February 19, 2025 – On this sad day in 1858, the great Nisqually leader Leschi – who forged an alliance of nine tribes to resist the seizure of their 2.5 million acre homeland and their forced removal to concentration camps set up by the US government – was hanged for crimes he did not commit in a war he never wanted.
The story of Leschi’s martyrdom begins with his judicial-murderer, Isaac Stevens, the first governor of Washington Territory. In the 1850s, Stevens was tasked with rounding up all the tribes in present-day Washington State and driving them off their ancestral homelands onto a handful of tiny, out-of-the-way reservations.
First in his class at West Point, Governor Stevens was a joyless megalomaniac with national political ambitions, famously short of stature, and he took everything personally. His first order of business was clearing the southern end of the Salish Sea, (commonly referred to as Puget Sound), making way for settlement around the new territorial capitol of Olympia. To do so, he appointed the Nisqually tribal leader Leschi as “treaty chief” over all the tribes in the area: the Puyallup, Steilacoom, Squaxin Island, S’Homamish, Stehchass, T’Peeksin, Squi-aitl, Sa-heh-wamish, and his own Nisqually.
Then, in the winter of 1855-56, Stevens handed Leschi a take-it-or-leave-it treaty for the nine tribes’ combined homelands. For their 2.5 million acres of verdant wetlands, prairie, forest, and foothills up to the Cascade Divide – including three major watersheds that drained the northwestern flanks of Tahoma (commonly known as Mount Rainier) – they would get three 3,840-acre parcels of salty scrub lands on islands in the middle of the Salish Sea. And $32,500.
When the rounding up of those nine tribes began that winter, Leschi stood his ground. He said he never signed the treaty, never understood it, and would have been even less inclined to sign it if he had. His “mark” on the treaty, he told everyone who would listen, had been forged. Because seriously: who in their right mind would trade away 2.5 million acres of game-rich forests and foothills, food-rich rivers and prairies and wetlands, and for what? Three inhabitable waterbound prisons and some cash?
Leschi lobbied, cajoled, and tried to re-negotiate on the tribes’ behalf with every white authority around the region who had any power. As the winter ground on and the confrontations grew uglier, he held to his position, refused to move, and refused to tell his people or any of the other tribes to move. Instead, he demanded a much larger reservation, located on some portion of their traditional lands, and he counseled the leaders of the other tribes to do so as well.
Thus was Leschi transformed, overnight, from handpicked “treaty chief” to the enemy, a rabble rouser, a “war chief” and criminal.
Isaac Stevens threatened him with arrest.
Leschi melted back into the forested mountains to figure out his next move.
He traveled back and forth across the Cascade Mountains, the Washington territorial militia on his trail, to forge military alliances with similarly besieged tribes in the high desert that would hold off Stevens for the next 15 months. He knew that if it came to armed resistance, he needed to overwhelm the invaders with their guns and cannon and horses.
Leschi’s first hope for military support on the other side of the mountains was his mother’s people, the Klickitat, who lived along their own namesake river near its confluence with Big River (commonly known as the Columbia River). The Klickitat were also confronting Stevens over a take-it-or-leave-it treaty, forging their own alliance of resistance with the Yakama, Spokane, Palouse and Walla Walla to their north and east. That conflict too would blow up into a war that would last nearly three years, until the US Army realized that the only way to break the united resistance of those highly mobile desert peoples was to slaughter all their horses, which they did along the Spokane River, after luring them all in for a peace parley. You can read about that here in “The Bones of 800 Horses.”
Back on the west side of the Cascades, Leschi’s efforts to hold out for more land had emboldened the young warriors among those nine tribes to take action independent of Leschi. Efforts by Stevens’ goons to round up their families – in Leschi’s absence and when none of them had agreed to anything as far as they were concerned – enraged them enough to gather up, storm off, and go raid the first settlement they came across, killing eight white people. Like tribes across this continent when told at gunpoint they were being stripped of their ancestral homelands, they would send a message not just to the treaty negotiators, but to all invaders: this is our land, and we will not be handing it over.
Those eight dead white people may as well have come gift-wrapped to the reportedly manic, driven, narcissistic Governor Stevens. Leschi had dared to defy him, and now he had an “Indian war” on his hands – what the newspapers of the day called the “Puget Sound Indian War” – and he didn’t have to re-negotiate anything. He could just “exterminate.”
“War shall be prosecuted until the last hostile Indian is exterminated,” Governor Stevens declared in what became a front-page story in an Olympia newspaper.
“Total War” Comes West
For those eight dead, the territorial militia would hunt down and kill every Native along the Salish Sea they could find: man, woman, and child. “Total war” is what historians call this military strategy.
