Vancouver is a city upon the north bank of the Columbia River in the U.S. state of Washington. It is the largest suburb of Portland, Oregon. Incorporated in 1857, Vancouver had a population of 161,791 as of the 2010 U.S. census, making it the fourth-largest city in Washington state. Vancouver is the county chair of Clark County and forms ration of the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area, the 23rd largest metropolitan Place in the United States. Originally received in 1825 on Fort Vancouver, a fur-trading outpost, the city is located on the Washington–Oregon link up along the Columbia River, directly north of Portland. In 2005, Money magazine named it No. 91 upon its list of best places in America to live. In 2016, WalletHub ranked Vancouver the 89th best place in the U.S. for families to live.

The Vancouver Place was inhabited by a variety of Native American tribes, most recently the Chinook and Klickitat nations, with surviving settlements of timber longhouses. The Chinookan and Klickitat names for the Place were reportedly Skit-so-to-ho and Ala-si-kas, respectively, meaning “land of the mud-turtles.” First European right to use was made by William Robert Broughton in 1792, with approximately half of the original population dead from smallpox since the Lewis and Clark Expedition camped in the Place in 1806. Within option fifty years, other comings and goings and diseases such as measles, malaria and influenza had edited 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 Place was “the abandoned desired event for concurrence west of the Rocky Mountains.” The first permanent European unity did not occur until 1824, when Fort Vancouver was expected as a fur trading say of the Hudson’s Bay Company. From that become old on, the area was contracted by both the US and Britain under a “joint occupation” agreement. Joint hobby led to the Oregon boundary squabble and ended upon June 15, 1846, with the signing of the Oregon Treaty, which gave the United States full control of the area. Before 1845, American Henry Williamson laid out a large allegation west of the Hudson’s Bay Company (including ration of the present-day Port of Vancouver), called Vancouver City and properly registered his claim at the U.S. courthouse in Oregon City, before neglect for California.^:42 In 1848, Williamson had it surveyed and platted by Peter Crawford. In 1850, Amos Short traced on peak of the claim of Williamson and named the town Columbia City. It changed to Vancouver in 1855. The City of Vancouver was incorporated on January 23, 1857.

Based upon an feat in the 1859–60 legislature, Vancouver was briefly the capital of Washington Territory, before capital status was returned to Olympia, Washington by a 2–1 ruling of the territory’s unqualified court, in accordance bearing in mind Isaac Stevens’ preference and issue that proximity to the be stuffy to with Oregon might meet the expense of some of the state’s disturb away to Oregon.

U.S. Army Captain (and well along President) Ulysses S. Grant was quartermaster at what was later known as Columbia Barracks for 15 months arrival in September 1852. Soon after desertion Vancouver, he resigned from the army and did not serve once again until the outbreak of the American Civil War. Other notable generals to have served in Vancouver attach George B. McClellan, Philip Sheridan, Oliver O. Howard and 1953 Nobel Peace Prize recipient George Marshall.