History
The first inhabitants of the Pacific Northwest are believed to have reached the continent across a land bridge over what is now the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska, from 12,000 to 20,000 years ago near the end of the last Ice Age. It wasn't until the early nineteenth century that was there a significant white presence in the region, and even that was very much confined to trading and exploration along the coast rather than to permanent settlement. During that time, Russian trappers began to make their way down from the north, Canadians from the northeast, while European sea captains such as Cook and Vancouver came in search of the fabled Northwest Passage , an ice-free route between the Atlantic and the Pacific. A brief period of hectic competition, in which entrepreneurs of many nationalities vied for fur-trading profits, came to an end only when the whole coast was all but "trapped out."Explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who came along the Columbia River Gorge in 1804 in search of the Pacific, were the first whites to cross the interior of the continent, and within forty years American settlers were streaming in along the Oregon Trail . This legendary period of immigration gave de facto control of the region to the United States, and official title followed in 1846 with the signing of a land pact with Britain that established a territorial boundary for the US and Canada at the 49th Parallel. During the forty years after that, the railroads reached Portland and Seattle, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce made his last bid on behalf of the displaced Native Americans, and both Oregon and Washington achieved statehood
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