Well before the “Puget Sound Indian War,” Natives across the continent had been wrongly blamed for unleashing the horrors of “total war” on the people who invaded their homeland, beginning with some of the earliest contacts in Dawnland (commonly known as “New England”). Contrary to what we were taught in American schools and popular histories would have us believe, total war was not something the Natives learned from each other. Their numbers were too few; and before the introduction of guns, their wars were low-grade, hand-to-hand affairs to refine or reset territorial boundaries, capture captives to adopt into their own tribes, and provide young men with rites of passage.
The military strategy of slaughtering entire villages, killing all their inhabitants, and destroying their winter shelters and food supplies? That was something the Natives of Dawnland had learned from British colonists moving west from the very first settlements in present-day Massachusetts during the “Pequot War” (1636-1637) – in reality, a massacre against the people standing in the way of colonial expansion. The British had first utilized the strategy in the 1500s against insurrections by the Irish people. “Total war” meant you didn’t just kill armed enemy combatants: you destroyed them, raped and killed their women, mutilated their bodies and desecrated their sacred objects. The idea was to bait them into the same behavior, then accuse your enemy of your own crimes and finish the job.
As Leschi was on the other side of the mountains gathering allies for the coming fight, the territorial militia under Isaac Stevens’ command would pre-empt his military alliance. They would wage total war on them first and brand it “The Puget Sound Indian War.” Leschi then organized the exact same sort of guerilla resistance that Natives had used across the continent in Dawnland a century earlier in what is commonly referred to as “King Phillip’s War” (1675-1676), launched to avoid the same catastrophic outcome as the Pequots.
Leschi’s alliance held off Stevens’ militia for 15 months.
And he may have been able to hold them off even longer, and win back even more of their homelands than he did, but for Stevens enlisting the help of other Natives. That would become the strategy used for the next fifty years across the continent: find a weaker, or more vulnerable, or more malleable tribe; promise them less onerous treatment for their help; and use them to betray the “hostiles.” In the case of Leschi’s war of resistance, it was the Snoqualmie to the north, with the assistance of Sealth and the Duwamish, his mother’s people. Sealth had assembled his own cursory military alliance further up the Salish Sea, and they had threatened a few settler families up north in a near comic farce of a confrontation where the Duwamish River meets the Salish Sea.
Nothing had come of it militarily. But it revealed to Sealth the armed might ready to meet even the most gratuitous of armed resistance against the invaders. He said he believed that conquest was inevitable, and thus threw in with Stevens, helping to bring down Leschi and his alliance. With the Snowqualmie and a few other tribes turning on him in hopes of getting a better deal for themselves – a deal that would never come – the militia trapped Leschi while he was coming in to negotiate.
There was that matter of those eight dead white people, and now two dead militiamen in the field, right in the middle of Leschi’s Nisqually territory. Someone had to pay. Although Leschi was a declared enemy combatant in what Stevens and the press were calling a “war,” he had dared to stand up to the mighty little Governor Stevens in public; that someone would be him. The charge was murder, for the killing of those two militiamen, even though there was zero evidence linking Leschi to the killings – and even though the “victims” were members of an armed militia out on a search and destroy mission, making their killings an act of war, not murder.
Leschi was put on trial in Steilacom, a US Army fort set up near the British trading post on the Salish Sea to regulate the flow of trade with the Natives in the area. Leschi’s defense was that (a) I didn’t do it, and (b) if I had, there was a war on, I was an enemy combatant, and that’s how war goes.
Leschi was acquitted, much to Governor Stevens’ great rage.
He responded not by ordering Leschi’s release, but by having him moved to Olympia, the new territorial capital. Unlike Fort Steilacom, it was a town full of burgeoning patronage jobs, territorial government operatives, and a fawning local newspaper. Stevens ruled it with an iron fist.
Leschi was put on trial again, this time by a handpicked jury of local cronies. He was convicted in short order, and hanged in front of 300 people.
“Leschi, the brave in battle, was launched into eternity without having moved a muscle to indicate fear of death (by hanging) so dreadful to an Indian,” one local paper reported at the time.
Years later Charles Grainger, the reluctant hangman, told Ezra Meeker, “I felt then I was hanging an innocent man, and believe it yet.”
Bad Blood in the Family
Through those 15 months of armed resistance, Leschi had crossed back and forth across the mountains several times on well-known trails used by the militia. He and the few hundred combatants he organized and led had eluded capture all that time, as they dipped in and out of village sites, recruiting and resupplying. Leschi had even canoed under the cover of night through the military blockade of Fox Island – where Stevens’ had imprisoned many of his people to keep them out of the resistance – to raise more recruits.
