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Seattle's Landmark Steam Plant home to ZymoGenetics Seattle's beginnings are rooted in business. Arthur Denny, a merchant, led the first party of white immigrants to settle the central Puget Sound region almost 150 years ago. They landed at Alki Point in what is now the West Seattle neighborhood, and quickly established this frontier outpost as a trading center supporting the region's developing timber and commercial fishing industries. Their new city was named for Suquamish Indian Chief Sealth.

Henry Yesler operated Seattle's first steam-powered sawmill, located on Elliott Bay at the edge of today's Pioneer Square Historical District. Yesler Way follows the original Skid Road, which paralleled the skid down which logs were sent to the sawmill. Taverns serving loggers and sawmill workers soon lined Skid Road – a rough-and-tumble locale that became known as the original "skid row!"

Much of Seattle's business district was destroyed in the great fire of June 1889, but this young city quickly bounced back, rebuilding in time for the Klondike Gold Rush a decade later. When the S.S. Portland – carrying a band of lucky prospectors with more than a ton of gold from the Klondike region in Canada's Yukon Territory – docked in Elliott Bay on July 17, 1897, it touched off a boom unlike anything seen in the Pacific Northwest before or since.

The Seattle Chamber of Commerce lost no time in promoting Seattle as "the" place for stampeders from around the world to outfit themselves and board steamers for the rush north. Business in Seattle doubled, then tripled. By the spring of 1898, these merchants had sold $25 million worth of goods to hopeful prospectors heading north. The Klondike Gold Rush changed the business face of the Pacific Northwest. In 1890, Portland was the region's largest city. By 1910, Seattle held this honor and has retained it ever since.

Corporate giants originated and grew in Seattle in the years following the gold rush. Weyerhauser, which became a timber-industry giant in the land of towering Douglas firs, was established at the turn of the century. Less than two decades later, an engineer named William Boeing started building airplanes in a red barn near present-day Boeing Field.

The Boeing Company turned out the B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-29 Superfortress by the thousands during World War II, then applied its military expertise to commercial aviation. Boeing gambled and won by introducing its 707, the first commercial passenger jet, in the 1950s and its 747, the world's first jumbo passenger jet, in the 1960s – becoming the world's largest commercial airplane manufacturer along the way.

During the last half of the 20th century, Alaska's North Slope oil boom and construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline generated new supply armadas sailing north from the Port of Seattle. And Seattle companies established world leadership in products ranging from computer software by Microsoft and games by Nintendo to trucks by Paccar and gourmet coffee by Starbucks.

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