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Seattle is the largest city in Washington and the county seat of King County. The area was discovered for the Europeans by George Vancouver in May 1782 and was settled by Americans from Portland, Oregon in 1851, who named the city for the friendly Native American leader Chief Seattle. Seattle was incorporated as a town on 14 January 1865, and it experienced several boom-and-bust cycles. In 1885-1886, anti-Chinese riots broke out in the city due to white unemployment and xenophobia, and the central business district was burned during the Great Seattle Fire of 1889. The Klondike Gold Rush of 1897 led to Seattle booming, but the only permanent residents were the shopkeepers who catered to the prospectors and locals leaving for Alaska; even the mayor resigned in order to travel the Yukon Trail. The boom funded many new Seattle companies and products, including Eddie Bauer and Nordstrom. A shipbuilding boom during World War I turned Seattle into a major seaport, but a series of several strikes - culminating in the maritime strike of 1934 - led to Los Angeles overtaking Seattle as the most important port of the American West. During World War II, the city quickly emerged from the Great Depression due to increased employment opportunities, but the Japanese business community was dispersed due to governmental internment. After the war, Seattle became prosperous as the center of Boeing until 2001, and especially as the home of booming technology companies such as Amazon, F5 Networks, Nintendo of America, and T-Mobile starting in the 1980s. Although the dotcom boom ended in 2001, Seattle continued to be a major commercial center, the center of a unique music scene (represented by Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Foo Fighters, and grunge music), a center of Native American, Scandinavian, Asian, African-American, and LGBT culture, and a city with one of the highest minimum wages of the country, at $15 an hour. In 2019, Seattle had a population of 753,675 people, with 65.7% being white, 14.1% Asian, 7% black, 6.6% Hispanic, .4% Native American, .9% Pacific Islander, .2% other, and 5.6% multiracial.

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