The Tacoma area's original inhabitants, the Puyallup and Nisqually lived here for centuries before European explorers arrived. They called today's Mount Rainier "Tacobet," which means "Mother of Waters." Europeans transliterated the native name into "Tahoma," and then "Tacoma."
Captain George Vacouver was the first European to reach Puget Sound, arriving in 1792 and naming the body of water after Peter Puget, one of his officers. In 1833, Hudson's Bay Company built Fort Nisqually a few miles south of today's Tacoma. By the 1850s, settlers began to arrive, and Nicholas Delin built a cabin and sawmill along the waterfront in 1852, on the site of modern Tacoma. In 1868, the Northern Pacific Railroad chose Tacoma as its western terminus.
After the railroad arrived in 1883, Tacoma grew rapidly, the city was incorporated in 1875, and by 1892, 50,000 people lived here, but it was eclipsed when the Klondike gold rush turned nearby Seattle into a boom town.
In the early twentieth century, Weyerhaeuser Timber Company took a major role in Tacoma's economy, and in 1918, Tacoma became an official U. S. Port of Entry, the first step toward Tacoma's status as the six-largest container port in North America. By the 1930s, Tacoma may have been best known for the "Aroma of Tacoma" because of the malodorous emissions from the local paper manufacturing plants, but by the 1990s, the problem had been largely solved.
