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Archaeological records date the first inhabitants of the Seattle region to 11,000-12,000 years ago. Tribes included the Suquamish, Duwamish, Nisqually, Snoqualmie, and Muckleshoot, who, despite their harsh environment, evolved into complex societies that traded with other tribes.

In 1851, Chief Sealth of the Duwamish Tribe greeted Arthur A. Denny and his group of European settlers at West Seattle’s Alki Point. Subsequently, Denny served as a delegate to the Monticello convention, which gave rise to the states of Oregon and Washington.

Seattle’s neighbor, Tacoma, was the original terminus of 1873’s Northern Pacific Railroad, linking the region to the rest of the country. By 1893, another transcontinental railroad, the Great Northern Railway, extended into Seattle, eventually supplanting Tacoma as the Puget Sound region’s main rail depot.

When timber baron Frederick Weyerhaeuser purchased nearly a million acres of railroad land in 1900, Seattle’s mushrooming logging industry turned a corner for even more rapid growth and exploitation of natural resources. Until then, entrepreneurs such as Henry Yesler ruled the wharf, and erected the pioneer town out of lumber from ancient old growth forests.

Natural resources created a boomtown whose rapid growth drew more than 1,000 new residents every month. Seattleites learned the impermanence of wooden structures in 1889, after a catastrophic fire destroyed much of the downtown area.

The Alaska Gold Rush (see Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park) officially kicked off in 1897 after a gold-filled steamship docked at Seattle’s waterfront. As the last gas for prospectors and suppliers bound for the gold fields, this city prospered as never before.

Recognizing the need for airplanes as the United States entered World War I in 1917, William E. Boeing hired pilot Herb Munter to design a sea-plane for the Navy. The rest of the giant Boeing Corporation’s success is history.

In 1975, Harvard dropout Bill Gates and his high school friend Paul Allen founded Microsoft. From the suburb of Redmond, they launched a personal computer revolution and have never looked back. Today, Microsoft’s Windows operating system is the dominant computer platform, and the company employs more than 50,000 people worldwide.

If Seattle is a boom and bust town, it certainly felt the boom in a magnitude-6.8 earthquake on the morning of February 28, 2001 (see Pioneer Square). Workers escaped their offices, if they could, to see the earth rolling, pavements cracking, and cars violently swaying. The region suffered more than $1 billion in damages.

The Seattle area lived under a dark shadow of brutal serial killings as dozens of women became victims of the Green River Killer. Twenty years of intense investigation led to the capture of Gary Ridgeway in 2001. He was convicted in 2003.