On a damp day at the waterfront, Seattle feels all glass, ferries, and rain-softened light, with the harbour pressing close and the skyline rising behind it. Yet this busy city began on a narrow stretch of land between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, where people have lived for at least four thousand years.

The Duwamish had at least seventeen villages around Elliott Bay, and the modern name comes from dᶻidᶻəlal̓ič, a Lushootseed village meaning little crossing-over place. In May 1792, George Vancouver, a Royal Navy officer charting the Pacific Northwest, became the first European to visit the area. Then in 1851 the settlers came in force: the Denny Party landed at Alki Point on the schooner Exact on November thirteenth, and after a hard winter most of them crossed the bay and tried again at what is now Pioneer Square.

That second attempt found its footing through timber. Logging became the first major industry, and Yesler Way earned the nickname Skid Road from the logs dragged downhill to Henry Yesler’s sawmill. But the new town also carried conflict. In January 1856, the Battle of Seattle ended the brief Puget Sound War, the attack was repelled, and the settlement was never attacked again.

The place kept changing names and forms. It was called Duwamps, then Seattle in honour of Chief Seattle, a prominent Duwamish and Suquamish leader. The town was incorporated in 1865, disincorporated in 1867, and incorporated again in 1869 with a mayor and council. That same year it won the nickname Queen City, later changed officially to the Emerald City in 1982.

Fire and gold made the next great turn. The Great Seattle Fire of 1889 destroyed the central business district, but a far grander centre rose in its place. Then the Klondike Gold Rush lifted Seattle into its finest early boom: on July fourteenth 1897, the S.S. Portland arrived with its famed ton of gold, and the city became the main supply point for miners heading to Alaska and the Yukon. The money was often made not by the miners, but by the people who fed and clothed them.

The twentieth century brought factories, strikes, and reinvention. Boeing helped turn Seattle into an aircraft centre after World War Two, and the city later basked in the Century twenty-one Exposition of 1962, when the Space Needle was built. Another downturn followed in the late nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies, and a billboard asked, Will the last person leaving Seattle, turn out the lights.

But the city came back again. Microsoft’s move to nearby Bellevue in 1979 helped spark a technology revival, and by the 1990s Amazon and other firms had drawn new residents and new wealth. Music gave the city another voice, from the jazz clubs that lined Jackson Street between 1918 and 1951 to grunge in the 1990s. Today, at Pike Place Market, the first Starbucks opened in 1971 still anchors that long habit of turning a corner, starting over, and growing fast.