Who knows how long Leschi and his warriors might have held off Stevens and his militia for more territory, had he not been betrayed by his own nephew, Sluggia.
Apparently, Sluggia had fallen in love with Leschi’s wife while Leschi was off on the other side of the mountains trying to recruit the Klickitat for his alliance. Sluggia – newly banished by the tribe for this most public of transgressions – thought he would ingratiate himself with the enemy by giving up his uncle’s whereabouts. He sold Leschi out to a wrathful Governor Stevens.
And still more family drama: the militia that chased, captured, and delivered Leschi in irons to Stevens was led by a man, his name lost to history, who may have been enraged by Leschi’s audacity and defiance, or horrified by the casualties and consequences of their war of resistance. But this was also personal. A few years earlier, he had taken up with Leschi’s daughter, under who knows what kind of arrangement. But, apparently, it was not one that worked for Leschi. He had forced the unnamed white man to marry her after Nisqually custom, turning the “sq—w” – the concubine and domestic slave he had made of Leschi’s daughter – into a wife. (Which would turn him into a “sq—wman” in good standing with the tribe.)
The new couple could have set up a household anywhere they wanted in the region and be left in peace, or in as much peace as was afforded mixed-race families in those days. But he never forgot the insult of having to marry his “sq—w,” and was more than happy to betray and capture his new father-in-law, drag him back to the territorial capitol, and hand him over to Governor Stevens.
More Mixed-Race Family Drama
As “the Puget Sound War” war dragged on – and as Leschi’s military alliance played cat and mouse with the territorial militia up and down the flanks of the Cascades – the frustrated Stevens did exactly what the mob would expect of him: he turned on the other “sq—men” and their families in the region.
With “total war” raging all around them, most of the homesteaders had retreated to the safety of the settlements and Fort Steilacoom. Those who did not were burned out. But not the five mixed-race families living on and around Muck Creek. Because they had been left alone by the Native warriors, they were, obviously, traitors. Surely, they had to be giving food, aid, and information about the militia’s movements to the enemy.
Why, they had to wonder, had “the savages” been able to hold out for so long? They had been staging raids on homesteads all over the area, ambushing every militia unit out hunting them down, and one of them getting caught or killed. How else to explain the as-yet unbroken string of military successes by Leschi’s warriors up and down those rivers, invisible as ghosts to the hapless militia in that densely forested landscape?
So Governor Stevens had all five families arrested and jailed.
Five families, five “sq—wmen” and their wives, and who knows how many children, dragged off to jail for the crime of being who they were. The “Muck Creek 5” they were called, a catchy crime-ring sort of name for the newspapers. There was no proof of their treason, only rumor, innuendo, and military embarrassment.
When a territorial judge heard about Stevens jailing the Muck Creek 5 families, he ordered them to be released.
Stevens responded by declaring martial law in that county, suspending all functions of civil government, including the courts.
The judge responded by going to the territorial capitol in Olympia to confront the governor and invalidate his declaration of martial law.
Stevens had the judge arrested.
The record goes silent after that about what happened to those five families after they were released from jail. No surprise there. Guilty or not of anything, they were pariahs to polite frontier society.
The especially chilling – and durable – part of the story was how easily Stevens got all the people around him to follow his lead. To chase down the Muck Creek 5 families, haul them in, and let him get away with all his other tyrannies in the name of their own perceived safety. Their governor had wrongly declared martial law and locked up the judge who tried to intervene, and what did the settlers do? Nothing.
The people of the newly established Washington Territory were, for all their new woodframe houses and churches and newspapers, just one more American mob. And the Muck Creek 5 were The Other, households headed up by race traitors.
They were lucky that the worst thing that happened to them was wrongful arrest and not, as happened up and down the margin of settlement, a mass lynching, children included. There are plenty of other stories about how frontier mobs especially enjoyed hanging Native boys, for the squirming, kicking, screaming show they made of their dying.
Who (and Where) Are They Now?
The resistance leader Leschi’s greater crime, as actual history has portrayed him, was not those initial eight killings at the outbreak of “the Puget Sound War” or any of the other wartime casualties inflicted by his warriors. It was the ingrate Leschi, Governor Stevens’ chosen one, daring to defy him over a treaty he considered a done deal. Leschi stood fast and refused to accept the sham document’s reduction of nine tribes’ homelands by 99 percent. Leschi had defied him in public, and for that he would be executed, in public of course, at the end of a rope.
If popular American history were to remember Leschi, it would be as another tenacious but doomed war leader like Sitting Bull or Geronimo. He had held out for as long as he could against the cramdown of a bogus treaty that would have wiped out his people and their neighboring tribes in a generation.
