Why are there no major cities on the actual Pacific coast (i.e. not inland on a river or large bay like Portland, Seattle or Vancouver) of North America north of San Francisco?

by joepyeweed
quick_Ag

First of all there aren't many great deepwater harbors on the Pacific Coast other than the ones you mentioned.

Compare how deep the water gets right off the shore in San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver. All of these harbors get deep quick right off shore.

Compare that to Grays Harbor, near Aberdeen, WA. Note that most of it is shallow tide flat, which what is (I am presuming) a dredged channel down the middle. Many of the other harbors you will find on the West Coast will be similar.

Second, you also need to think why something would need to be shipped in/out of any given harbor. That depends on there being a transportation network at that harbor to get goods from wherever they are produced inland to the harbor where they are shipped out.

  • The San Francisco Bay watershed drains a huge swath of Northern California, including the area of the California Gold Rush. This watershed allows it to take in goods and produce from a large area before they are shipped out from the harbor in San Francisco.
  • Portland is at the nexus of the productive Willamette river valley, one of the first areas heavily settled in the northwest by Euro-Americans, and the Columbia River, which also drains a huge productive area. A trade network here had already existed since time immemorial, with the Chinook people at the mouth of the Columbia being such known traders that their language formed the nucleus of Chinook Jargon, the trade language spoken in much of the Northwest in the 19th Century.
  • Puget Sound has numerous deep water harbors. While it also has productive farmland and many resources to be extracted on its shores, it was also connected by rail to the interior of the United States as early as the 1870s, a different sort of "Watershed" that allowed it to be the nucleus of another sort of trade network. It was also a natural departure point for Americans headed to the Alaska/Yukon Gold Rush in the 1890s. The fact that Seattle became the main city of the region and not Tacoma, Olympia, or even Everett is just how things played out with the railroads, and it wasn't exactly destiny (more on that here).
  • Canada has two ports on its West Coast that were made accessible by rail to the rest of the country: Vancouver and Prince Rupert. Being at the mouth of the Fraser, another huge network of rivers, also helped it become the hub of a trading network. Vancouver's also pretty temperate by Canadian standards and is also flanked to its south by fertile farmland.

Compare these regions to rest of the west coast. There are no other large watersheds that drain to the Pacific, so no other natural trade networks. Most of the west coast from SF clear up to Alaska consists of chain after chain of mountain ranges, making the construction of highways and railroads to the coast expensive and difficult.