Puget Sound Native Tree
Botanical Garden
Human History
The history of humanity in the Puget Trough region is a story constrained by geography. The lands are nestled between two mountain ranges, the Olympics and the Cascades, and immersed in the Salish Sea. The summers are not brutally hot, and the winters are not a frozen wasteland. The lands are shrouded by cloud cover more than 50% of the time. Nature, left on its own, grows into a magnificent temperate forest growing down to innumerable inlets and long lengths of shoreline.
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However, before that, slightly over 12,000 years ago, the land was covered by glaciers, in fact, the Puget Lobe of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet lay over the land thousand of feet thick, and the seas themselves had retreated miles away due to the lowered sea levels.
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By 10,000 years ago, the icee had melted and the conifer forests from the south had grown slowly north until the lands were covered by Douglas Fir and Western Hemlock, Red Cedar and Sitka Spruce, creating a world capable of supporting human civilization.
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Over the millenia a mature civilization arose based upon the reliable source of food from the sea as well as the forgiving climate and resources. These peoples developed a mature civilization with sophisticated economic systems as well as artforms on par with the ancient Greeks and Egyptians.
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Then the Europeans arrived.
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In the early 1800s Chief Seattle was the leader of the Duwamish and Suquamish tribes who befriended early American settlers, and the city of Seattle was named in his honor. A respected figure who encouraged coexistence through trade and intermarriage, his legacy is most associated with the now-famous speech about the environment and human relationship with the earth, though the speech was significantly altered from his actual words over time
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