Population Growth in the Puget Sound Region

Abstract

Acting upon the suggestion of ter highway. News of the discov an English geographer that ninetyery of gold in California came by nine percent of geography can be boat in 1848 and almost depopulat expressed in maps, a series of seved the struggling settlements. A en dot and circle maps has been territorial census taken in 1849 prepared to show the growth of showed 304 people in all Oregon Puget Sound cities by census denorth of the Columbia River, only cades from 1870 to 1930. The re189 of whom were American citi marks that follow represent an atzens. By 1851 many of the origin tempt to evaluate some of the geoal settlers had returned from the graphic conditions that help to exgold fields bringing with them not plain the facts thus illustrated. only increased capital and new re Old Fort Ni squally, the first cruits> but what was more valu white settlement on Puget Sound, able> knowledge that San Fran was established by the Hudson's Cisco offered a ready market for Bay Fur Co. as an agricultural stajbe mb€T aac* agricultural pro tion and transfer point in 1833. ducts of the Sound Region. The The permanent occupation of the federal census of 1850 had already region began a few years later, reflected this return, a total of however, through the expansion of i ft P®r®ons bein£ counted north American settlement northward °* tbe Columbia, from the Willamette Valley. TurnThe decade from 1850 to 1860 water, at the head of Budd's Inlet was the pioneer period of settle where the eighty-five foot fall of ment in the Puget Sound Region, the Deschutes River within three The economic possibilities of the hundred feet provided power for Sound littoral were thoroughly in a mill site, was settled in 1845. vestigated and their development From this location contact with begun. By 1855 there Were six the -Columbia River settlements teen saw-mills in operation at wide was relatively easy by way of the ly scattered locations ; crews of numerous prairies and the Cowlitz men at work getting out logs, piles River. Fertile prairies nearby enand ship's spars along the water's couraged subsistence agriculture, edge; coal had been discovered at difficult elsewhere along the heavseveral easily accessible locations ily wooded shores of the Sound. and was soon being shipped in The equivalent of a cash crop exsmall quantities to California ; in isted in hand-split shingles from iad, the economic life of the region straight grained Western Red Cewas well established. By 1860 there dar which could be exchanged for were 11,000 people in Washington supplies at the Hudson's Bay Co. Territory, about half of whom were store at Fort Nisqually. located in the Sound region. Once the westward moving wave The development of towns pro of American settlement had reachceeded slowly during the next two ed Puget Sound, it spread rapidly decades. The census of 1870 shows along the shores of this great waonly two cities with a population