...162,400,
making it the fourth largest city in the state. It is part of the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area.
The larger city of Vancouver, British Columbia is located 305 miles north of Vancouver, Washington. Both cities were named for sea captain George Vancouver, but the Canadian city was not incorporated until 1886, nearly thirty years after Vancouver, Washington, and more than sixty years after the name Fort Vancouver was first used. City officials have periodically suggested changing the city's name to Fort Vancouver, Vancouver USA, or even Old Vancouver to reduce confusion with Vancouver, British Columbia. Washington residents distinguish between the two cities by referring to the Canadian Vancouver as "Vancouver, B.C." Current mayor Royce Pollard is an advocate of the unofficial moniker "America's Vancouver."
History
The Vancouver area was inhabited by a variety of Native American tribes, most recently the Chinook and Klickitat nations, with permanent settlements of timber longhouses.
The Chinookan and Klickitat names for the area were reportedly
Skit-so-to-ho and
Ala-si-kas, respectively, meaning "land of the mud-turtles".
[gesswhoto.com - Native Sons 1900] First European contact was in 1775, with approximately half of the indigenous population dead from small pox before the Lewis and Clark expedition camped in the area in 1806.
Within another fifty years, other actions and diseases such as measles, malaria and influenza had reduced the Chinookan population from an estimated 80,000 "to a few dozen refugees, landless, slaveless and swindled out of a treaty."
Meriwether Lewis wrote that the Vancouver area was "the only desired situation for settlement west of the Rocky Mountains." The first permanent European settlement did not occur
... (This article is used under GFDL)
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