But the resulting uproar over that resistance – along with eventual local settler outrage against Stevens’ sham-judicial murder of Leschi – resulted in the tribes getting to stay on slivers of their homelands along the Nisqually and Puyallup Rivers, sparing them the banishment and certain genocide of those barren scrub islands out in the Salish Sea.
Isaac Stevens would go on to greater glory. Despite his height – or maybe because of it? – Governor Stevens would go on to become a Civil War hero and martyr: at the battle of Chantilly, he was blown off his horse while carrying not a gun or a sword, but a flag.
And how did Stevens and Leschi fare in the great re-write that is the history of American placenames?
There is a Stevens County, of course, in the northeastern corner of present-day Washington State, and Lake Stevens in the northern Seattle suburbs. Also in present-day Washington, there is the Isaac I. Stevens Elementary School in Seattle, the Stevens Middle School in Port Angeles’, and Isaac Stevens Middle School in Pasco.
The scenic Stevens Canyon Road runs up through Stevens Canyon into Mount Rainier National Park from the east side of the Cascades. Stevens Pass – one of the more beautiful ways to drive across the Cascade Mountain Divide – is topped off by Stevens Pass Ski Area. There was a Fort Stevens in present-day Oregon, at the mouth of Big River, now the Fort Stevens State Park. And in present-day Idaho, there is Stevens Peak, Upper Stevens Lake, and Lower Stevens Lake.
But Isaac Stevens’ real legacy on the American landscape?
In two frenetic years, 1856 – 1857, he had turned an enormous land and water mass, from the high desert across the mountains to the Salish Sea and on across the Olympic Peninsula to the Pacific Ocean – all the land once belonging to the Nisqually, Puyallup, Steilacoom, Squaxin Island, S’Homamish, Stehchass, T’Peeksin, Squi-aitl, Sa-heh-wamish, Yakama, Klickitat, Spokane, Palouse, Walla Walla, Okanagan, Lummi, Tulalip, Skagit, Samish, Snowqualmie, Duwamish, Chinook, Cowlitz, Chehalis, Skokomish, Suquamish, S’Klallam, Chemakum, Quinault, Quilyete and Makah – into a place called “Washington.”
The territory, and eventually the state, would be named after the military leader Americans have come to call the “father of our country.”
But not everyone would call him that. The Haudenosaunee (commonly referred to as the Iroquois) would call General Washington by another name, based on his unleashing of total war against them, their food supplies, and their civilization during the American Revolution: “the Town Destroyer.”
And who is Leschi to history now?
There are no cities or towns named for him, but there is this beautiful school on the Puyallup reservation.
The Nisqually people, who still inhabit the sliver of land he was able to save along their namesake river, have set aside January 29th, Leschi’s birthday, as Chief Leschi Day. It is a national holiday, the tribal offices closing in remembrance and celebration of their national hero.
Up north, far from his Nisqually homeland, there is an urban neighborhood and small park named for Leschi, along with a fireboat stationed on the tourist waterfront of a major city, the one named after Sealth – to honor the “peace chief” the white people called “Seattle.”
Why the yawning difference in historic settler tribute to the two Native leaders who took very different paths to cope with the invasion and seizure of their ancestral homelands?
After Sealth convinced the Duwamish and other northern tribes to abandon Leschi and his alliance – and after their own perfunctory, one-day resistance known as “the Battle of Seattle” that resulted in the death of two settlers, one by friendly fire – he and the rest of the Duwamish were banished from the area. The little hamlet of Seattle, perched on a hillside overlooking a good natural harbor on the eastern shore of the Salish Sea, would need the room to grow.
Sealth was banished to the other side of the Salish Sea, to the land of his father’s people, the Suquamish, where he lived out his life and the Suquamish people hold their annual Chief Seattle Days.
Here is a picture of that fireboat, the “Leschi,” in its usual docking spot between the ferris wheel and ferry building, waiting to save the day on the waterfront of Seattle.
The legal part of Leschi’s story does end with his exoneration, if 146 years too late to save him. On December 10, 2004, then current and former justices of the Washington State Supreme Court held a post humous re-trial of Leschi. The court unanimously concluded, as Chief Justice Gerry Alexander wrote: “Chief Leschi should not, as a matter of law, have been tried for the crime of murder.”
What is that worth in the end? The popular version of American history does not teach about Leschi for obvious reasons; and his story is too complicated and nuanced for Hollywood to find it marketable. But 146 years too late to save him, the historic record on Leschi is finally closed, if not complete. And if nowhere else speaks the truth to the world about the judicial murder of a man who dared to stand up and defend his extended family and their ancestral homelands, then his people, the Nisqually, made sure that the flip side of his gravestone would…
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