Topic: Exploration
The Columbia River Treaty, signed in 1961 and ratified in 1964, was a landmark event in the joint U.S.-Canadian possession of the Columbia River. Yet for most of the river's vast history, the notion o...
The Donation Land Law of 1850, or Oregon Land Law, permitted settlers on unsurveyed lands to select claims of 320 acres per settler (640 acres per married couple) provided they resided there for four ...
In A. D. 458, a Chinese adventurer named Hwui Shan crossed the Pacific to Mexico, and then followed the Japan current north to Alaska. Centuries later, in September 1513, Vasco Nunez de Balboa "discov...
Fort Colvile, located near Kettle Falls, was established by the British Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) in 1825 when it moved its upper Columbia Basin fur-trading operations to this new location from Spoka...
Fort Okanogan was the first American outpost in what is now the state of Washington. Established in 1811 by representatives of John Jacob Astor's Pacific Fur Company, the "fort" was a modest affair, i...
Washington state has fossils ranging in age from 12,000 years old to more than 500 million years old. People have made use of them for thousands of years, but not until non-Native people arrived were ...
George Vancouver's voyage of 1791-1795 was about the exploration of a new world and staking England's claim there; about cultural encounters and exchanges of knowledge and ideas. But in terms of looki...
The Hudson's Bay Company, a fur-trading enterprise headquartered in London, began operations on the shores of Hudson Bay in 1670. During the next century and a half, it gradually expanded its network ...
This is an account by Gus A. Temple of a March 1885 journey from Puyallup (in present-day Pierce County) to Davis Lake Valley in east Lewis County near present-day Morton. Temple was 14 years old at t...
In May 1803, the United States purchased Louisiana from France. The doubling of U.S. territory caused President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) to send Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) on a westward expediti...
Alessandro Malaspina (1754-1810), an Italian explorer who sailed under the Spanish flag, is not as well-known as others who explored the Northwest Coast in the late eighteenth century. But like contem...
Mexicans first moved to Washington Territory in the 1860s, one family raising sheep in the Yakima valley and another operating a mule pack train. In the twentieth century, particularly after the start...