196 GUIDEBOOK OF THE WESTERN UNITED STATES. 
The first settlement in the vicinity of Seattle was made at Alki 
Point in 1851. This was named New York, to which somebody face- 
tiously added the Chinook word “‘alki,” meaning ‘‘by and by.”’ On 
February 15, 1852, the claims which became the town site of Seattle 
were staked, but up to 1860 there were not more than 20 families in 
the town. The town of Tacoma was laid out in 1872, and since that 
date there has been the most intense though friendly rivalry between 
the two places. 
The Puget Sound basin lies in what is called the moist district of 
Washington. It has an annual precipitation of 25 to 60 inches, three- 
fourths of which occurs in the “‘ wet season,’”’ from November to April. 
It is therefore intermediate between the extremely wet country of the 
coast, having an annual precipitation of 60 to 120 inches, and the 
dry belt east of the Cascade Mountains, where the annual precipitation 
is only 8 or 10 inches. The Puget Sound region is regarded by many 
unfamiliar with it as a region of excessive rainfall, but the figures given 
by the Weather Bureau show that the precipitation here is about the 
same as in southern Ohio. The mean annual temperature of Seattle 
for December, 1894, to December, 1903, was 52°. The maximum for 
that time was 96° and the minimum 3°. 
Although the great forests that have made this part of the north- 
west coast famous are fast disappearing, lumbering continues to be 
the chief industry along the Sound, and millions of feet of lumber 
are each year sent east by the railways or shipped by vessel to various 
parts of the world. 
Seattle has one of the finest deep-water harbors on the coast. As 
shown by the sketch map of Elliott Bay on sheet 27, the water deepens 
rapidly to 100 feet and then the depth increases gradually and some- 
what irregularly to 600 feet where the bay opens into the Sound. 
The harbor facilities of Seattle and its position near the Strait of 
Juan de Fuca and also the inland passage to the north have made it 
the most advantageous place on the northwest coast for the center of 
the Alaskan trade and also for a large part of the oriental commerce 
to the United States. 
