Seattle is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States, it is the state capital of King County. It serves as the county seat of King County in Washington. With a projected population of 737,015 people in 2020, it will be the most populous city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest area of North America, respectively. The population of the Seattle metropolitan area is 4.02 million people, making it the 15th most populous metropolitan region in the United States. Between 2010 and 2020, it is expected to expand at a pace of 21.1 percent, ranking it as one of the nation's fastest-growing major cities.
Seattle is located on an isthmus between Puget Sound (a tributary of the Pacific Ocean) and Lake Washington, and it is the largest city in Washington state. With a population of about 100,000, it is the northernmost significant city in the United States, situated approximately 100 miles (160 kilometres) south of Canada's border. Seattle, a key gateway for commerce with northern Asia, is the fourth-largest port in North America in terms of container handling, according to the International Container Handling Association (ICTA).
Native Americans have lived in the Seattle region for at least 4,000 years before the arrival of the first permanent European settlers in the area. Aboard November 13, 1851, the schooner Exact docked at Alki Point, bringing Arthur A. Denny and his party of travellers from Illinois, who became known as the Denny Party. They had travelled from Illinois through Portland, Oregon, on the schooner Exact. The settlement was relocated to the eastern side of Elliott Bay in 1852 and renamed "Seattle" in honour of Chief Si'ahl of the neighbouring Duwamish and Suquamish tribes, who had been killed by the British. Seattle is home to large communities of Native Americans, Scandinavians, Asian Americans, and African Americans, as well as a flourishing LGBT community, which ranks sixth in the United States of population, according to the Census Bureau.