Tacoma harbour was visited by Capt. George Van couver in 1792, and 3o years later the Hudson Bay Company established a trading-post at Nisqually. Commencement bay was surveyed for the United States in 1841 by Lieut. Charles Wilkes. Settlement began in 1852, when Nicholas Delin, a Swede, took a claim on the south shore of the bay and set up a small saw-mill, from which in 1853 he shipped lumber to San Francisco. In 1855 the settlers were frightened away by the opening of the Indian war, taking refuge in Ft. Steilacoom (12 m. S.W.) which had been built in 1849 ; but in 1864 Job Carr and his two sons, from Indiana, took claims on the west shore of the bay. Develop ment of a city dates from the arrival from Portland in 1868 of Gen. Morton Matthew McCarver. He induced settlers to come; persuaded two of them to erect a saw-mill; and planned a town site, confident that a transcontinental railway would soon reach Puget sound. The first name he chose for the town was Com mencement City, but this was soon dropped for the Indian word meaning a snow-covered mountain. In 1873 the Northern Pacific
established its terminal on Commencement bay and named it New Tacoma. A town was organized in 1874, becoming the county seat in 188o, and in 1883 the two settlements were consolidated and incorporated as the city of Tacoma. In 188o the population was 1,098; in 1887, when the railroad was completed across the Cascades, it had grown to about 5,000. A boom immediately set in, attracting land speculators from all parts of the country, and three years later (189o) the population was 36,006. There was little increase in the next decade, but between 190o and 1910 the population grew from 37,714 to 83,743, and the total increase of the 20 years 190o to 1920 was 157%. In the first quarter of the loth century the assessed valuation of property increased (roughly) threefold; postal receipts were multiplied by nearly 9; and the value of the foreign commerce by 5.