Like the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, the Washington State Museum in Tacoma isn’t in its state capital but it’s not in the largest city Seattle either. If it weren’t for the museums, there would be no reason to visit Tacoma. The museum starts with a quick overview of prehistoric geography before going into indigenous artefacts from pre-Columbian times.
Predictably, most of the exhibits were on the population boom that followed the Oregon Trail with recreated pioneer shops and wagons. After the railroad connected the Pacific coast with the rest of America and Canada, people and goods poured in.to what was, at the time, the region of the continent with the lowest morality rate. Farming on the prairies, mining in the mountains, and fishing along the coast made it an attractive place for commerce.
A corner of the museum is dedicated to Executive Order 9066 that imprisoned Japanese-Americans simply for their ancestry. Thousands of Japanese people fought in the US Army but that didn’t change how the government saw them as enemy aliens. Boeing, which has its main facility in Everett, Washington, boomed by producing bombers for the war effort. Shipyards on the Pacific coast also worked to replace the fleet sunk at Pearl Harbour.
