On the morning of November 2, 1889, President Benjamin Harrison sat down at his desk with two documents in front of him and a problem he had decided to solve by making it disappear. Both documents were statehood proclamations — one for North Dakota, one for South Dakota — and both new states desperately wanted to be admitted first, because whichever one came earlier would get the lower number, and neither wanted to be the newer Dakota. Harrison picked up both papers, held them together, and shuffled them back and forth like a man cutting a deck of cards. Then he covered the headings with a piece of paper so that neither he nor his secretary of state nor anyone else in the room could see which was on top. He signed them both. He shuffled them again.
Which Dakota he actually signed first has never been established. Both states have been arguing about it ever since. They appear in the official record in alphabetical order — North Dakota as the 39th state, South Dakota as the 40th — because Congress, facing the same problem, chose the only solution that could not be contested. Nobody was willing to flip a coin in front of a senator.
Nine days later, on November 11, Washington became the 42nd state. The signing was quieter. There was no shuffling. Washington Territory had been waiting for thirty years, and there was nobody else in line to fight with.
The waiting had been genuinely absurd. Washington had sent petitions to Congress in 1867, 1872, 1878, and 1883. Each time, Congress nodded politely and did nothing. The territory had the population. It had the economy — logging, fishing, wheat, coal. It had functioning courts and cities and newspapers. What it lacked was a Congress that wanted to act.
The problem was arithmetic, and it was not subtle. Admitting Washington Territory meant adding two new senators. Adding two senators meant one party's majority got smaller. For years, whichever party controlled the Senate found reasons to delay. Washington leaned Republican, which helped with Republican Congresses and hurt with Democratic ones, and the Senate kept flipping, and every time it did the petition went back to the bottom of the pile.
What finally broke the logjam was the election of 1888. Benjamin Harrison beat Grover Cleveland, and Republicans swept both chambers of Congress. Suddenly, admitting a batch of Republican-leaning western territories made excellent political sense. The outgoing Democratic Congress, in a gesture of either principle or spite, passed the Omnibus Bill in February 1889, authorizing statehood for North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington all at once. Cleveland signed it on his last day in office.
The four territories spent the spring and summer writing constitutions. Washington's convention met in Olympia from July through August, seventy-five delegates arguing about everything they could think of — water rights, liquor, the structure of the legislature. Women's suffrage came up and was voted down, a decision that would not be corrected for another twenty years. The location of the permanent capital was debated at length. Olympia won, over the objections of larger cities, which is the only reason Olympia is still the capital today instead of Seattle or Tacoma.
The finished constitution went to the voters on October 1. It passed easily. The territory that had been told for thirty years that the moment was not quite right was finally, paperwork-wise, ready.
The news of Harrison's November 11 signature reached Washington by telegraph. Olympia held a celebration. Seattle, which had burned to the ground five months earlier and was in the middle of the most ambitious rebuilding project in its history, took an afternoon off and went back to laying bricks. Spokane, which had its own fire in August — a different fire, in a different city, in a year that seemed designed to test the territory's nerve — was also rebuilding. The place that became a state in November 1889 had spent most of that year on fire.
November 11 was not chosen for any particular reason at the time. Twenty-nine years later the date would become famous for something else entirely: on November 11, 1918, the armistice ending World War One was signed. Washington State's birthday and Veterans Day are the same square on the calendar, which is either a meaningful coincidence or the kind of thing that only seems meaningful because you noticed it.
The state Washington became that morning was almost unrecognizable compared to what it is now. Most of the population was squeezed into the wet western side of the Cascades. Eastern Washington was ranches and wheat and a young Spokane that had only incorporated eight years earlier. No Grand Coulee Dam. No Boeing. No nuclear reactors along the Columbia. The tallest building in Seattle had four floors. Large sections of the Olympic Peninsula had not been mapped.
What there was, on November 11, 1889, was a piece of paper with a president's signature on it, and thirty years of waiting finally done, and a territory that had been told repeatedly that the moment was not quite right discovering, at last, that it was.