This article appears in print in the August 2018 issue. Click here for a free subscription.

There’s a lot of mythology around Seattle’s emergence as a global city.

Start with Chief Sealth’s mid-1880s message to white settlers, perhaps apocryphal, in which he reportedly said, “The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth.” Those words, silk-screened onto posters and T-shirts since the 1970s, may have lent the city named after that chief a certain credibility as a center of environmentalism.

Then there’s Daniel Bagley, the Methodist minister who persuaded pioneer Arthur Denny to give up his dreams of establishing the state capital in Seattle and instead donate prime property downtown for the University of Washington. That choice of education over politics helped make Seattle the state’s center for business and technology.

Erastus Brainerd, a newspaperman, did his part in Seattle’s rise by launching a media campaign of letters and posters to persuade the world that if it wanted to prospect for the gold recently discovered in the Klondike, Seattle was the place to start. That campaign brought the first big wave of migrants to Seattle during the waning years of the 19th century.

But one of my favorite stories is about how the two founders of Sub Pop, the record label, took a music scene emerging in several areas of the West, called it grunge and, through some clever marketing, made Seattle its center. In 1989, Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman paid the air fare for Everett True, a British music critic, to fly to Seattle so he could travel and drink with local bands represented by the label. As they expected, True wrote glowingly about the burgeoning music scene in Seattle, putting the city on the map as the birthplace of a new kind of music.