Cultural institutions

Washington residents pursue a wide range of interests in the fine arts. The Seattle Symphony, the Seattle Opera Association, and the Seattle Repertory Theatre draw national attention. The School of Drama at the University of Washington pioneered modern arena staging. Several smaller cities have orchestras and drama groups. Among the major art galleries and museums, the Seattle Art Museum has extensive collections of Asian art. The Thomas Burke Memorial Washington State Museum on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus has an important collection relating to Pacific Northwest Indians. Also of interest are the Museum of History and Industry and the Pacific Science Center, both in Seattle. Among important historical museums is the Washington State Historical Society Museum in Tacoma.

The first library in the state, the Washington State Library in Olympia, was initially funded under a provision of the Territorial Act of 1853. Rapid development of the public library system occurred in the first decade of the 20th century, when the Carnegie Foundation provided building funds. Noteworthy are the two state university libraries, the Washington State Archives, and the Seattle Public Library system, whose architectural centrepiece is the Central Library building, designed by Rem Koolhaas with the participation of Seattle native Joshua Ramus.

Sports and recreation

The most popular spectator sport in Washington is arguably football, which was first played by the University of Washington only 17 days after Washington achieved statehood in 1889. Over the course of the 20th century, the University of Washington built one of the most storied college football programs on the West Coast, with numerous Rose Bowl victories and a national championship in 1991 to its credit. Collegiate teams—including Washington State University, a member of the Pacific-12 Conference, like the University of Washington, which it plays annually for the Apple Cup, and Pacific Lutheran University (Tacoma), the winner of multiple lower-division national championships—were the primary focus of local football fans’ attention until the founding of the Seattle Seahawks, a National Football League franchise, in 1976. The Seahawks have been moderately successful, winning one Super Bowl (2014) in team history, and they have a regional fan base that extends from Montana to Alaska.

The state’s first professional sports team, the National Basketball Association’s Seattle SuperSonics, began play in 1968 and won a league championship in 1979. The franchise relocated to Oklahoma City in 2008, but professional basketball remained in the state via the Seattle Storm of the Women’s National Basketball Association. The sport also thrives in Seattle’s many celebrated high-school programs, and five Washington universities play the sport at the Division I level (University of Washington, Washington State University, Gonzaga University, Eastern Washington University, and Seattle University).

Washington has been home to a number of minor league baseball teams since the late 19th century, and locally prominent clubs remain in Spokane and Tacoma, among other cities. The Seattle Mariners—who play at picturesque Safeco Field, a popular summertime tourist destination—are the state’s lone Major League Baseball franchise. Football (soccer) is also widespread in Washington, from the many recreational leagues that dot the state to the Seattle Sounders of Major League Soccer. A notable state tradition is rowing: locals scull in Washington’s many lakes and waterways year-round, and the University of Washington boasts a distinguished rowing history, which includes a gold medal win by the school’s eight-man crew over the German national team in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.

Washington’s mild climate and great landscape variety give its citizens the opportunity to enjoy a number of outdoor activities in all seasons. Aquatic sports are popular on many lakes and rivers and especially on Puget Sound. Skiing and snowboarding are favourite winter sports in the Cascades and Okanogan Highlands. Public forestlands, national recreation areas, three national parks—Mount Rainier National Park, North Cascades National Park, and Olympic National Park, the latter of which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1981—Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, and more than 125 state parks attract campers, hikers, and rock climbers during the summer months.

Media and publishing

The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer are Washington’s leading newspapers, although in 2009 the Post-Intelligencer became an online-only publication. Daily newspapers around the state are the Columbian (Vancouver), Spokesman-Review (Spokane), Herald (Everett), News Tribune (Tacoma), and Olympian (Olympia). A number of weekly and biweekly business journals provide financial and business news. Among the state’s book publishers are the University of Washington Press, which is noted particularly for its publications on the art and culture of Northwest Coast and Alaskan native peoples, and Washington State University Press, which publishes in a wide variety of genres, including scholarly monographs, biographies, and works on the prehistory, politics, and culture of the West and the Pacific Northwest. Smaller publishers specialize in poetry and topics of regional interest.

Native Americans and early European explorers

Native Americans lived in what is now Washington for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. In anthropological terms, the state spans two distinct culture areas, those of the Northwest Coast Indians and the Plateau Indians. Marmes Rock Shelter, in arid eastern Washington, has yielded a 10,000-year sequence of tools left by hunters and gatherers along with some of the oldest well-documented skeletal remains in the Western Hemisphere. The Ozette site, on the Olympic Peninsula, has a unique collection of well-preserved clothing, basketry, and harpoons of people who fished and hunted seals and whales 500 years ago. Tools of a similar culture dating from 2,000 years ago were also found there. These and other sites in the state reflect the diverse cultural forms that evolved after prehistoric migrations from northeastern Asia. In July 1996 human remains believed to date to about 9,400 years ago were discovered near Kennewick; the specimen is known to scientists as Kennewick Man and to Native Americans as the Ancient One. The relationship of Kennewick Man to existing Native American groups is a source of controversy.

When Europeans first explored the Washington area, they encountered a number of Native American tribes, the most prominent being the Chinook, the Coast Salish, the Nez Percé, and the Yakima. The early history of Washington and of the Northwest is intertwined with efforts to find the Northwest Passage, the development of the fur trade with East Asia, and the attempts of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries to convert the Native Americans. Spaniards had sailed along the coast earlier, but the wealth of sea otter skins secured from the Native Americans on one of the voyages of Capt. James Cook in 1778 marked the start of real exploration and of the maritime fur trade. George Vancouver, sent by Britain in 1792, tried to find the Northwest Passage and to map the coast. Robert Gray was the first trader from the United States; his explorations resulted in the discovery of the Columbia River in 1792. The Russian-American Company dominated the sea otter trade in Alaska and California during this period but was less successful along the Washington coast, and by 1812 the United States almost completely dominated the fur trade. The British Hudson’s Bay Company, however, maintained areas of dominance into the 1840s.

Missionaries were generally welcomed by the Native Americans, though often not so much for Christian salvation as for the knowledge and material advantages these colonizers could bring. Among the most famous missions were those of the medical missionary Marcus Whitman and Henry Harmon Spalding, established in 1836 in southeastern Washington, and the Roman Catholic missions established by Pierre-Jean de Smet in northeastern Washington.

The Protestant missionaries encouraged settlement of the region by European Americans, thinking it would help in their attempts to “civilize” native peoples. With the opening of the Oregon Trail the first large group, about 1,000 people, reached the Northwest in 1843. These and others following at first went mainly into the Willamette River valley of what became the state of Oregon and later into the area north of the Columbia River (in present-day Washington), then still dominated by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Native Americans were initially receptive, but the settlers’ and the government’s inconsistent dealings with them led to such conflicts as the Cayuse War (1848–50), the Yakima War (1855–58), and the Nez Percé War (1877).

By the end of the 19th century most of the Native Americans had been removed to reservations, representing three principal tribal groups: the Coast Salish, the Interior Salish, and the Sahaptin. Within these were many smaller groups, each identifiable on the basis of language differences and other local cultural characteristics. Among the larger tribes of western Washington were the Makah, Quinault, Lummi, Snohomish, and Puyallup; tribes of eastern Washington included the Okanogan, Yakima, Klickitat, Kalispel, and Spokane.