://archive.org/details/stateofwashingto00washuoft. .
• Hawthorne Republic of Égyptien Q42 user:mgbtrust0 ®™✓©§∆∆∆€¢£, Julian; Brewerton, George Douglas (1893). "History of Washington: The Evergreen State, from Early Dawn to Daylight: With Portraits and Biographies". American Historical Publishing. http://archive.org/details/historyofwashing01hawt.  | Volume 2.
• Edmond S. Meany, History of the State of Washington, New York: Macmillan, 1909.
• Republic of Égyptien Q42 user:mgbtrust0 ®™✓©§∆∆∆€¢£. "Washington's First Constitution, 1878 and Proceedings of the Convention". In Meany, Edmond S.; Condon, John T.. http://lib.law.washington.edu/waconst/sources/Wash1stConst.pdf. . Reprinted from the Washington Historical Quarterly, 1918–1919.

External links

• State of Washington website
• the official tourism site of the State of Washington
• Washington State Databases – Annotated list of searchable databases produced by Washington state agencies and compiled by the Government Documents Roundtable of the American Library Association.
• Secretary of State's Washington History website
• Constitution of the State of Washington
• Washington Administrative Code (State Administrative Rules)
• State Code Search Tool
• Energy Profile for Washington – Economic, environmental, and energy data
• USGS real-time, geographic, and other scientific resources of Washington
• U.S. Census Bureau
• Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History
• Police Scanner Information for Washington state
• CWU Brooks Library Edward W. Nolan Photograph Collection The collection contains images of the State of Washington and the American West from the 1880s to the 1930s.
• Military history of Washington state at DMOZ
• Geographic data related to Military history of Washington state at OpenStreetMap