Its motto: By and By.

Its nickname: Evergreen State.

The Picture-Perfect Comer of the Northwest

Like neighboring Oregon, Washington is divided by a mighty  mountain range into two quite different worlds: lush alpine landscapes  to the west; semiarid plains and hills to the east.

 The Cascade Range forms this great divide, running from north to south in a broad band of tall peaks, glacial lakes, and thickly wooded valleys. As the great range moves southward it becomes less rugged. Crowning the southern Cascades is the glacier-clad volcano that Washingtonians simply call the Mountain. Two more volcanoes punctuate the southern Cascades.

The world west of the Cascades is moist and green, a place of huge trees and legendary lumberjacks. It was here that pioneers first settled.

Once part of Oregon Territory, this timberland bore its first real wave of white settlement when "Oregon fever" swept the country in the 1840's. Most pioneers made their way to the bountiful Willamette Valley, but some ventured north of the Columbia River into the fertile, wooded lowlands. Here they milled hemlocks and Douglas firs from forests that a railroad agent described as "surpassing the woods of all the rest of the globe in the size, quantity and quality of the timber."

In 1852 the northerners petitioned Congress to form a separate territory north and west of the Columbia. Congress granted the petition in 1853, extended the eastern boundary of the new territory to the Rocky Mountains, and named it after the nation's first president.

The vast estuary known as Puget Sound is still the center of Washington life today. Its eastern shore - some 75 miles of it - is an unbroken chain of cities and towns linked to Seattle, the Northwest major port.

The parched land east of the Cascades was less than idyllic. Pioneers on the Columbia Plateau had no bounty of timber and salmon, nor even rain. The first eastern settlers clustered where the relatively moist soil along the Columbia River was suitable for small farms. But those who followed were relegated to the drier reaches of the plain.

Eventually the arid Columbia Plateau bloomed, transformed by irrigation into a self-proclaimed Inland Empire, with Spokane as its designated Queen City. Where once no trees grew, apple orchards and wheat fields now stretch to the endless horizon. It is a sight as beautiful in its own way as the more familiar Washington that lies west of the great mountain divide.

Washington joined the Union in 1889 as the 42nd state.

(”The USA Diversity of 50 States”)