Chief Leschi

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Portrait of Chief Leschi

Chief Leschi (1808 - February 19, 1858) was chief of the Nisqually Native American tribe. He was hanged for murder in 1858, but exonerated in 2004.

Leschi was born in 1808 near what is today Eatonville, Washington, to a Nisqually father and a Yakama mother. He was appointed chief by Isaac Stevens, first governor of Washington Territory, to represent the Nisqually and Puyallup tribes at the Medicine Creek Treaty council of December 26, 1854, which ceded to the United States all or part of present-day King, Pierce, Lewis, Grays Harbor, Mason, and Thurston Counties and stipulated that the Native Americans inhabiting the area move to reservations. Some maintain that Leschi either refused to sign (and had his "X" forged by another) or signed under protest. The historical record is unclear on this point. However, he did argue that the reservation designated for the Nisqually tribe was a rocky piece of high ground unsuited to growing food and cut off from access to the river that provided the mainstay of their livelihood, salmon.

The next year, Leschi traveled to the territorial capital at Olympia to protest the terms of the treaty, but was rebuffed. In October 1855, Acting Governor Mason ordered that Leschi and his brother Quiemuth be taken into "protective custody" and sent the militia after them, thereby initiating the Puget Sound War of 1855-1856. Leschi became war chief, in command of around 300 men, and led a small number of raids which panicked the white population. Early in the conflict, Territorial militiamen Abram Benton Moses and Joseph Miles (or Miller) were killed. Leschi made peace overtures, including a surprise visit on January 5, 1856, to Fox Island to speak with Indian agent John Swan, but Stevens rebuffed him. In March 1856, Stevens arrested some settlers with claims along Muck Creek in Pierce County because he believed they were cooperating with Leschi. Lacking evidence that would withstand scrutiny in court, Stevens declared martial law over Pierce County on April 2, 1856. On May 7, Judge Edward Lander convened his federal court in Pierce County in defiance of the governor, and Stevens had the judge arrested. Stevens abrogated martial law on May 24, 1856, and later pardoned himself for declaring it in the first place. His pardon stated:

That I Isaac I. Stevens Governor of the said Territory by virtue of the authority vested in me as Governor...do hereby respite the said Isaac I. Stevens defendant from execution of said judgment and all proceedings for the enforcement and collection of said fine and costs.

Leschi was taken into custody under disputed circumstances involving a member of his band responding to a government reward offer, and his brother turned himself in. Quiemuth was murdered on November 18, 1856, by an unknown assailant, in Governor Stevens's office in Olympia, where he was being held for the night on his way to the jail at Fort Steilacoom, now in Lakewood, Washington. Leschi himself was put on trial in 1858 for the murder of Colonel Moses, which he denied having committed. His first trial resulted in a hung jury because of the judge's instruction that killing of combatants during wartime did not constitute murder. He was convicted and sentenced to death in a second trial in which this instruction was not given and his lawyers, Frank Clark and William Wallace, were not allowed to introduce potentially exonerating evidence. One supporter, William Fraser Tolmie, petitioned the new governor, LaFayette McMullen, to pardon Leschi, but the governor refused. Another supporter, United States Army officer August Kautz, published two issues of a newspaper defending Leschi. Titled the Truth Teller, the newspaper's masthead stated: "Devoted to the Dissemination of Truth and the Suppression of Humbug." Tolmie's petition and the front page of the Truth Teller are reprinted in Ezra Meeker's 1905 history, The Tragedy of Leschi.

Leschi's execution was initially scheduled for January 22, 1858, but his supporters arranged an elaborate plot in which the Pierce County sheriff, George Williams, allowed himself to be arrested by sympathetic members of the United States Army rather than carry out the execution. On February 19, 1858, Leschi was hanged in a small valley, from a hastily constructed gallows near Lake Steilacoom, in what is today the city of Lakewood. The hangman is reported to have later said "I felt then I was hanging an innocent man, and I believe it yet."

Roughly three decades later, Frederick J. Grant named the Leschi neighborhood in Seattle after the chief in the late 1880s. Today, the neighborhood and its waterfront park; schools in Seattle and Puyallup; and streets in Seattle, Lakewood, Steilacoom, Anderson Island, and Olympia, bear his name.

In March 2004, both houses of the Washington state legislature passed resolutions stating that Leschi was wrongly convicted and executed and asked the state supreme court to vacate Leschi's conviction. The court's chief justice, however, said that this was unlikely to happen, since it was not at all clear that the state court had jurisdiction in a matter decided 146 years earlier in a territorial court. On December 10, 2004, Chief Leschi was exonerated by a unanimous vote by a Historical Court of Inquiry following a definitive trial in absentia.

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